What Is Happening to Us?

We like to think we're the height of civilization.

Look at what we've accomplished.

We have computers in our pockets. Artificial intelligence. Satellites orbiting the planet. Nuclear power. Modern medicine. We can look billions of light years into space. We've walked on the moon. We can split an atom.

But we still can't figure out how to stop people from sleeping on sidewalks.

We haven't figured out addiction.

We haven't figured out hunger.

We haven't stopped killing one another.

And apparently, we haven't figured out when enough is enough.

That's what has been bothering me.

We have become incredibly intelligent, but have we become wise?

Those aren't the same thing.

We Have Barely Been Here

Homo sapiens has existed for roughly 300,000 years.

Earth is about 4.54 billion years old.

Agriculture only began around 10,000 years ago. Recorded history covers roughly the last 5,000 years.

Think about how small that is.

Every empire. Every war. Every king. Every border. Every fortune. Every government. Every person who thought they were incredibly important.

All of it happened in a tiny sliver of Earth's existence.

We're a blink.

Yet somehow, during that blink, one species became powerful enough to alter an entire planet.

Instead of humbling us, we seem to have decided we own the place.

What If We Weren't the First?

In 2018, scientists Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank explored something called the Silurian hypothesis.

Despite the name coming from Doctor Who, the scientific question is serious.

If an industrial civilization existed on Earth millions of years before us, would we even know?

They're not saying one did.

They're asking whether we'd be able to detect one.

That's fascinating because Earth erases things.

Continents move. Ocean floors are recycled. Mountains disappear. Rock gets buried, crushed and melted.

After tens of millions of years, you're probably not finding somebody's skyscraper.

You might find what they did to the planet.

Changes in carbon.

Changes in sediment.

Unusual chemicals.

Climate changes.

Extinctions.

A geological fingerprint.

And that made me think about something else.

Forget some hypothetical civilization from millions of years ago.

What the hell are we leaving behind?

What Will They Find?

Imagine something intelligent walking this planet 50 million years from now.

It starts digging.

What tells them we existed?

Probably not our money.

Not our borders.

Not our political parties.

Not our property values.

Not Facebook.

Not who became prime minister or president.

Not who had the biggest house.

Not the corporation that made record profits.

Most of the things we're fighting over right now will mean absolutely nothing.

But perhaps they'll find plastic.

Radioactive signatures.

An unusual carbon signal.

Evidence of rapidly changing ecosystems.

Extinctions.

A thin geological layer saying something very strange happened here.

Something became incredibly powerful, incredibly quickly.

And then it wasn't here anymore.

What would they think happened to us?

Where Is Everybody?

Then there's the Fermi paradox.

There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone.

Planets are everywhere.

The universe has had billions of years longer than human civilization to produce intelligent life.

So where the hell is everybody?

Maybe intelligent life is incredibly rare.

Maybe civilizations are too far apart.

Maybe we're looking for the wrong things.

Maybe we're alone.

Then there's Dark Forest theory.

Imagine the universe as a dark forest filled with hunters.

Nobody knows who's friendly.

Nobody knows who's dangerous.

Everybody understands that revealing themselves could be fatal.

So everybody stays quiet.

It's a fascinating and disturbing possibility.

But there's another possibility that bothers me even more.

Maybe civilizations don't last very long.

Maybe This Is the Great Filter

Another possible explanation for the silence of the universe is something called the Great Filter.

Maybe somewhere between lifeless matter and an advanced civilization there's a barrier almost nobody gets through.

Maybe life itself is incredibly rare.

Maybe complex organisms are rare.

Maybe intelligence is rare.

But I've been wondering about something else.

What if becoming intelligent isn't the hardest part?

What if surviving our own intelligence is?

Look at what we've done.

We became intelligent enough to dominate our environment.

Then intelligent enough to dig enormous amounts of stored energy out of the ground.

Intelligent enough to industrialize agriculture.

Change rivers.

Clear forests.

Alter the atmosphere.

Build weapons capable of destroying cities in seconds.

Potentially destroy ourselves.

We became powerful.

But did we become wise enough to handle that power?

Maybe every technological civilization eventually reaches something like this point.

Its technology becomes more powerful than its wisdom.

Then comes the real test.

Can it control itself?

Look Around

Forget outer space for a minute.

Walk through almost any major city.

People are sleeping outside.

People are dying from poisoned drugs.

Families are being destroyed by addiction.

People are lonely.

People are hopeless.

At the same time, we're polluting oceans, contaminating water, cutting forests, extracting finite resources, fighting wars and producing mountains of garbage and plastic.

And our answer to almost everything remains:

More.

More production.

More consumption.

More development.

More extraction.

More profit.

More growth.

More.

Until when?

That's the question nobody seems to want to answer.

The Earth isn't getting bigger.

You cannot have infinite physical growth inside a finite physical system.

Eventually something has to give.

We Know

This is the part I find hardest to understand.

We know.

We fucking know.

Scientists measure what's happening.

Satellites watch it.

Universities study it.

Governments hold conferences about it.

We produce reports.

We create committees.

We sign agreements.

We know forests matter.

We know clean water matters.

We know ecosystems matter.

We know species depend upon one another.

We know pollution doesn't magically disappear when we throw something away.

We know resources are finite.

And then Monday morning comes and we go right back to feeding the same machine.

How is that sane?

What Do We Mean by Civilization?

Maybe that's another word worth questioning.

Civilized.

We can have someone possessing billions of dollars while another human being sleeps outside in freezing weather a few kilometres away.

We can produce enormous quantities of food while people go hungry.

We can have empty buildings while people sleep on sidewalks.

We understand trauma and addiction better than any generation before us, yet still treat suffering people like they're disposable.

Then we congratulate ourselves on being advanced.

Advanced by what measurement?

Technology?

Absolutely.

Civilization?

I'm not convinced.

Maybe civilization isn't measured by what we can build.

Maybe it's measured by what we refuse to destroy.

Maybe it's measured by how we treat somebody who has nothing to offer us.

How we treat children.

How we treat Elders.

How we treat animals.

How we treat water.

How we treat the land.

And whether we leave anything behind for people who haven't been born yet.

Indigenous People Understood Something

This is where I can't ignore Indigenous knowledge.

I'm not pretending every Indigenous nation has the same teachings. We don't.

But many Indigenous traditions have understood something about relationship, responsibility and reciprocity for generations.

The land isn't simply real estate.

A river isn't just water waiting to be diverted.

A forest isn't lumber that hasn't been harvested yet.

Animals aren't simply inventory.

We're part of this place.

We don't stand outside of it.

And because we're part of it, we have responsibilities to it.

Think about the arrogance of calling that primitive.

Then replacing it with a system that says extract as much as possible, turn it into money, consume it, grow the economy and come back next year needing even more.

Then, hundreds of years later, we hold international conferences trying to figure out sustainability.

Maybe the people called primitive understood something the supposedly advanced civilization forgot.

You cannot endlessly take from the thing keeping you alive.

It really isn't that complicated.

Maybe We're Adolescents

Maybe humanity isn't the height of civilization.

Maybe we're adolescents.

Brilliant.

Creative.

Impulsive.

Powerful.

Self-absorbed.

Absolutely convinced we know everything.

And playing with things capable of killing us.

Maybe technological intelligence comes first.

Wisdom has to come later.

And maybe civilizations that never develop that second part disappear.

That changes the Fermi paradox for me.

Maybe the question isn't only:

Where is everybody?

Maybe it's:

How many made it this far?

And then:

How many made it past this?

Maybe the Great Filter isn't climate change specifically.

Or nuclear war.

Or pollution.

Or artificial intelligence.

Or resource depletion.

Maybe it's something underneath all of them.

The inability of an intelligent species to control its own appetite once it becomes powerful enough to consume an entire world.