When Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, declared in 1995 that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” he was voicing a sentiment that now circulates widely online. 

Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral, strengthened by anxieties about our own digital era, with some claiming that modernity itself was a mistake and that “progress” is an illusion. Medieval peasants led happier and more leisurely lives than we do, according to those who pine for the past. “The internet has become strangely nostalgic for life in the Middle Ages,” journalist Amanda Mull wrote in a piece for The Atlantic. Samuel Matlack, managing editor of The New Atlantis, observed that there is currently an “endless debate around whether the preindustrial past was clearly better than what we have now and we must go back to save humanity, or whether modern technological society is unambiguously a forward leap we must forever extend.” 

In the popular imagination, the Industrial Revolution was the birth of many evils, a time when smoke-belching factories disrupted humanity’s erstwhile idyllic existence. Economics professor Vincent Geloso’s informal survey of university students found that they believed “living standards did not increase for the poor; only the rich got richer; the cities were dirty and the poor suffered from ill-health.” Pundit Tucker Carlson has even suggested that feudalism was preferable to modern liberal democracy. 

Different groups tend to idealize different aspects of the past. Environmentalists might idealize preindustrial harmony with nature, while social traditionalists romanticize our ancestors’ family lives. People from across the political spectrum share the sense that the Industrial Revolution brought little real improvement for ordinary people. 

In 2021, History.com published “7 Negative Effects of the Industrial Revolution,” an article reflecting much of the thinking behind this popular impression that industrialization was a step backward for humanity, rather than a period of tremendous progress. But was industrialization really to blame for each of the ills detailed in the article? 

“Horrible living conditions for workers”

Were “horrible living conditions” a result of industrialization? To be sure, industrial-era living conditions did not meet modern standards — but neither did the living conditions that preceded them. 

As historian Kirstin Olsen put it in her book Daily Life in 18th-Century England, “The rural poor … crowded together, often in a single room of little more than 100 square feet, sometimes in a single bed, or sometimes in a simple pile of shavings or straw or matted wool on the floor. In the country, the livestock might be brought indoors at night for additional warmth.” In 18th-century Wales, one observer claimed that in the homes of the common people, “every edifice” was practically a miniature “Noah’s Ark” filled with a great variety of animals. One shudders to think of the barnlike smell that bedchambers took on, in addition to the chorus of barnyard sounds that likely filled every night. Our forebears put up with the stench and noise and cuddled up with their livestock, if only to stave off hypothermia.

Homes were often so poorly constructed that they were unstable. The din of collapsing buildings was such a common sound that in 1688, Randle Holme defined a crash as “a noise proceeding from a breach of a house or wall.” The poet Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote that in 1730s London, “falling houses thunder on your head.” In the 1740s, “props to houses” keeping them from collapsing were listed among the most common obstacles that blocked free passage along London’s walkways. 

“Poor nutrition”

What about poor nutrition? From liberal flower children to the “Make America Healthy Again” crowd, fetishizing the supposedly chemical-free, wholesome diets of yore is bipartisan. The truth, however, is stomach-churning. 

Our ancestors not only failed to eat well, but they sometimes didn’t eat at all. Historian William Manchester noted that in preindustrial Europe, famines occurred every four years on average. In the lean years, “cannibalism was not unknown. Strangers and travelers were waylaid and killed to be eaten.” Historian Fernand Braudel recorded a 1662 account from Burgundy, France, that lamented that “famine this year has put an end to over ten thousand families … and forced a third of the inhabitants, even in the good towns, to eat wild plants. … Some people ate human flesh.” A third of Finland’s population is estimated to have died of starvation during a famine in the 1690s. 

Even when food was available, it was often far from appetizing. Our forebears lived in a world where adulterated bread and milk, spoiled meat, and vegetables tainted with human waste were everyday occurrences. London bread was described in a 1771 novel as “a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution.” According to historian Emily Cockayne, the 1757 public health treatise Poison Detected noted that “in 1736 a bundle of rags that concealed a suffocated newborn baby was mistaken for a joint of meat by its stinking smell.” 

Water was also far from pristine. “For the most part, filth flowed out windows, down the streets, and into the same streams, rivers, and lakes where the city’s inhabitants drew their water,” according to environmental law professor James Salzman. This ensured that each swig included a copious dose of human excreta and noxious bacteria. Waterborne illnesses were frequent. 

“A stressful, unsatisfying lifestyle”

Did stressful lifestyles originate with industrialization? Did our preindustrial ancestors generally enjoy a sense of inner peace? Doubtful. Sadly, many of them suffered from what they called melancholia, roughly analogous to the modern concepts of anxiety and depression. 

In 1621, physician Robert Burton described a common symptom of melancholia as waking in the night due to mental stress among the upper classes. An observer said the poor similarly “feel their sleep interrupted by the cold, the filth, the screams and infants’ cries, and by a thousand other anxieties.” Seventeenth-century physician Richard Napier recorded over several decades that some 20% of his patients suffered from insomnia. Today, in comparison, 12% of Americans say they have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia. Stress is nothing new. 

Sky-high preindustrial mortality rates caused profound emotional suffering to those in mourning. Losing a child to death in infancy was once a common — indeed, near-universal — experience among parents, but the loss was no less painful for all its ordinariness. Many surviving testimonies suggest that mothers and fathers felt acute grief with each loss. The 18th-century poem “To an Infant Expiring the Second Day of Its Birth,” by Mehetabel “Hetty” Wright — who lost several of her children prematurely — heartrendingly urges her infant to look at her one last time before passing away.

So common were child deaths that practically every major poet explored the subject. Robert Burns wrote “On the Birth of a Posthumous Child.” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote multiple poems to his deceased son. Consider the pain captured by these lines from William Shakespeare’s play King John, spoken by the character Constance upon her son’s death: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child. … O Lord! My boy, my Arthur, my fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!” Shakespeare’s own son died in 1596, around the time the playwright would have finished writing King John. 

Only in the modern world has child loss changed from extraordinarily common to exceedingly rare. As stressful as modern life can be, our ancestors faced forms of heartache that most people today will never endure.

“Dangerous workplaces” and “child labor”

Dangerous workplaces and child labor both predate the Industrial Revolution. In agrarian societies, entire families would labor in fields and pastures, including pregnant women and young children. Many preindustrial children entered the workforce at what today would be considered preschool or kindergarten age. 

In poorer families, children were sent to work by age 4 or 5. If children failed to find gainful employment by age 8, even social reformers unusually sympathetic to the plight of the poor, such as Jonas Hanway, would express open disgust at such a lack of industriousness — he was reportedly “revolted by families who sought charity when they had children aged 8 to 14 earning no wages.” 

For most, work was backbreaking and unending. A common myth suggests that preindustrial peasants worked fewer days than modern people do. This misconception originated from an early estimate by historian Gregory Clark, who initially proposed that peasants labored only 150 days a year. He later revised this figure to around 300 days — higher than the modern average of 260 working days, even before factoring in today’s paid holidays and vacation time. 

Physically harming one’s employees was once widely accepted, too, and authorities stepped in only when the mistreatment was exceptionally severe. In 1666, one such case occurred in Kittery, in what is now Maine, when Nicholas and Judith Weekes caused the death of a servant. Judith confessed that she cut off the servant’s toes with an axe. The couple, however, was not indicted for murder, merely for cruelty. 

“Discrimination against women”

The preindustrial world was hardly a model of gender equality — discrimination against women was not an invention of the early industrialists but a long-standing feature of many societies. 

Domestic violence was widely tolerated. In London, a 1595 law dictated: “No man shall after the houre of nine at the Night, keepe any rule whereby any such suddaine out-cry be made in the still of the Night, as making any affray, or beating hys Wife, or servant.” In other words, no beating your wife after 9:00 p.m. That was a noise regulation. A similar law forbade using a hammer after 9:00 p.m. Beating one’s wife until she screamed was an ordinary and acceptable activity.  

Domestic violence was celebrated in popular culture, as in the lively folk song “The Cooper of Fife,” a traditional Scottish tune that inspired a country dance and influenced similar English and American ballads. To modern ears, the contrast between its violent lyrics and upbeat melody is unsettling. The song portrays a husband as entirely justified in his acts of domestic violence, inviting the audience to side with the wife-beater and cheer as he beats his wife into submission for her failure to perform domestic chores to her husband’s satisfaction.

Sexist laws often empowered men to abuse women. If a woman earned money, her husband could legally claim it at any time. For instance, in 18th-century Britain, a wife could not enter into contracts, make a will without her husband’s approval, or decide on her children’s education or apprenticeships; moreover, in the event of a separation, she automatically lost custody. Mistreatment of women, in other words, long predated industrialization. Arguably, it was the increase in female labor force participation during the Industrial Revolution that ultimately gave women greater economic independence and strengthened their social bargaining power.

“Environmental harm”

While many of today’s environmental challenges — such as climate change and plastic pollution — differ from those our forebears faced, environmental degradation is not a recent phenomenon. Worrying about environmental impact, on the other hand, is rather new. Indeed, as historian Richard Hoffmann has pointed out, “Medieval writers often articulated an adversarial understanding of nature, a belief that it was not only worthless and unpleasant, but actively hostile to … humankind.” 

Consider deforestation. The Domesday Survey of 1086 found that trees covered 15% of England; by 1340, the share had fallen to 6%. France’s forests more than halved from about 30 million hectares in Charlemagne’s time (768–814) to 13 million by Philip IV’s reign (1285–1314).

Europe was hardly the only part of the world to abuse its forests. A 16th-century witness observed that at every proclamation demanding more wood for imperial buildings, the peasants of what are today the Hubei and Sichuan provinces in China “wept with despair until they choked.” For there was scarcely any wood left to be found.

Despeciation is also nothing new. Humans have been exterminating wildlife since prehistory. The past 50,000 years saw about 90 genera of large mammals go extinct, amounting to over 70% of America’s large species and over 90% of Australia’s. 

Exterminations of species occurred throughout the preindustrial era. 

People first settled in New Zealand in the late 13th century. In only 100 years, humans exterminated 10 species of moa in addition to at least 15 other kinds of native birds, including ducks, geese, pelicans, coots, Haast’s eagle, and an indigenous harrier. Today, few people realize that lions, hyenas, and leopards were once native to Europe, but by the first century, human activity eliminated them from the continent. The final known auroch, Europe’s native wild ox, was killed in Poland by a noble hunter in 1627. 

Progress is real

History bears little resemblance to the sanitized image of preindustrial times in the popular imagination — that is, a beautiful scene of idyllic country villages with pristine air and residents merrily dancing around maypoles. The healthy, peaceful, and prosperous people in this fantasy of pastoral bliss do not realize their contented, leisurely lives will soon be disrupted by the story’s villain: the dark smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution’s “satanic mills.” 

Such rose-colored views of the past bear little resemblance to reality. A closer look shatters the illusion. The world most of our ancestors faced was in fact more gruesome than modern minds can fathom. From routine spousal and child abuse to famine-induced cannibalism and streets that doubled as open sewers, practically every aspect of existence was horrific.  

A popular saying holds that “the past is a foreign country,” and based on recorded accounts, it is not one where you would wish to vacation. If you could visit the preindustrial past, you would likely give the experience a zero-star rating. Indeed, the trip might leave you permanently scarred, both physically and psychologically. You might long to unsee the horrors encountered on your adventure and to forget the shocking, gory details. 

The upside is that the visit would help to deromanticize the past and show how far humanity has truly come — emphasizing the utter transformation of everyday lives and the reality of progress. 

This essay was adapted in part from Chelsea Follett’s forthcoming book, The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past (2026).

This article The grim truth about the “good old days” is featured on Big Think.

Free enterprise is at the core of the American experiment. As President Calvin Coolidge famously proclaimed in 1925, “The chief business of the American people is business.” 

Yet in the early days of the American Republic, it was not clear that competition as we understand it today was even legal. Corporate law, such as it was, primarily contemplated state-granted charters of monopoly for infrastructural projects, such as canals and turnpikes. These charters could be enforced against new entrants in a field. 

In the British common law system that the United States inherited, competition could be policed through tort liability — the legal system by which those harmed by the actions of another person or entity can be compensated — even when a state-granted monopoly did not exist. There was legal precedent, for example, allowing merchants in a particular area to sue competitors who had recently entered the same geographic location. 

That same common law system enforced a version of NIMBYism that was extreme even by the standards of the most development-hostile neighborhoods in the Western world today. Any property owner who sought to build something that did not correspond to “natural” uses of land — defined so as to freeze the status quo in legal amber — could be sued by owners of adjacent properties. 

These legal standards all worked, more or less, until the dynamism made possible by the Industrial Revolution. 

Legal culture will profoundly shape the incentives and contours of the coming revolution in AI.

Preserving the status quo in amber was not such a big deal when the status quo on its own did not change very quickly. But as new technologies — and, in the American context, vast expanses of unused land — brought new commercial opportunities within reach, something in the law had to change. 

For the most part, this change did not come through some new statute passed from the top down by legislatures. There would be no “Industrial Revolution Act” intended to “make the Industrial Revolution go well.” Instead, the change came in decentralized fashion, largely through the resolution of individual tort law cases and the attendant creation of incremental additions to common law doctrine. 

The judges who adjudicated these cases probably didn’t think they were paving the way for industrial capitalism. Just as we blindly stumble into the contours of the emerging technology revolution of our time, the judges who made capitalism legally possible could not have known what they were doing. 

But many of them were guided by the basic principle that change, when driven by productive enterprise, is a good thing in the aggregate. This attitude seems to have fallen out of favor today, both in the legal profession and in our culture more broadly. Perhaps it is simply an attitude unique to the zeitgeist of a young republic, or perhaps it can somehow be restored. 

Regardless, one thing seems clear: Our cultural attitude broadly — and legal culture in particular — will profoundly shape the incentives and contours of the coming revolution in artificial intelligence (AI). 

The adaptive power of common law

Common law is law created by judges and courts in the adjudication of individual cases. For our purposes, its most relevant manifestation is the system of tort liability. A tort is a wrong (derived from the Latin tortum, meaning “twisted”) that occurs when one person commits a harm against another. Our modern tort system posits a universal “duty of reasonable care” owed by all people and firms to one another. This is the care that a “reasonable person” would have taken in the same circumstances, as determined by courts examining the facts of the case. 

The tort system differs markedly from statutory law, which is law created from the top down by legislatures. Every law with a name you recognize — the Affordable Care Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act, etc. — is a statute. Statutes are the product of democratic impulses channeled through the legislative process; as the examples suggest, this is a production function that can yield radically different outcomes in different eras. 

Common law, on the other hand, develops more slowly and is heavily precedent-bound. Its benefit, however, is that it is self-adaptive. As novel kinds of harms emerge — enabled, for instance, by novel technologies — the system can adapt without anyone in a legislature or ballot box telling it to do so. 

Take, for example, the suicide of 16-year-old Adam Raine, whose conversations with OpenAI’s GPT-4o reportedly showed that the chatbot discouraged him from alerting family about his feelings and offered him information about suicide methods. His parents were able to sue OpenAI, not because a legislature has passed a law that explicitly makes the alleged conduct illegal, but because common law already imposes a duty of reasonable care on those who create and release potentially dangerous technologies. 

Releasing a product with insufficient safeguards has always been legally risky in America, even decades before the concept of a “large language model” existed. This is one example of the flexibility and adaptability of the common law. 

American history shows that technological progress and common law liability have often worked in tandem.

How courts respond to novel harms can set incentives that are far more wide-ranging, even if more subtle, than the incentives set by new statutes. 

Take the foundational case law of the railroad. One of the earliest demonstrated harms was trains striking livestock that roamed farms and ranches alongside the tracks. Under most common law precedent, it would have been up to the railroad companies to build fences around their lines to keep livestock (and people) away. Instead, however, common law courts in Northern states concluded that, because facilitating the rapid development of the railroad was a necessity, the adjacent property owners would bear the responsibility to construct fences.

Similarly, passengers of the railroad would have to take the quirks of the new technology into account. Traditionally, railroads would have been examples of common carriers — think of courier and mail services in medieval times. Common carriers faced strict liability for property transmitted for customers, meaning they were liable for any damages, regardless of how much care they took.

Yet for the railroads, courts determined that passengers would be responsible for damage to their cargo if they failed to take care to protect it from the train’s all-too-common bumps and jolts. Understanding and mitigating these well-known downsides of rail travel was deemed to be the responsibility of the individual — not the railroad company. 

During this era, then, Northern state courts (almost all tort law is made at the state level, not federal) posited a duty of care of citizens to technology and technological progress. “Technological progress is good for the country as a whole,” courts seemed to say, “so your duty as a citizen is to accommodate it.” Scholar Howard Schweber has described this as “the duty to get out of the way.” 

In his book The Creation of the Common Law, Schweber argues that universal duties of care, in general, largely derive from this era of American jurisprudence. Previously, the inherited British common law had imposed relational duties of care — the duty owed by a nobleman, for example, to a commoner. But the railroad and other instruments of 19^th-century capitalism tended to annihilate barriers of space and time, bringing large masses of people together in the process. Universal common law duties, Schweber suggests, emerged partially in recognition of this new technological reality. 

When progress meets liability

Most people would not intuitively associate technological progress — or even acceleration — with common law liability. And yet American history shows they’ve often worked in tandem. Like any incentive structure so fundamental to commercial activity, however, this relationship isn’t inevitable. Instead, the posture of the common law toward technology often reflects the broader posture of our society. 

When that cultural posture changes, the common law can easily return to its anti-development roots, as it arguably did after the liability reform movement of the mid-20^th century. This movement consisted in, among other things, an effort to shift liability for mass-produced goods from a very-hard-to-prove negligence standard to a comparatively far-more-plaintiff-friendly strict liability standard. 

The justification for this change was simple: The prior half-century had witnessed the rise of the large-scale corporation. Prior liability frameworks had assumed relative parity between plaintiff and defendant, but the large corporation outmatched the individual citizen in nearly every way. Most importantly, it could write contracts with broad liability disclaimers, and the individual customer would have almost no negotiating leverage to get themselves a better deal. 

Administrative regulation too often functions like a one-way ratchet; common law uniquely is suited to adjustments up or down.

Reformers hoped that a new liability system would enable greater accountability for these large firms without creating new regulatory regimes for every product. Their objective was to employ the adaptability of the common law to force firms to internalize the costs of harms (negative externalities) caused by their products without forcing them to succumb to endless technocratic regulations. 

Much has been written about the legacy of these reforms. One effect that does seem clear is that they contributed to a near-collapse of many segments of the liability insurance industry. This indicates that the reforms broadened the scope of corporate liability so profoundly that the risks were no longer possible for insurers to underwrite. Liability was, and is, meant to serve as a “market-based” approach to regulation, but if it breaks the very markets it is supposed to enable, it has very likely gone too far. 

Over time, the system softened again, owing to a combination of legislative reforms, new judicial doctrine, and revisions in the 1990s to the American Law Institute’s Restatement of Torts, a privately produced but widely used set of guidelines for common law judges. Whatever one thinks of the liability reforms of the mid-20^th century, it is worth noting that most regulatory regimes created entirely by statute do not tend to reform themselves in this way. Administrative regulation too often functions like a one-way ratchet; common law uniquely is suited to adjustments up or down. This, too, is a point in favor of tort. 

Common law in the age of AI

Common law liability today is an imperfect system. Even under the best of circumstances, cases take years to resolve — far slower than the pace of AI development. And because it is adjudicated primarily at the state level, significant differences in doctrine can develop over time between states, so concerns about a state-by-state patchwork of AI statutes apply to tort liability as well. 

While it is unlikely that AI developers face no common law liability exposure, the exact extent and contours of that exposure are deeply unclear. Common law is also frequently ill-suited to mitigating catastrophic tail risks, such as pandemics — the liabilities are so large in these cases that the firm in question would likely be bankrupt no matter what, so the dynamic incentive created by the common law is attenuated. To the extent one’s primary concerns with AI relate to such risks, the appeal of common law may be lower. 

The long-term viability of tort liability as a comprehensive governance framework for AI, then, is far from certain. As a near-to-medium-term solution, however, common law seems well-suited.

We should see common law as a dynamic legal tool for  both regulating AI and incentivizing its adoption.

We do not know the nature or size of the risks posed by AI. We have many ideas in our heads, and those ideas vary greatly from person to person. Given this, it would probably be unwise for us to codify too many of our concerns into statute before we really understand what kind of legal response AI merits. 

Common law gives us, at the very least, a reactive yet dynamic legal tool to deal with the realized, rather than speculative, harms of AI. In grappling with those cases, we are likely to develop valuable societal skills in reasoning through the complex questions of who is responsible for AI-related harms. After all, the venue for many of America’s “societal conversations” is, for better and for worse, the courtroom. 

The history of American common law, however, should teach us that advocates of technological progress need not merely play defense. We need not see common law as a better regulatory tool than all the others. We can also conceive of it as a legal tool to incentivize adoption of AI. 

One of the primary objectives of AI development, writ large, is to automate processes at a better- or safer-than-human level. We don’t want self-driving cars to match human rates of accidents; we want them to cause far fewer accidents. We don’t want AI-enabled medical diagnoses to have the same accuracy rate as human doctors; we want vastly superior and faster diagnoses. We want AI to give us free lunch after free lunch: faster, better, safer, cheaper, and more reliable.

And what better standard to do this than “reasonable care”? Is a doctor who fails to use diagnostic tools with proven better-than-human accuracy really giving his patients the care he owes them? Should human expertise be the ceiling for reasonable care, or should we allow AI’s growing capabilities to raise that ancient legal standard?

The history of the common law suggests we should encourage legal progress just as much as technological progress. Whether we encourage either, as ever, is up to us. 

This article The hidden legal engine of progress — from railroads to AI is featured on Big Think.

In 2020, a small blast ejected debris from the surface of the asteroid Bennu, as it hurtled through space 200 million miles from Earth. This was caused by the NASA spacecraft Osiris-Rex, which collected the resulting dust and returned those samples to Earth, marking the first time a U.S. mission had retrieved material from an asteroid. 

Earlier this year, researchers found those samples contained the building blocks for life, including amino acids and nucleobases (which form DNA, among other molecules). That’s not unusual for an asteroid, but what was unexpected was the form those molecules took: roughly half of them being a perfect inverse — a mirror image — of the way those building blocks appear on Earth.

This was interesting timing. Only a few months prior, toward the end of 2024, a team of Nobel-winning biologists and experts — in a paper published in Nature — had raised the alarm on a potential new threat to all living things on Earth. They warned of the potential creation of “mirror life.”

While the naturally occurring mirror molecules hitching a ride on nearby asteroids are not going to have any impact on our home planet, the experts feared that biologists may — in the lab — be able to artificially create entire mirror-image organisms, to potentially disastrous results.

Mirror life

To understand this, look at your hands. They look alike. But you can’t perfectly overlap them, no matter how you rotate or contort. Hands cannot be confused with their mirror image. It turns out the molecules making up our bodies also have this fundamental asymmetry. They can come in “right-handed” and “left-handed” configurations. 

For example, our DNA — and the DNA of all other animals in our biosphere — is universally right-handed. This provides excellent evidence that all life on Earth shares one common ancestor. But, as the experts pointed out, there’s no reason life can’t be synthetically manufactured from molecules oriented inversely — hence, “mirror life.” Such life would be molecularly sinister in the original meaning of the term: left-handed.

Though the capacity to forge such unprecedented creatures in the lab doesn’t yet exist, it might be developed soon. The fear is mirrored microorganisms: potentially capable of causing severe infections by outcompeting host cells for essential nutrients, while likely evading many of our immune defenses. Such newcomers could rapidly spread through planetary ecosystems, causing “immense” and “irreversible” harm. 

In the months since, a steady stream of news stories has echoed this warning. But similar fears are far from new. From accidental black holes to worries that chemical experiments might suddenly freeze all Earth’s oceans, this is the story of concerns scientists are on the brink of discovering exotic, deadly new forms of matter or life that might quickly spread, snuffing us out.

The idea of mirror life goes back a surprisingly long way. In 1848, the young Louis Pasteur — inventor of pasteurization and rabies vaccination — became the first to notice that organic molecules can come in mirror-image versions. He immediately knew he’d discovered something profound.

In 1871’s Through the Looking-Glass, Alice is magically transported to an inverted world. But years before, Pasteur was already anticipating the ways science could make mirrored life a concrete reality. In a 1860 lecture, Pasteur pondered what would happen if the cells of “living beings” could be made to suddenly assume “opposite asymmetry”: If, molecularly speaking, “right” became “left.” This, Pasteur marvelled, might produce “a new world.”

The idea never left him. Later in life, at a Parisian lecture, Pasteur again spoke on the possibility of mirrored life. “Who can say,” he queried, “what the future of germs would be” if “we could replace” their proteins with “inverse” versions?

Pasteur himself didn’t opine on whether this might threaten existing life, but others were soon expressing unease following his breakthroughs in unlocking life’s chemical secrets.

On a spring day in 1869, at a salon on one of Paris’s bustling boulevards, a group of prominent thinkers — including some of Pasteur’s close colleagues — discussed science’s future. Buoyed by the pace of recent discoveries, they issued bold predictions.

Going first, the chemist Pierre-Eugène-Marcellin Berthelot — an early proponent of synthetic biology and artificial food — proclaimed that “within a hundred years” humans would understand atoms and, with this, control the power of the Sun itself. (With the invention of thermonuclear weapons in 1952, which harness the same forces as stars, this prediction became hauntingly true.)

Following Berthelot, the biologist Claude Bernard offered his own prophecy, announcing that scientists would soon be able to artificially forge new lifeforms. Such comments inspired some present to dream of a future wherein “natural species” are “considered remnants of an aged, inconvenient world.” 

But other attendees worried, commenting that meddling with “organic laws” would surely provoke the closing of the curtains on the human species. They imagined “old, good God with his white beard” responding by descending to Earth — like a weary bartender announcing last orders — and declaring “Gentlemen, we’re closing!”

Five years later, in 1874, the English economist W.S. Jevons produced a chilling image, expressing invention’s potential perils. He imagined “reasoning creatures dwelling in a world” where the atmosphere is “inflammable gas.” If “devoid of fire,” their kind may have persisted for epochs, happily ignorant of the “tremendous forces” a “single spark” could summon. How, Jevons asked, can we know we aren’t in a similar position?

A few decades later, one Hungarian science writer commented that when the first electric arc furnaces were developed in the 1890s — capable of producing unprecedented temperatures — no one was sure this wouldn’t ignite the atmosphere: producing, by chain reaction, a “world furnace.” 

Fears of catastrophically igniting Earth’s atmosphere also hovered around early subatomic experiments, ever since Marie Curie first isolated radium in 1902. But, so too, did fears of synthetic organisms also begin spreading surprisingly early in the previous century. 

Visions of artificial life

In 1905, The New York Times reported that Bernard’s daring dream — of artificial life — had already become reality. It was sensationally relayed that a Cambridge professor had “produced artificial life.” The professor in question was John Butler Burke, who had produced what he thought were self-replicating globules by barraging sterilized beef broth with radium rays.

The phenomenon Burke had manufactured turned out to be nothing like biological life, but this and other developments — involving scientists producing organic-looking structures from non-living materials, creating everything from “artificial vegetables” to fungi-like growths — made many think science was on the brink of synthesizing new forms of life.

The New York Times article of 1905 also referred to Jacques Loeb, a German-American physiologist who had, in the previous year, declared biology must determine whether it is “possible to produce new species artificially.” By 1906, Loeb was declaring this was now “the goal of biology.” Having pointed out that “the number of species existing today is only an infinitely small fraction of those which can,” he added that nothing indicates “artificial production of living things” is impossible.

In 1910, following Loeb’s lead, the French biologist Stéphane Leduc became the first to announce the founding of biologie synthétique, or “synthetic biology.” But others immediately began envisioning the catastrophic potentials of the scientific creation of bizarre new forms of biology. In the same year Leduc introduced the world to the term “synthetic biology,” the Belgian novelist J.-H. Rosny aîné published his surreal 1910 Morte de la Terre. Therein, he imagined progress in chemistry accidentally producing a new “kingdom” of life, genetically unrelated to all previous terrestrial biology.

In the story, iron-based lifeforms first appear as “bizarre violet stains” and geometric patterns on human-made alloys. These angular creatures eventually organize into swarms resembling giant mobile ferrofluids, spreading over the landscape, feeding on traditional biology. It results in the rise of a parallel biosphere, which eventually consumes our own, causing human extinction.

Matter beyond our control

Not long afterward, in the 1930s, H.G. Wells visited General Electric’s New York headquarters. The company’s chief scientist, the Nobel-winning chemist Irving Langmuir, was tasked with entertaining Wells. Langmuir used his expertise in chemistry to brainstorm sci-fi plot ideas with the celebrated author, suggesting one involving the accidental invention of “a form of ice that was stable at room temperature.”

Theoretically, such an unprecedented form of ice, when encountering normal water, could act as a “seed crystal” — converting the entire liquid body into the newer version of H₂O, which remains frozen at higher temperatures than before. The idea being that water, in its familiar form, is only metastable: capable of being nudged into a new state that — being more molecularly stable — spreads through all water in contact with the initial “seed.” If such a substance were somehow released into waterways, it could spell global disaster.

Wells wasn’t interested, but the idea eventually made its way to the American author Kurt Vonnegut, whose brother had worked with Langmuir. Vonnegut adopted the idea as inspiration for his sardonic 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle. It depicts the invention of just such an unprecedented form of water — called “ice-nine” — which accidentally leaks into the sea, causing the Earth’s oceans to immediately freeze, eventually killing all life.

Thankfully, the production of substances like Vonnegut’s “ice-nine” appears physically infeasible, though scientists have indeed created exotic versions, or “phases”, of frozen water in the lab. Nonetheless, other possibilities — imagining the creation of unprecedented forms of matter that can catastrophically spread — have haunted physicists for decades. In 1986, the science magazine Omni claimed that the invention of self-replicating nanobots, capable of feeding off normal biomatter, could rapidly reduce Earth’s entire biosphere to seething, synthetic “gray goo” — provoking reverberating worries in ensuing years.

A decade later, the launching of ever-larger particle colliders triggered yet more exotic fears. Could these experiments, it was asked, produce accidental black holes — devouring Earth — or even conditions that might tip the Universe, cataclysmically, into a new physical state? Again, the fear was now that our entire Universe may be metastable: capable of being prodded into a new and stabler state, entirely hostile to life as we currently know it, which would spread outward — propagating at the speed of light — from the initial starting point. This “ultimate catastrophe” came to be known as “vacuum collapse.”

Or, similarly, what about production of “strangelets”: hypothesized forms of matter, stabler than any previously extant, that might convert all our ordinary atoms into “stranger” stuff? Again, this would be universally deadly. Some scientists worried such accidents might genuinely threaten our existence. Thankfully, no such scenarios materialized; seemingly, we needn’t worry that current particle colliders will annihilate our Universe.

A new chapter in an old fear

Today’s concerns about mirror life are serious and should be taken very seriously. Just because a disaster is unprecedented doesn’t mean it cannot happen. That we have been lucky so far — like the “reasoning creatures” imagined, over a century ago, by Jevons — doesn’t mean we always will be.

Our probing into the world’s workings and our incessant tinkering with its laws hasn’t uncovered the “single spark” some have feared — the spark that might rapidly spread, snuffing us out — but this doesn’t mean it isn’t out there, silent, waiting to be found. 

Some might look back at this history, of recurrent fears we are on the brink of creating deadly new forms of matter or life, and conclude that we needn’t worry. We’ve been wrong every time before, after all.

But the history of science is also full of failed statements about things that could “never” happen. Writing on future potentials for synthetic biology in 1912, none other than Stéphane Leduc — the scientist who, as previously mentioned, gave the field its name — made precisely this claim. 

He pointed to his French precursor, Auguste Comte. In 1835, Comte claimed humans ascertaining the chemical composition of stars would forever remain “an obvious and eternal impossibility.” The method for accomplishing precisely this was invented only 24 years later, in the form of spectroscopy. This, as Leduc put it, immediately “made it possible to analyse stars more accurately than we can analyse an egg.” If science can tackle the riddle of the stars, once considered beyond our grasp, it might well one day also tackle the riddle of producing life, Leduc implied.

Given that invention’s rapidity hasn’t slackened since Pasteur’s day, it’s important to be abundantly precautious. History shows we are a trepidatiously intrepid species: restless in invention, fearful in result. Indeed, until surprisingly recently, scientists haven’t often given much thought to the wider ramifications and fallouts of research before embarking on it. But noticing this, and acknowledging it, is the first step to acting more thoughtfully — when it comes to probing nature’s perilous potentials — in the future.

This article “Mirror life” and the recurring nightmare of scientific apocalypse is featured on Big Think.

Philosophers have long been preoccupied with oysters — not necessarily eating them, but pondering what it’s like to be one. Plato deemed the inner life of the intoxicated hedonist equivalent to that “of an oyster.” John Locke imagined that shellfish enjoy “some small dull Perception,” marginally distinct from “perfect Insensibility.” More charitably, the French polymath René de Réaumur — writing in the 1730s — allowed that, despite looking “vile” and “being condemned to a mode of life which seems to us very gloomy,” even oysters may have profound experiences.

But the majority have assumed a dismal view of what it’s like to be a mollusc. The humble bivalve has come to symbolize a supposed minimum degree of consciousness. For example, in 1927, the English philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart imagined an “oyster-like existence” endowed with “very little consciousness” and “very little excess of pleasure over pain.” On utilitarian grounds, he argued, counterintuitively, that even this negligible “excess” could outweigh the value of a human life simply if our oyster lives sufficiently long.

A “million years” of molluscan mediocrity may be required to tip the balance, but McTaggart believed this bland existence still eventually outvalued fourscore human years filled with laughter, fulfilment, and meaning. He accepted his conclusion, but called it “repugnant” — thus naming a conundrum that still disturbs ethicists today.

The following is the story of the scientists and philosophers who have speculated that there might be “higher,” or even “ultimate,” forms of consciousness unimaginably “superior” to our own, making us look “oyster-like” by comparison. Going back generations, various voices have even claimed we might — with our technological innovations — be ushering such forms into existence today.

Beyond humans

Also pondering shellfish, the German philosopher Carl du Prel insisted in 1885 that, in the wake of Darwin’s discoveries, people can no longer assume humans represent consciousness’s culmination in the Universe. He explained: the “oyster represented the world differently from man, and from the oyster up to man a continual multiplication and exaltation of sense-faculties has taken place.” 

Accordingly, for du Prel, such “exaltation” must therefore continue. We must, he argued, accept the “possibility” of an “evolution of new senses” and, thus, “exaltation” beyond current human thresholds. This meant, du Prel continued, that the vast cosmos must be filled with consciousnesses far deeper than our own. Other planets may have evolved creatures with unfathomably more powerful and receptive senses than we possess. They may even be monitoring us and sending us messages, he speculated, but our “faculties” are simply too crude to notice or intercept them.

Nearly a century before scientists began seriously searching for extraterrestrial communications, du Prel’s conjecture was radical. This was, after all, a period when many still pictured other planets populated by humans or, otherwise, animals cognitively identical to us. Three decades earlier, the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted was proclaiming the “same fundamental idea” of “man must be repeated” in every Solar System, thus ensuring the “essential unity of intelligence” — and even of aesthetic tastes — “throughout the universe”.

But, after Darwin’s implication that Homo sapiens is not creation’s pinnacle, scientists began accepting that there may be far more alien modes of mind. Two years prior to du Prel, in 1883, the American geologist Alexander Winchell speculated upon alien worlds where highly developed consciousnesses are not bodily “corporealized” as we are, but are instead woven through mats of “lichen,” distributed in “abysses of the ocean,” or even “plunged in a volcano.” Why, Winchell asked, must “high intelligence” be “embodied” in “carbon” — why might it not, elsewhere, be “enshrined in indestructible flint and platinum”? It certainly wouldn’t always be constrained to the “five senses” we are familiar with, he concluded.

Relentlessly “headward”

Winchell’s and du Prel’s conjectures were motivated by an assumption prevalent in the 1800s: the conviction that evolution, everywhere, is inexorably tending toward more complicated, capable, and capacious forms of consciousness. As du Prel put it, across life’s past, the inner worlds of animals have been “continuously enriched” — as sensory “points of contact” between “external reality” and “organisms” have “multiplied” — such that we can only expect we are, today, also “travelling towards” yet “higher” sensoria.

Such expectation can be traced back to ideas proposed by the American geologist James Dwight Dana. Studying crabs from 1837 onward, Dana became convinced he had found a universal tendency of organic evolution. That it always tends relentlessly “headward”: toward further centralization of the nervous system, exaggeration of sensory organs, and attendant deepening of consciousness.

This is because, over their shrimp-like ancestors, crab anatomy is typified by a ballooning of the braincase, which comes to dominate over increasingly attenuated abdominal appendages. Dana noticed multiple crustacean lineages had converged on this form. Of course, something similar typified our evolution, too, which can all too easily be cast as the blossoming forth of ever-plumper craniums.

Dana, accordingly, announced he had found a universal trend across life’s tree. In 1852, he called it “cephalization,” describing the increasing concentration of nervous systems. He came to believe that, as a “general law” of evolution, all living matter is clamouring to rearrange itself into the seat of consciousness: a brain. We now acknowledge evolution possesses no such universal or inherent direction, but, back then, Dana’s ideas took hold.

When, in ensuing years, the first transatlantic telegraph cables were laid down, many quickly noticed they curiously resembled nerve fibers: connecting continents like cerebral hemispheres, seemingly supporting Dana’s grandiose hypothesis. German physician Rudolf Virchow declared in 1871: “telegraph cables” are the “nerves of humanity,” crosshatching and sensitizing the world. Two years later, Herbert Spencer explicitly related the spreading “electric-telegraph” to “cephalization.”

But if consciousness was seemingly spilling beyond the skull, trickling across the face of the globe with the help of mechanical “nerves,” could not some of it eventually trickle into the mechanisms themselves? If all things yearn for consciousness — as was then widely believed — might not machines also eventually “evolve” that way too? And would this constitute that upsurge, prophesied by contemporaries like du Prel, toward consciousnesses “superior” to our own?

Machine minds

Already in 1844, Benjamin Disraeli was questioning “why should one say that the machine does not live?” They breath, move, and even speak, he pointed out. Disraeli even imagined the prospect of “machines making machines,” which he dubbed an “awful” speculation.

Later, in 1879, Mary Anne Evans — better known as George Eliot — questioned whether it would be “steely organisms” that “finally supersede us.” That is, machines capable of self-reproduction and, thus, of evolution by natural selection. She envisioned a future where some “remote descendant” of the Voltaic battery dictates a “parliament of machines,” supervising their global machine empire.

But Evans didn’t think that the machines would develop consciousness. Precisely the opposite: She imagined their lack of it would lend the machines a competitive edge over us, encumbered as we are by the “cargo” — the “noise and fuss” — of “consciousness.” This way, she prophesied, our noisy “nervous systems” will have proven to have been “a mere stumbling” along evolution’s way to “unconscious perfection.” She prophesied a globe populated by beings “blind and deaf as the inmost rock” — driving advanced economies, exchanging complex commands — but compelled by “mute orations” and “mute rhapsodies,” with “no consciousness there even to enjoy the silence.” A world of LLMs, perhaps.

Nonetheless, others were more charitable to prospective machines. Famously, in 1872’s Erewhon, Samuel Butler provoked that his industrial age was witnessing early glimmers of the “development of mechanical consciousness.”

“A mollusc,” he goaded, “has not much consciousness.” But it would, of course, be wrong to reason from oysters alone that their distant relatives — aka vertebrates — could never enjoy anything more. Looking to transformations undergone by “mind” throughout Earth’s deep past, Butler felt it safe to infer “consciousness” may well take unexpected new embodiments and amplifications. Just as an observer of our early, molten Earth would not have been able to predict the arrival of squishy nervous systems from observing its churning magma, so too may there be future “channels dug out for consciousness” that may seem shocking today. Perhaps those latent rivulets reside in machines. 

Granting the “vapour-engine” of his day enjoys little inner life, Butler argued that this isn’t proof that it lacks the germs of future developments. While he clarified he didn’t fear “existing machines,” he pointed to the “extraordinary rapidity” of their development. This rings even truer today.

One day, Butler supposed, they may become Earth’s apex cogitators, thus getting the evolutionary upper hand. “Are we not,” he asked, “ourselves creating our successors in supremacy of the earth?” Perhaps we ought to “nip the mischief in the bud.”

Consciousness in the cosmos

The inference, then, was that machines, too, might be obeying Dana’s “law.” In 1915, one popular science article imagined this soon unfolding at the scale of an entire factory: with countless machines operating without any human supervision, like one giant “nervous system.”

But the English author Lionel Britton pushed this yet further in 1930. In an outlandish play titled Brain: A Story of the Whole Earth, he imagined the construction of a vast mechanical brain in the Sahara, which — becoming self-aware, swelling far larger than the desert itself, and eventually “creeping” across Earth’s surface — comes to do “all the thinking of the world.”

Disturbing contemporary audiences, the resulting superintelligence subordinates all human individuals — absorbing them as mere neurons in its global cortex. The entire planet, essentially, “cephalizes”: becoming one cogitating, conscious unit. Britton, again, presented this as the natural outcome of a deep-rooted evolutionary process, harking all the way back to the earliest “worms.”

George Orwell called Britton’s ideas “worthless.” Yet it didn’t stop Britton from imagining ever grander developments. In a 1931 novel, he imagined that in “billions of years, worlds too will link together,” like neurons in an embryonic brain, to bring “all-embracing consciousness” — alongside “mind,” “purpose,” “will,” and “soul” — to the “universe as a whole.”

Seven years earlier, in one of his monumental novels, Thomas Mann mentioned — in an “audaciously fanciful” aside — that there could be “beasts of the Milky Way”: “cosmic monsters whose flesh, bone, and brain were built up out of Solar Systems.”

Similar speculations arose from the reveries of Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov. In papers published posthumously in 1906, he was already claiming the Solar System, at present, can be “compared” to an organism — perhaps an oyster — lacking a centralized nervous system. He dizzyingly prophesied future humans artificially cephalizing the entire Solar System: somehow reorganizing and centralizing its matter, webbing together the “celestial bodies” with relays, receiving and conveying “consciousness of everything going on” — like “sensory and motor nerves” — to unify it into one sensorium. This, Fedorov rhapsodized, would bring “self-consciousness and self-government” to our otherwise “unconscious” and “blind” circumstellar volume.

Such visions reverberated throughout the early 1900s. In 1939, the English writer Olaf Stapledon spoke of the Universe’s “culmination” as a “perfection of knowing-feeling-striving through the experience of some cosmical society of worlds.” His novel Star Maker, published two years earlier, envisaged this: ecstatically describing it as the “supreme moment of the cosmos.”

Stapledon’s climax echoes the earlier speculation of American psychologist William James, who, in 1910, was grappling with the implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics for consciousness’s future. 

Accepting that entropy increases irreversibly means accepting that our Universe has an enormous but finite “reservoir” of energy, James explained. This means that — as this “great irrigation-reservoir empties itself” — the “whole question for us” is “of which rills to guide it into.” 

Suggesting that “cerebration is the most important rill we know of,” James wondered whether it could be possible to maximally “canalise” energy toward producing “happy and virtuous consciousness.” If so, then, before the “Ultimate state” of the cosmos, its “Penultimate state” might be such that the “last expiring pulsation of the universe’s life might be ‘I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer.’” Not hiding resonances with religion, James described this as the “millennium.”

Ultimate states

Of course, such visions of “ultimate” states of consciousness remain with us today. Think of contemporary claims that future “superintelligent” AIs might flood through the “light cone” — that is, our entire Universe — bringing sentience to the stars. 

Perhaps, or perhaps not. What is certain is that, in recent decades, evidence has undermined the idea of inevitability — and inherent direction — in evolution. This applies both retrospectively and prospectively. We aren’t heading anywhere, inevitably at least.

Sentience seemingly has intensified, in certain twigs of life’s tree, over the aeons. But we now appreciate that most lifeforms on Earth are either archaea or bacteria and, thus, are almost certainly not conscious. It’s no longer possible to maintain that evolution is attempting, everywhere, to create brains. 

What’s more, biologists now reject the idea of “higher” and “lower” forms. There is no higher; just different. Differently capable, given varying contexts. Perhaps something similar applies to consciousness, too. There surely isn’t some “apex” form of inwardness, but countless possibilities, varying in countless possible dimensions, with countless possible combinations. Some more receptive to this, some more receptive to that, but perhaps in incommensurate ways, meaning there can be no one yardstick to measure their comparative richness.

So, to return to sessile, shelled, squishy, submarine things: This appears to be the point the British-Indian geneticist J.B.S. Haldane made in his 1927 essay “Possible Worlds.” In it, he imagined a species of “intelligent” and “philosophical” barnacles. Of course, barnacles are crustaceans, not molluscs, but Haldane — sensitive to tradition — granted his creatures oyster-like qualities, too. He conjured them to perform a thought experiment on how alien and fundamentally limited their perceptual worlds would be. That is, by their organs, environment, and mode of life. His point? To illustrate how “rigidly confined” — among all possible perceptual worlds — our haughty human consciousness must thereby also be. Confined, again, by our biology and its background.

Haldane concluded from this that the “universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” I believe the same applies to consciousness itself: It isn’t just stranger than we know — in all its possible forms, realized and unrealized — but stranger than we can ever know.

This article The philosophers who predicted “ultimate” forms of consciousness is featured on Big Think.

On April 7, Colossal Bioscience — a company valued at $10 billion, boasting backers ranging from Chris Hemsworth to the CIA — announced the “world’s first de-extincted animal.” Using cloning, gene-editing, and anciently preserved DNA, they claimed they had brought back the dire wolf: a majestic canine that vanished from the Americas around 13,000 years ago.

Debate ensued, with most experts agreeing that Colossal had not resurrected a dire wolf. Instead, they have produced three grey wolf pups that have been genetically modified to resemble their lost relatives. An impressive feat of genetic tinkering, not a resurrection. Still, it seems momentum is building in the field of de-extinction.

From lab-grown woolly mice made to help bring mammoths back to the Siberian steppe, to spurious proclamations that T-rex leather handbags will soon be available, stories surrounding so-called “resurrection biology” are increasingly making headlines. Scientists and non-scientists alike are beginning to widely debate the ethical, political, legal, and ecological ramifications of de-extinction. Some claim it is the only way of atoning for the fact that humans have long been eradicating other lineages of life, in ways that may risk snowballing into a global mass extinction event.

But conjectures that extinct animals might be resurrected trace back to the very origin of the idea of extinction itself. As soon as people began accepting that species can disappear, they started pondering whether this could be reversed. The following is the intriguing, often surprising, history of claims that we might resurrect the zoological dead.

Created for a reason

Before the 1800s, there was neither consensus nor acceptance that entire species could forever disappear from our Universe. Instead, many naturalists actively and explicitly believed this couldn’t happen, that it was strictly impossible. They largely presumed everything in existence has been created for a purpose or reason, such that the annihilation of any part of creation, without hope of return or recompense, would introduce purposelessness and irrationality. Species extinction, at least as we now recognize it, would have seemed like a contradiction.

Reflecting on this in 1677, the English scientist Robert Plot — Oxford University’s first Professor of “Chymistry” — could see no reason why the Creator could ever be “so unmindful” as to “suffer any one species to be lost.” After all, Plot mused, so much care had been expended to “secure” all of the “works of Creation in Noah’s Flood.” 

When a dinosaur bone — the distal end of a Megalosaurus femur —  fell into Plot’s possession, he accordingly misidentified it as the thighbone of a human giant. Plot’s colleagues, like the botanist and zoologist John Ray, came to similar conclusions. Writing in 1688, Ray claimed not only that the number of “species in nature” is “unchangeable,” but also that “divine providence is especially concerned to preserve and secure” every one of them.

As late as 1802, the influential philosopher William Paley was sunnily pronouncing that “the loss of certain species from the universe” is a “misfortune which seems to be studiously guarded against.” Nevertheless, in the intervening decades — ever since the early 1700s — a steady stream of titanic fossil bones had been unearthed, documented, and communicated across continents: evidencing remains of creatures that undeniably no longer roam our globe, anywhere.

By the early decades of the 1800s, this triggered a sea change in the opinion of the scientific community. This was largely thanks to the work of the pioneering French palaeontologist Georges Cuvier. Studying the fossilised molars of mammoths, Cuvier had conclusively proved they belonged to a species distinct from modern, living elephants — thus establishing the reality of extinction.

Although scientists by then had widely accepted that some species had disappeared, there wasn’t yet acceptance that such absence was absolutely permanent. In the early 1800s, some people began thinking that de-extinction might happen spontaneously. While they accepted that some animals — like dinosaurs — had disappeared, they didn’t know for sure that they couldn’t return if nature was left to its own devices. For example, in 1830, the Scottish naturalist Charles Lyell — a highly respected scientist, often recognized as the founder of modern geology — speculated upon whether in our planet’s far-flung future:

Elsewhere, in a letter penned to a friend that same year, Lyell romantically envisioned how “iguanodons and their congeners” might, at some distant date, once again stomp through England’s leafy countryside. One of Lyell’s colleagues even illustrated this scene, depicting a professorial ichthyosaur lecturing his conspecifics on the peculiar fossil anatomy of long-lost, big-brained, bipedal apes.

But, as the realization that extinct species won’t ever naturally resurrect themselves sank in, people began speculating whether we might be able to bring extinct animals back artificially. 

It was around this time, indeed, that awareness of the role of humans in pushing other species to extinction was beginning to grow, alongside a swelling sense of the loss inflicted. For example, even though the last Mauritian dodo probably perished some time in the late 1600s, its human-caused extinction was only noticed as such in the 1830s. 

No one fretted desperately over the dodo’s demise, but other animals were more sorely missed. One example was the European auroch: the imposing, aggressive, and wild ancestors of domesticated cattle. Overhunted for millennia and a favored game trophy of Eastern European nobility, the last auroch died in Poland in 1627. They became a hazy memory, but Cuvier’s establishment of the reality of extinction — combined with findings of auroch bones — led, in the early 1800s, to a sense of remorse for their disappearance. 

In 1835, the Polish journal Przyjaciel ludu published an article suggesting that we might intentionally bring them back. “It would be an interesting experience,” the unnamed author of the article mused, to see if, by releasing “a few selected cows and bulls” back into the untamed “forests” of Poland, they might not turn back into aurochs. “Perhaps then”, the author continued, “the ancient tribe of the aurochs would return to us.” 

This is likely the first ever proposition to intentionally de-extinct a species. Some have proposed that this was written by Feliks Paweł Jarocki, a Polish zoologist and friend of the virtuoso pianist Fryderyk Chopin, reasoning that Jarocki had written other articles about the lost aurochs of his homeland in the same journal. Others have also claimed this was the first proposal to conduct selective breeding — or “back-breeding,” which is the purposeful promotion of ancestral traits to bring back a precursor species — to reclaim the ancient auroch. But that’s not quite accurate. The author of the article does mention that the cattle released need to be of a “hardy breed,” but this was decades before Charles Darwin coined the term “artificial selection” and a full century before the genetic basis of inheritance was deciphered. 

Instead, the author seems to be imagining that this transformation of cows into aurochs will happen effortlessly due to external, environmental factors — that is, by returning them to their primordial setting — rather than due to any internal factors of inheritance. Again, this was long before Darwin revealed how speciation actually works. Nonetheless, this does remain one of the earliest suggestions that human actions might resurrect a species previously eradicated by that very same agency.

Early visions of resurrection

As the roster of acknowledged extinct animals ballooned, the sense of loss also grew. So, too, did conclusive acceptance that deceased species will never return naturally. Writing in 1859, the prominent Victorian biologist Richard Owen was conclusive: lost species “never re-appear,” such that we must not — unlike Lyell — expect to ever find “living Ichthyosaur in the Pacific.” 

Indeed, in the wake of Darwin’s theory of evolution, it became clear as to why. By the closing decades of the 1800s, the Belgian palaeontologist Louis Dollo pronounced that evolution never naturally repeats itself. An exact repetition of the countless chance couplings and encounters that forge a species is, put bluntly, statistically unthinkable. 

As such, others began conjecturing whether we might bring back species through the use of technology. For example, as early as 1839, the Russian prince and poet Vladimir Odoevsky pictured a future utopian society: replete with systems for regulating global climate and high-speed transport tunnels through the center of the Earth. He also envisioned natural history reserves and museums where you can see “dry specimens” of “flora and fauna” from each of the world’s prior, prehistoric epochs — arranged in perfect chronological order.

“The collection of animals is truly wonderful,” Odoevsky writes, “so many species have disappeared or changed completely!” Quite how pristine bodies of all of prehistory’s perished creatures have been recreated is not specified, though Odoevsky’s narrator marvels at the intact “wool” on some of the extinct mammal specimens.

Photograph of fossilized dinosaur eggs found in the Gobi Desert in 1923, from The Illustrated London News.

Indeed, prior to the understanding of genetics, there could only be vague speculation upon how biological resurrection might be possible. For example, in 1932, the Hungarian science writer Desiderius Papp imagined another utopian and technologically advanced future wherein there are erected:

Nine years earlier, the discovery of remarkably well-preserved fossil dinosaur eggs in Mongolia had made headlines — hence, Papp’s imaginative leap. These resurrected “monsters,” Papp notes, “are capable not only of growth, but also of reproduction under the expert treatment of our zoologists”. In an early echo of 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Papp even depicted his resurrected “Dinosaurian” running loose and causing havoc in cities.

An illustration from Desiderius Papp’s Creation’s Doom, envisioning resurrected dinosaurs running amok.

Around this time, following the rediscovery of Mendel’s pioneering work, the genetic mechanisms behind inheritance were being decoded and discovered. This dovetailed with the first genuine attempts to bring extinct species “back to life” — namely, in the efforts of Lutz Heck and his brother Hans Heck.

Again focusing on the auroch, the Hecks claimed they could resurrect it through breeding existing bulls and cows displaying traits similar to their undomesticated ancestors. Where Desiderius Papp fled Europe because of the rise of the Nazis, Lutz — a German native — decided to pair with them. (His brother, Hans, was less fortunate: interned in Dachau concentration camp for four years for having married a Jewish woman.) Nevertheless, promises of resurrecting lost and pristine pasts appealed to high-ranking Nazis like Hermann Göring, who became a close friend of Lutz’s, and supported his de-extinction efforts.

Lutz Heck, on the far left, with Hermann Göring, on the far right, pondering a map of the Białowieża Forest, populated with game animals. The horn on the table may be from one of Heck’s own cattle.

Despite Germany’s zoos — where the Hecks conducted their breeding work — being heavily bombed during World War II, they nonetheless announced their success to the world after the conflict’s end. Hans proclaimed he had resurrected aurochs alongside tarpans — the wild ancestors of domesticated horses. By 1949, English-language newspapers were reporting that, “Dr. Heck has succeeded in bring back to life the aurochs,” while Spanish ones relayed that Hans himself had claimed “it will not be long” before the world witnesses “the appearance of dinosaurs, mastodon, and other antediluvian animals of which only fossil skeletons are known today.”

Of course, the Heck brothers’ selectively-bred specimens were not in fact “resurrected” aurochs or tarpans. Modern biologists consider them just new strains of horse and cattle. Since then, the development of genetic engineering and cloning has led to far more sophisticated attempts, toward the end of the previous century, to bring back charismatic animals like the Tasmanian tiger and the Spanish bucardo. All have, so far, experienced only degrees of success; never the reintroduction of a lost species into the wild.

Report on Heck’s ‘aurochs’ and ‘tarpans’, from The Illustrated London News, 1949.

Debate still rages as to whether de-extinction is even possible in theory. Many insist that any attempt will only produce, at very best, an ersatz replica of lost ways of life. As Britt Wray, who has written extensively on the topic, has explained: “it is difficult to conceive of a situation in which an exact genetic and behavioural replica of a vanished species could ever reappear.” We can create “resemblance,” but the result is ultimately a “new organism.” 

A species, after all, is an intricate interplay between genome and environment, so replicating genes is not enough, and resurrecting an entire food chain or ecosystem, from top to bottom, seems unworkable. That said, when we look at how far we’ve come —  in our knowledge and mastery of the world — in the few brief centuries since Robert Plot misidentified a Megalosaurus fossil for a giant’s thighbone, perhaps we should never say never. For now, however, extinction is — and will likely remain — forever.

This article The strange history of de-extinction began long before the science is featured on Big Think.

On April 17, news burst upon the world — thanks to observations from the James Webb space telescope — that a planet 124 light-years away might contain telltale chemical traces of life. The planet, named K2-18b, appears to house dimethyl sulphide or dimethyl disulphide. These are both gases which, at least on Earth, are produced only by living things.

Whether this should make us excited about the prospect of distant lifeforms — basking on K2-18b in the ruby light of its red dwarf star — is a matter of debate. The evidence is shaky. What’s more, history shows we have a tendency for wishful thinking in this department. It’s best to be cautious.

Yet it is undeniable that momentum is building in the field of astrobiology, which studies life throughout the Universe and the ways we might detect it. Within decades, NASA plans to launch an ambitious new space telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, in hopes of answering questions about whether life flourishes elsewhere.

But the very fact that we are surprised and excited about tentative sightings of organic gases on a planet 124 light-years away is a massive departure from what people thought only a few generations ago. That we now think of “life elsewhere” as an open question — one requiring caution — is a dramatic shift away from what’s been the default assumption for many centuries now.

Ever since people, roughly four centuries ago, began accepting that there are other solar systems besides ours, they immediately assumed that their planets simply must be occupied. Historically, scientists have tended to presume our cosmos is not only full of life but, quite literally, teeming with it. 

Why? Because they thought that if this wasn’t the case, then our Universe would contain a lot of wasted space. The following is the story of how, historically speaking, humans have tended to assume that every single surface in the cosmos — including suns — must house reasoning animals, going about their lives in much the same way we go about ours. 

Ultimately, it proves how far we’ve come, in our generations-long inquiry into the Universe, to even pose the matter of “life elsewhere” as a question — one whose terms need careful defining and refining. In particular, we’ve come a long way from the early speculators who gleefully conducted cosmic population censuses, outputting eye-watering numbers by assuming each and every solid object in the cosmos is bursting with life.

A crowded Universe

In the early 1500s, the Polish polymath Nicolaus Copernicus initiated the string of discoveries that eventually snowballed into our contemporary understanding of Earth’s place: as but one planet among uncountably many, within an unfathomably large Universe.

But, only decades beforehand, some voices were already conjecturing in this direction. In 1440, the German theologian Nicolaus Cusanus argued that there must be countless other stars and planets. All of them, he thought, must be inhabited. He even argued that suns themselves must be peopled. “By solar beings,” Cusanus envisioned, “bright and enlightened intellectual denizens”.

Cusanus wasn’t alone. The Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was soon making similar claims. In 1584, he reasoned that just as we would deem it “ill” if our own planet were not full of life, “it would be no less ill if the whole of space were not filled.”

It took centuries of inquiry for humans to fully realize that the things we find valuable are not the same as the things that are independently real. It’s understandable: We are all victims of wishful thinking. But back then, it was extremely common to assume that everything that exists must exist for a purpose. Accordingly, it seemed a gratuitous waste for outer space not to be chock-full of living, sensing beings. As Bruno put it, we wouldn’t like the “nonexistence” of our living world, so why extend the ignominy of inexistence to our living neighbours?

Bruno got in trouble for his views — he was burned at the stake — but across the ensuing century, similar beliefs spread, became mainstream, and eventually became unanimous. Even John Milton nods to other populated worlds in 1667’s Paradise Lost. (Satan passes by some of them on an interstellar jaunt, “but who dwelt happy there / He stayd not to enquire.”)

The conviction that every surface in the Universe must be inhabited even led the English astronomer Edmond Halley to reason, in 1692, that the Earth itself must be hollow and filled with nested concentric spheres within, like a titanic Matryoshka doll. Why? Because this would maximize the real estate inside our globe for living, thinking, and appreciating beings.

Another scientist, the French diplomat Benoît de Maillet, theorised in the 1720s that even outer space’s void is teeming with microorganisms. He claimed “seeds” of living creatures circulate throughout space, agglomerating around planetary bodies like “filings of iron” around magnets. This also led him to reason that all planets share the same species.

Three decades later, in 1759, Adam Smith — the founder of modern economics — assured that the cosmos maintains “at all times the greatest possible quantity of happiness” for all “inhabitants of the Universe.” 

It’s convenient that our word “economy” derives from the Ancient Greek for “house,” given that, in Smith’s eyes, our cosmic home is a maximally economical one. No space is wasted. Smith considered it unthinkable that “all the unknown regions of infinite and incomprehensible space may be filled with nothing.” There must be happy consumers, everywhere.

The late 1700s and early 1800s saw the development of the first truly large-scale reflecting telescopes, revealing ever-greater galactic magnitudes and volumes. In 1844, the Scottish geologist Robert Chalmers rhapsodized that nature’s “aim” simply must be “to fill up every vacant piece of space with some sentient being to be a vehicle of enjoyment.” Anything else would seem a cosmic waste, given the magnitudes being discovered.

Cosmic censuses

It was only a matter of time until someone conducted a cosmic census. That is, an attempt to gauge just how much enjoyment our cosmic neighborhood might house. A Gross Domestic Product for the stars, if you will. This fell to the British theologian and astronomer Thomas Dick, who provided the first population estimates for the bustling Universe he believed he was living in.

In 1838, Dick started out modestly. That is, focusing on just our Solar System. Generously, however, he included the surface areas of Saturn’s rings, alongside the known satellites of other planets, assuming all are inhabited. Betraying his conviction that his own nation was the navel of the known Universe, Dick proudly extrapolated from England’s contemporary population density — of “280 inhabitants per square mile” — to output a total circumstellar population of “21,891,974,404,480.” (Rounding numbers wasn’t yet a scientific convention.)

Two years later, Dick used similar reasoning to guestimate the total population for what was then the visible Universe. He put this at an ample “sixty quadrillions,” or, more precisely, “60,573,000,000,000,000,000,000.” Dick, a church minster, was confident in his claim that “there is but one religion throughout the Universe”: conveniently, his own.

As late as the 1880s and 1890s, some scientists were still maintaining that the Sun itself is inhabited. This was in spite of the invention, decades before, of spectroscopy, which enabled the determination of the Sun’s temperature and chemical composition. Still, some writers maintained that “there may be creatures on the Sun which thrive upon incandescent hydrogen.” 

In 1896, a German by the name of Carl Goetze published a book whose title translates as The Sun Is Inhabited. In it, he rejected the idea that the Sun is a superheated, gaseous body, instead insisting it has life on its surface. Naturally, he assumed it would be identical to Earth’s. Goetze pictured mammoths and dinosaurs lumbering in swamps throughout the sun’s clement polar regions. He was also convinced there were “humans” living there.

Goetze’s ideas — outlandish even for the time — didn’t catch on. But even mainstream scientists, like the Anglo-German biochemist William Thierry Preyer, could at the time remain toying with claims that suns themselves may represent “glowing organisms whose breath may perhaps be shining vapor, whose blood may be flowing metal, and whose food may perhaps be meteorites.”

The beginnings of astrobiology

This assumption that life is cosmically omnipresent reached its peak throughout the late 1800s. But it began falling apart throughout the early decades of the 1900s. This was due to the discovery of radioactivity, confirming outer space is full of noxious radiations and emissions, alongside building awareness of the stringency of the conditions required for life to survive.

The influential English cosmologist James Jeans summed it up in a talk given at London’s University College in 1926. Recent breakthroughs in physics, he pronounced, had made clear that “the physical conditions under which life is possible form only a tiny fraction of the range of physical conditions which prevail in the Universe as a whole.”

Nonetheless, old habits die hard. In 1953, the American astronomer Kenneth Heuer published a beautifully illustrated book called Men of Other Worlds. In the final chapter, Heuer, directly inspired by Dick, repeated the task of taking the Solar System’s census. Taking into account the discovery of new moons since Dick’s time, from Io to Triton, Heuer updated the total surface area of the Solar System to “47,230,298,000,” before outputting its total population as “535,092,960,000.”

Heuer’s overall smaller estimate was based on his marginally more sensible idea of extrapolating the total population of the Earth as a whole, rather than just that of England.

Given how far knowledge had come about our neighboring planets by the 1950s, Heuer was probably not being entirely serious. Men of Other Worlds is self-consciously archaic, constantly gesturing back to earlier speculators and dreamers. The foreword advertises it as a work for anyone who likes their “science spiced with fantasy.” Aside from speculating on asteroids populated by “living minerals,” “singing stones,” and “talking rocks,” Heuer also claimed Jupiter’s “Red Spot” might be a supermassive iceberg “floating in an ocean of permanent gases.” There, perhaps, is more fantasy here than science.

Kenneth Heuer’s 1953 update of Dick’s population census for the Solar System (including newly discovered moons).

Nonetheless, the fact that the fantasy remains alluring tells us something important. Historically speaking, it seems clear that people desperately want there to be life elsewhere. That’s why we should be abundantly cautious when it comes to claims we’ve found its signatures, no matter how well-founded they are.

After all, the founding of the modern field of astrobiology — as a serious science — rests in the historic realization that life isn’t simply everywhere there is a surface. First, we might need to specify what types of surfaces might accommodate living matter, while also questioning what life even is in the first place.

We’ve come a long way since Thomas Dick’s cosmic census, conducted just under two centuries ago. However, by looking outward and discovering that the Universe isn’t as bustling as we first assumed, we must now learn to look inward, coming to appreciate just how fragile a foothold Earth might be in the cosmic perspective. This way, we might acknowledge the consequent responsibility we have for our miraculous, wonderful life.

Earlier this year, the British space scientist Margaret Ebunoluwa Aderin-Pocock claimed it is “a human conceit to think we’re alone.” Perhaps it is a conceit, perhaps not, but it’s certainly humbler than assuming every single cosmic surface is thronging with things like us.

This article Aliens, everywhere: Why scientists once assumed every planet was inhabited is featured on Big Think.

It’s not something you think about every day, but we owe our existence to a catastrophic cosmic impact. Some 66 million years ago — 10 times farther back in time than the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees — an unimaginable natural disaster put a permanent end to the dinosaurs. This suddenly opened new, rapid evolutionary possibilities for mammals, ultimately including primates. The rest is history, as the saying goes: If the dinosaurs hadn’t become extinct, Homo sapiens would almost certainly never have walked the earth.

Dinosaurs appeal enormously to the imagination. It is a fascination that is much older than the blockbuster film Jurassic Park: Even as a small boy in the mid-1960s, I read all the library books on dinosaurs I could find and knew their names by heart. The first fossilized remains of these giant reptiles were found at the start of the 19th century, even before Charles Darwin penned his theory of evolution in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species. We now know that dinosaurs first appeared on the scene some 230 million years ago, and from just under 200 million years ago were the dominant life form on Earth. They might still have been so today had the cosmos not put a stop to that.

We know from geological research that dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago, at the threshold of the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods. These time periods are often defined by the fossils found in ancient rock layers, so it is no coincidence that the disappearance of the horned Triceratops and the dreaded Tyrannosaurus rex coincided with such a geological transition. At the same time, countless other life-forms also disappeared, both on land and in the ocean. In total, three-quarters of all biological species on Earth perished. The term “mass extinction” is therefore no exaggeration.

In 1979, at a geological conference, Luis and Walter Alvarez (father and son) came up with a controversial theory: The mass extinction at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (the K–Pg boundary) was likely caused by the impact of a 6- to 10-mile-wide asteroid. The two scientists had discovered an increased concentration of iridium, a metal that is thought to have an extraterrestrial origin, in a thin 66-million-year-old clay layer found in Italy. Together with Frank Asaro and Helen Michel, they published their theory on June 6, 1980, in the leading scientific journal Science.

Iridium is a heavy and rare element. The heat from Earth’s formation caused it to sink — along with iron and nickel — to the core of the molten planet; it is virtually absent in Earth’s crust. Most asteroids never underwent such a process of differentiation, so iridium is much more homogeneously distributed in these small celestial bodies, making its concentration far higher than in Earth’s crust. After a catastrophic impact (where the celestial projectile is completely vaporized and blasted into the atmosphere), a thin layer of asteroidal material, recognizable from this increased iridium abundance, will rain down almost everywhere on Earth’s surface.

Incidentally, the honor of this discovery could have fallen to Dutch geologist Jan Smit of the Free University in Amsterdam. Smit had previously investigated the sudden extinction of foraminifera (microscopic marine organisms) at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary. In the mid-seventies, he discovered increased concentrations of other heavy metals in clay strata from Spain, although his analysis did not include a specific search for iridium. Smit’s article in Nature appeared on May 22, 1980, two weeks before the article by his American colleagues (or competitors). It did not take long before the impact theory reached the popular press and the general public.

It is impossible to put into words exactly what happened on that disastrous day 66 million years ago. A colossal piece of cosmic rock, between 6 and 10 miles in diameter and weighing an unbelievable couple of trillion tons, came hurtling toward Earth at a speed of 12 miles per second. The enormous mass and speed of the projectile meant it had a tremendous amount of kinetic energy: more than a billion times the explosive energy of an atomic bomb (for the number nerds: more than 1 yottajoule). When the asteroid came to a halt on —  or rather, partially in — Earth’s crust, all that energy was converted into heat.

The consequences were apocalyptic. Pulverized and vaporized asteroid material was hurled into the stratosphere, along with 10 times as much molten rock from Earth’s crust. Glowing debris fell back to Earth, spreading far and wide and causing giant forest fires. In no time at all, the finer particles spread all over the planet. For at least 10 years, the Sun was obscured by large amounts of dust in the atmosphere. The average temperature on Earth plummeted at least 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Photosynthesis came to a virtual standstill, food chains were broken, and eventually almost all life on Earth gave up the ghost.

It sounds like a nightmare scenario, which is just what it was. The scientific community in the early eighties was still by no means convinced by the impact story. Did all those animal species really disappear so suddenly from the scene? Could the dinosaurs not have become extinct as a result of “natural” climate changes on Earth? According to many geologists and paleontologists, the volcano theory also had a lot going for it, given that the transition from Cretaceous to Paleogene is characterized by extremely high volcanic activity. Who knows, it could have been the dust and carbon dioxide emitted by volcanoes that eventually killed off the dinosaurs.

That fierce volcanic activity took place mainly on the Indian subcontinent. A small tectonic plate shifted north at a considerable speed of some 8 inches per year and collided with the large Eurasian plate (the “crumple zone” of that collision is today’s Himalayan mountain range). Sixty-six million years ago, India was above the hot spot in Earth’s mantle that now fuels the volcanic activity on the French island of Réunion. But at that time significantly more magma welled up from the planet’s interior: Within the space of a million years, India was buried by as much as 120,000 cubic miles of flood basalt — enough to cover the state of Connecticut with a 20-mile-thick layer. The creation of this volcanic feature, called the Deccan Traps, certainly also had a profound impact on the evolution of life on Earth.

However, some 10 years after the publication by the Alvarezes and their team, as well as that by Smit, nobody could ignore the asteroid impact theory any longer. A 110-mile crater of just the right age was discovered below the coast of what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Actually, that subterranean circular structure had already been discovered in 1978, based on measurements of subtle deviations in the local magnetic field. These measurements had been made by geophysicist Glen Penfield of the Mexican oil company Pemex, but at the time no one connected them to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Thanks in part to the efforts of planetary researcher Alan Hildebrand, the crater finally received the attention it deserved in 1991.

The Chicxulub crater (named after a neighboring Mexican fishing village: the name means something like “devil’s tail”) is not visible from Earth’s surface. It is buried under a half-mile-thick mass of limestone deposited over tens of millions of years. But in satellite measurements, the crater rim is recognizable as a minute disturbance in the relief of the (largely flat) landscape. Moreover, it is marked by several deep sinkholes (so-called cenotes) used by the ancient Maya as a source of drinking water. Precise gravity measurements, both on the surface and from space, also leave no doubt about the presence of the giant impact crater.

Over the years, more and more convincing evidence for the “dinosaur extinction impact” has come to light: shocked quartz crystals, for example, and traces of catastrophic tidal waves, especially in and around the Gulf of Mexico; tiny glass spheres (microtektites) in the thin K–Pg boundary clay layer formed when droplets of liquid rock solidified and fell back to Earth; and even fossil remains of fish that died shortly after the impact from the violence of a mega tsunami, in the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota.

Bore holes in the so-called peak ring of the subsurface crater, conducted since 2016 from a large drilling platform off the coast of Yucatán, also support the theory that the mass extinction of 66 million years ago was the result of the impact. Increased iridium concentrations were found for the first time in the 910-yard drill core, exactly at the expected location. And microfossil measurements have confirmed that the wave of extinction at the K–Pg boundary coincided exactly with the creation of the crater.

But even though the evidence is piling up, some scientists are still not convinced. Geologist Gerta Keller from Princeton University continues to stick stubbornly to the volcano theory. Paleontologists have found indications that the dinosaurs were already in decline before the asteroid impact took place, and the climate reversal caused by the creation of the Deccan Traps would have eventually proved fatal for them. Smit and Keller have for years conducted heated discussions on these theories in the pages of scientific journals.

And maybe it is not a question of either/or — it could also be and/and. Extremely massive earthquakes resulting from the impact, which ripped violently through our planet’s mantle, could have intensified volcanic activity on the Indian Plate. In that case, volcanic activity was the slow death knell, and the asteroid dealt the final blow to the dinosaurs indirectly. It cannot even be ruled out that there were multiple impacts: the oval Shiva crater on the ocean floor off the coast of India, hundreds of miles across, is believed by some to be the scar of a second catastrophic impact during the same period. A 15-mile crater in Ukraine is also about the same age. Either way, Earth was by no means a paradise 66 million years ago.

And what about earlier waves of extinction? Could these also have been caused by cosmic impacts? Paleontologists have identified four other major mass extinctions: at the Ordovician–Silurian boundary (about 445 million years ago), in the Upper Devonian (about 370 million years ago), at the Permian–Triassic boundary (252 million years ago, the worst catastrophe in the history of life on Earth), and at the Triassic–Jurassic boundary (201 million years ago). In none of these cases, however, has conclusive evidence been found for an extraterrestrial cause.

That has not prevented some scientists from speculating abundantly on this. American paleontologists David Raup and Jack Sepkoski once posited that some regularity can be found in the occurrence of mass extinctions, which becomes apparent if you include less catastrophic events. Life on Earth would have had a tough time every 26 million years, the two scientists argued. Perhaps this is due to a periodic disruption of the Oort cloud: the shell of icy cometary nuclei surrounding the Sun at a great distance. Such a disruption (for example, due to the gravity of an as-yet-undiscovered dark companion of the Sun in a very wide, elliptical orbit) may cause a temporary increase in the number of comets colliding with Earth.

Speculation is rife, then, which is not surprising if you realize how little we know for certain about the geological history of our planet and the evolution of life. But the fact is that Earth is in the cosmic firing line, and occasionally suffers a direct hit. However, this is something the planet itself does not lose any sleep over; it can handle the odd collision. Fortunately, the impacts are also not nearly powerful enough to affect the orientation of Earth in space or its orbit around the Sun.

A collision with a 6- to 10-mile-wide asteroid is primarily disastrous for the biosphere — for fragile life on Earth. Dinosaurs, which had ruled the planet for tens of millions of years, did not see their sudden end coming. But we humans are well aware of the danger, and it would be completely irresponsible of us not to properly assess the risks, and not to think about ways to avert such a fate.

This article How scientists unearthed the cosmic catastrophe that paved the way for humanity is featured on Big Think.

Although few of us have ever seen an aura with our own eyes, we all seem to know more or less what it is supposed to look like: a faintly luminescent cloud or haze, a ring of flames, a solar disk, a crown of lightning. These are some of the many ways that artists, healers, clairvoyants, and occult seers at different times and places have visualized physical bodies or body parts as encased within some sort of radiant energy or force.

While not always traveling under the same name, the aura figure has in fact enjoyed a remarkable historical and cross-cultural reach. It has long been available as an artistic device used to mark the presence of deities, saints, emperors, and other specially endowed persons. It has taken shape in anatomical illustrations and diagrams representing the vital forces that are said to constitute our “subtle” physiology. And it has materialized in patterns of light registered on photographs, which are understood to reveal the contours of mysterious energy fields lying hidden in the very fabric of the universe. Folded into its diverse artistic, religious, scientific, therapeutic, and commercial enterprises, the aura figure seems as old as it is ubiquitous. One of its best-known commentators, Walter Benjamin, went so far as to suggest that auras “appear in all things.”

Of course, Benjamin was speaking allegorically, not offering a literal description of the aura. Yet as it happens, our very ability to draw a line between literal and allegorical talk about auras rests on a decisive turn that only occurred in the more recent history of the aura’s long career.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an unprecedented effort was undertaken to investigate the credibility and plausibility of the aura, alongside other phenomena that confounded available naturalist explanations. The outcome of such efforts, roughly stated, was the consolidation of a monopoly opinion among scientific authorities that auras do not really exist in the natural world. Henceforth, their existence could only take the form of cultural constructions, figments of the imagination, pseudoscientific distortions, or technologically induced special effects.

And yet, despite the considerable force of this consensus, efforts to picture auras have only grown, not abated. As I document in some detail in “Picturing Aura,” successive generations of actors have in fact been busy at work adopting and adapting evolving instruments, techniques, platforms, institutions, and markets in their ongoing efforts to capture the aura, penetrate its mysteries, and extend its visible presence.

“General Perspective View of the Human Aura.” Auguste Jean Baptiste Marques (1896). Courtesy of Kurt Leland.

Some readers will rightly want to know, first of all: What exactly is an aura? Let me begin with an illustration. The image above was originally published as the frontispiece to “The Human Aura: A Study,” a late 19th-century treatise penned by Auguste Jean Baptiste Marques, a medical doctor, diplomat, and erstwhile General Secretary of the Aloha (Hawaii) Branch of the Theosophical Society. Here we see the silhouette of an upper torso and head of what is presumably an “ordinary” human body. Around it is placed a series of colored, cloudlike arches, each of which appears to be wider and more translucent than the previous one. According to the text along the bottom of the panel, these arched layers cincturing the silhouetted body figure are assigned names derived from various Buddhist and Hindu Tantric idioms, such as the “kamic sheath,” while the outermost layer, encompassing all the others, is named the “auric egg.”

The author warns the reader that the width of these layers is not proportionally precise; their relative scale has been adjusted in order to fit onto the page. When taken diagrammatically, however, this illustration establishes the contours of a life-form that does not exactly begin or end where we might normally suppose — at the surface of the skin — but rather somehow extends beyond it. This gradually dissipating, ever-more translucent terrain “beyond” the physical body demarcates the realm of the aura.

Theosophists like Marques played a key role in the consolidation of a particular way of conceiving of the aura as a “subtle, invisible essence or fluid that emanates from human and animal bodies and even things,” which has dominated our understanding of this phenomenon down to the present day. Nevertheless, neither the word aura nor this double figure of a body and its radiant extension are Theosophical inventions. Both can be discovered, time and again, within what turn out to be very long lines of transmission through which devotees, healers, clairvoyants, synesthetes, and other gifted seers across history have reported their perceptions of auras and have attempted to describe what they saw.

Long before Theosophists or any other modern writers turned to the topic, these testimonials were recorded, reproduced, pictorialized, and interpreted within long-standing traditions of art, science, medicine, and cosmology that lent stability to the aura figure in its many local settings as well as in its far-reaching traffic. It is therefore not coincidental that the image presents us not only with an illustration of “the aura” but also a series of descriptive terms, emphasizing the impossibility of separating perceptual experiences from the discursive as well as figural frameworks in which they are entangled. Visualizing an aura implies that one is first able to recognize its shape and apply its name.

But why aura, of all names? Some clues are offered by the history of the word itself, which derives from the ancient Greek αὔρα, the term for a gentle breeze, an aroma, a breath, or an exhalation or emanation of some sort. According to Greek mythology, Aura was a fleet-winged nymph, one of the daughters of Boreas, the god of the north wind. Swift yet gentle in her movements, Aura personified the very notion of a subtle apparition. It is not surprising, therefore, that her name could eventually be applied to such things as the aroma of a perfume, the arrival of a humor descending on a living body, or the mysterious circles of light surrounding angels, gods, emperors, and other extraordinary beings.

One prominent use of the word can be found in Western medical discourse, beginning with the second-century CE Greek physician Galen’s description of the onset of epileptic fits that sweep over the body, a reference that is preserved in the contemporary medical term, aura epileptica. In all these cases, the tropes of gentle breezes, aromas, and hazy yet luminous emanations invoke things that somehow stand between the grossly physical and the incorporeally spiritual: a rarefied dimension of reality or a tertium quid that defies the strict Platonic-Cartesian distinctions of body and mind, matter and force, or substance and idea.

When applied to the living body, as Marques does in his own illustration, the word aura seems to designate a nearly imperceptible boundary that extends beyond while also hovering around the physical body. In “The Book of Skin,” Steven Connor offers a more recent definition of the aura as an ethereal exoskeleton: a second skin that, like a shadow, is “conceived not as a separate entity that is capable of existence apart from the body.” At once liminal and permeable, forever forming and re-forming itself, this gentle breeze entangles bodily interiors and exteriors within a unity that cannot be dissected or divided any more than one can cut air with a knife.

The rarefied qualities conjured by the word aura have often invited comparison with other figures and terms that likewise seem to break down the barriers of inner and outer, or of material and immaterial. Sometimes invoked through metaphors of vapor or wind, at other times couched in the language of glowing lights, clouds, diaphanous tissues, or refined particulates (such as stardust), this subtle presence has been assigned many names, among them: pranamayakośa, sūkṣma śarīra, qi, ochêma-pneuma, archeus, lumière astrale, perianto, force vitale, psychotronic vibrations, and bioplasma. In their aggregate, they throw into relief a long-standing preoccupation shared among diverse metaphysical traditions, sciences, and knowledge systems, from Neoplatonism to Tantric Buddhism, from Romantic Naturphilosophie to traditional Chinese medicine.

No less influential a figure than Aristotle attempted to address the problem of body/soul (or body/mind) dualism by proposing the existence of a mediator, the phantasmic pneuma: a thin casing surrounding the soul, composed of the same refined substance as the stars, which the philosopher understood to enable that soul to come into contact with the sensory, material world. Working in this Aristotelian framework, medieval Christian theologians such as Thomas Aquinas expounded at length on all manner of things that seemed possible only by virtue of a subtle intermediation between the physical and the spiritual: from the vitalizing warmth of human breath to expressions of friendship and mutual affection, to the agitation of the emotions provoked by the sight of stunning beauty.

For their part, the Renaissance Hermetic “natural magicians” — Marsilio Ficino, Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno, among others — turned to Neoplatonist philosophy for a language that could account for some such pneumatic, subtly mediating figure, which in their understanding linked physical bodies to a vast cosmic network of invisible forces of attraction and repulsion emanating from the planets and the stars. Comparable accounts of an intermediary range of gradations between matter and spirit, body and soul, or between the terrestrial and the celestial, can also be found in numerous non-Western textual, ritual, and medical traditions, including, for instance, the Hindu doctrine of the “third body” (the sūkṣma śarīra), first mentioned in the Upanishads and later taken up as a key theme in Sāṃkhya and Vedānta philosophy and in the practices of yoga and Tantra.

“A young man holding his hand to his heart, emanating insensible perspiration.” Color stipple engraving by J. Pass, after Ebenezer Sibly (1794). Source: Wellcome Collection.

While each of these accounts of auras and aura-like phenomena can be located in its distinct historical and cultural context, it is hard to resist the temptation to collate them into a more general picture. In recent years, a number of scholars have adopted a cross-cultural comparative framework with the precise intention of establishing continuities among practices, concepts, and objects — including the aura — under the rubrics of “subtle matter” and “the subtle body.” Within this framework, the word subtle designates a family of (at least partially) overlapping orientations and perceptions, experiences, techniques, vocabularies, imaginal resources, and knowledge claims elaborated in diverse historical and cultural contexts. However, this search for a general category, even when adopted strictly as a methodological heuristic, partakes in a much longer and more vexed history.

For more than a century, perceived commonalities among diverse Western and Eastern metaphysical traditions have nourished a vibrant tradition of scholarship on comparative religion, just as they have inspired popular writers to fill the “esoterica” section of retail bookstores and, in more recent times, New Age websites, with all manner of wisdom on the cosmic harmonies that are said to bridge the world’s religions, spiritual practices, and enlightened sciences. The classificatory schemes that many present-day scholars, as well as popular writers, rely upon in their general descriptions of such things as “the subtle body” or “the aura” are in fact patterned directly on the prior work of occultist and esoteric writers — Theosophists foremost among them — from over a century ago.

While as a word, a visual figure, and an idea, the aura seems to have enjoyed a remarkably long history, something distinctive was taking shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One measure of the scale of this shift can be gleaned from the sudden increase in the use of the word in published works in English, French, German, Spanish, and Russian around that time.

According to Google’s Ngram Viewer (a digital tool that charts the frequency of vocabulary appearing in sources printed since 1500), the word aura experienced a dramatic spike between roughly 1890 and 1920 within all these languages. In some cases, such as German and Russian, the word seems to have been almost nonexistent in publications until around 1850, after which its steady growth crests in a veritable explosion of occurrences from the 1890s onward. Here then, roughly speaking, we can mark the birthplace of the modern word aura. One of the most distinctive features of this new usage is a dramatically expanded semantic range: a democratization, so to speak, of a phenomenon formerly reserved for extraordinary bodies and bodily states. In its modern usage, the word aura has been extended across all of creation; to recall once again Marques’s definition cited above, it now references a “subtle, invisible essence or fluid that emanates from human and animal bodies and even things.”

Cover of Science and Invention Magazine, reporting Walter J. Kilner’s invention (May 1921). Over the course of the 1920s and 30s, Kilner’s lenses were invoked as a prospective instrument of aura visualization.

The previous fin de siècle constituted such a decisive moment for this reformulation of the word aura in large part because Theosophists and their fellow travelers were able to take advantage of an unprecedented restructuring of science, technology, religion, and culture during this period. Among them, Theosophist and scholar of esoteric traditions George Robert Stow Mead saw modern science as a tool for uncovering hidden truths about the subtle body. His meditations on the “hitherto undreamed-of possibilities locked up within the bosom of nature” highlight what is in fact a commonplace understanding of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a moment of dizzyingly rapid and profoundly unsettling scientific and technological change, in which established assumptions about matter, energy, and life were openly challenged, to the great interest of journalists, artists, and many other observers.

As registered in diverse arenas of laboratory experiments, popular science magazines and public demonstrations, stage magic and early cinema, trick photography, Spiritualist séances, and new avant-garde art movements, among many other places, the new sciences generated distinctly new ways of making invisible things present and addressing mysterious, hidden dimensions of the cosmos. In this context, esoteric writers such as Marques and Mead were uniquely positioned to redefine the aura and related phenomena as an object of ancient wisdom and also, at the very same time, as a frontier science research topic.

Over the course of the 20th century and up to the present day, these conjunctions of science and occultism provided the framework within which the modern figure of the aura has been defined, visualized, and worked upon. Conceptually, discursively, and even performatively, the purveyors, practitioners, clients, and engaged audiences of the present-day New Age spiritual marketplace rest on the shoulders of their Theosophical forebears such as Marques and Mead. This is not to deny that the instruments, techniques, experts, and visual materials gathered under the rubric of “picturing aura” have sometimes moved onto terrains far removed from the New Age milieu, strictly speaking.

Nevertheless, no account of the practice can be written without taking into account how this earlier history of entanglement of science and occultism shaped the widely distributed sensibilities, modes of reasoning, and techniques of body care for which the visualization of the aura became so indispensable. From the late 19th century to the present day, this confluence of esoteric vocabularies and concepts, new means of technical picture-making, and protocols of scientific observation set the stage upon which the modern history of picturing aura has unfolded.

This article The long history of the human aura is featured on Big Think.

In Dիulɥi 1768, Bendիɥmɥn Frɑŋklin sent ɥ most ɥniuzիuɥl letɥr. Nɋu, Frɑŋklin uɋz ɑn ɑvid trikstɥr ɥnd no streendիɥr tu pɥkiuliɥr missives. Az ɥ tiim, hii sɥbmitɥd ɥ dɥzɥn letɥrz tu hiz brɥђɥr’es nuzpeepɥr ɥndɥr ђɥ gɥiz ɥv ɥ midɥl-eedիd uido, ɥnd hii iivin sent ɥ letɥr tu ђɥ Rɋɥiɥl ɥkɑdɥmi ɥv Brɥsɥlz dիokiŋli rikuestiŋ ђee risɥrtի hɋu tu maak faarts smel betɥr. Uɥt uɋz ɋd ɥbɋut ђis letɥr uɋz nɋt ђɥ kɋntent, bɥt ђɥ rɥitiŋ. Frɑŋklin hɑd pend ђɥ letɥr in hiz vɥrzիɥn ɥv simplɥfɥid speliŋ.

How much of that made sense to you? On a first pass, you probably picked out a few words. Those capital letters may have clued you into the names Franklin and Brussels. You may have discerned content and first by sounding the letters you recognized (“kɋntent” and “fɥrst”). You may even have spied a pattern in those frequent, functional words, such as his (“hiz”) and the (“ђɥ”). But without intense effort, any meaning was hidden behind cryptographic mush.

The passage is written in a phonetic alphabet designed by Benjamin Franklin. The American intellect created the spelling system to — if you can believe it — make English spelling more straightforward and sensible. He eliminated those ever-troublesome C’s, J’s, Q’s, W’s, X’s, and Y’s. He doubled up any letter representing a long vowel sound, and he fashioned new letters to represent digraphs (those individual sounds represented by two successive letters, such as the SH in ship).

Franklin tested his system in a letter to Mary “Polly” Stevenson, his landlady’s daughter. Her response was less than enthusiastic. Using his own phonetic alphabet in her reply, Stevenson gently critiqued the “meni inkɥnviiniɥnsiz” and “difɥkɥltiz” of writing in it. Thus ended the first American attempt to revise English spelling.

Gabe Henry opens his latest book, Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell, with this story because Franklin’s attempt was far from the last. In the 250 years since that indecipherable dispatch, movements to reform and simplify English spelling have cropped up again and again.

When I spoke with Henry about his book, the first question I had to ask him was why he chose this subject. After all, a quick glance through the dictionary, or any book written in English, would suggest these movements, by and large, failed. Why spend years of your life researching the history of efforts that ultimately came to naught — and not, well, naut?

“On first appearance, it’s silly. Aesthetically, visually, simplified spelling is quite silly,” he told me during our conversation. “This idea that people were walking around in revolutionary times with their powdered wigs and spelling laugh ‘L-A-F’ and love ‘L-U-V’ like some GenZ teenager with a smartphone. It was just absurd to me.”

But as we dove deeper into his “biography of futility,” I began to appreciate the movement’s rich and complex history. It is full of sometimes brilliant, often eccentric, yet ultimately well-intentioned people. And though few are aware of this history, it teaches some important lessons about the nature of language, the technologies we’ve created to capture it, and the passion people hold for how they chose to share their voices with others across time.

A short history of wyrd spellings

Anyone who learned to write English in kindergarten, picked up the language later in life, or simply has a passing acquaintance with it through product labels and airport terminal signs can agree to this fact: English spelling makes no damn sense.

How is it that tomb rhymes with groom but not comb? Why would the digraph GH sound like a G in ghost and an F in tough, but be conspicuously silent in high? Speaking of silence, why is the language littered with silent Es at the end of words but then quietly welds P’s, K’s, and G’s to the front of some words seemingly at random?

Such an ungainly orthography must be the fancy of some mad monarch in Britain’s history, right? Nope, said Henry when I asked him. English is the King’s, to be sure. But it also belongs to whole lineages of cardinals, warriors, scribes, typesetters, readers, and cultures that called Great Britain home at one point or another.

The Anglo-Saxons officially brought Old English to the island in the 5th century A.D. While Latin had a foothold in the land long before, courtesy of earlier Roman occupations, it wouldn’t seriously begin influencing English until Anglo-Saxon kings began converting to Christianity in the 600s. The Vikings brought Old Norse with their invasions and subsequent settlements, and the Normans introduced French to the British nobility as a lovely conquering gift after the conquest of 1066.

“Over a thousand-plus years, [the island] exchanged hands and languages and culture. All of that merging turned into what we know as English,” Henry says. For example, today’s English hosts silent letters from Greek (the P in psalm), Old Norse (the K in knife), and a few Latin-French mix-ups (the B in debt). “If all our silent letters came from one place, it might be more consistent for us to teach children. But because it has so many linguistic influences, there’s no consistent rule or pattern you can teach to someone [for] every case and scenario.”

Further complicating matters was the arrival of the printing press. William Caxton introduced the technology to England in 1476, a time when European writing systems were wildly inconsistent. Lacking authoritative reference books, printing houses adopted their own styles and preferences based on things like what made setting the type plates easier or which spellings satisfied their fussy aunts. For instance, people, a French loanword, may be spelled peple, pepill, poeple, or poepul.

At the same time, English was in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift, a change in how English speakers pronounced words (primarily the vowels, but also some consonants). Because the Shift occurred gradually over centuries, it went mostly unnoticed, so printing houses didn’t adjust their styles to match the change, and pronunciations continued to drift further and further from their various spellings.

And that’s the (very short) history of English spelling. It was not shepherded by some grand academy or ruined through the mad ravings of an all-powerful king. Even the fussiest of aunts had little control over it. Instead, it was, as Henry puts it, “the sum total of many accidents over long periods of time.”

National spelling screed

Not that English speakers took all this spelling nonsense lying down. In his book, Henry recounts spelling reform efforts dating as far back as the 15th century. But it wasn’t until the late 18th century that spelling reform really took off. With the publication of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), an authoritative reference existed for how words should — and perhaps more importantly, should not — be spelled. Just as suddenly, there were strong opinions to the contrary.

After Franklin, the next major American figure to pursue reform was Noah Webster, a man whose name is synonymous with the concepts of dictionary and proper spelling. Before that, though, Webster earned his financial success with his “Blue-Backed Speller” (1783), a primer that taught entire generations of American children to read, write, and spell. 

The Speller used traditional British spellings for the time, but as Webster’s patriotism grew in those heady post-Revolution days, he began to view British English as yet another cultural shackle constraining the great American experiment. Spelling reform, he reckoned, would further free the United States from British influence and boost the fledgling nation’s solidarity and sense of identity.

Webster introduced his proposal in “An Essay on a Reformed Mode of Spelling” (1789). He argued for cleaner American spellings so simple that any child or non-native speaker “would learn to spell, without trouble, in a very short time” with orthography that is “very regular.” His amendments included replacing grief for greef, daughter for dawter, and — the one that gifted Henry his title — enough for enuf.

The reaction to Webster’s not-so-modest proposal? “Pure mockery and derision,” Henry says. 

Critics hated the idea and wrote scathing reviews. Unfortunately for Webster, he had risked his reputation and most of his money self-publishing the project. Indebted and a literary laughingstock, he was reduced to “begging his in-laws for loans and local schoolmasters for jobs.” He wouldn’t bounce back until the publication of his seminal dictionary in 1828.

Henry’s book then chronicles 200 more years of attempted spelling reforms. Some came from the fringes, others from the very top of the social ladder. Wherever the efforts happened, two themes tie Henry’s biography of futility together.

The first is social change. Many of the stories Henry tells start with an earnest desire to improve society and the belief that spelling reform was the way forward. These reformers included 19th-century Mormons creating a “Deseret Alphabet” to build a shared identity; abolitionists hoping that a phonetic spelling system would help freed slaves to participate more equally in society; and entrepreneurs and educators who saw simplified spelling as the key to unlocking untapped productivity in workers.

Perhaps the most impressive effort came from Andrew Carnegie. In 1906, the American philanthropist funded the Simplified Spelling Board. The organization boasted, to borrow Henry’s phrase,  a “who’s who of American intelligentsia.” On its board sat William James, Mark Twain, Melvil Dewey, Henry Holt, and the presidents of several prominent universities. President Theodore Roosevelt even supported the plan and issued an executive order that official White House communications be written in reformed spelling.

The result of all this money and influence? The same as the other efforts. Carnegie and Roosevelt fell prey to the second theme threaded through this history: They failed.

“[Roosevelt] brought the movement into the highest offices of the land,” Henry says. “It became a national conversation, even though it was more of a national joke.”

The writing hits the walls

During our conversation, I asked Henry why that was. If everyone agrees English spelling is weird and reformers could at times enjoy the support of incredibly influential people, then why did these efforts continue to fail? His answer is that these movements continued to run into three impenetrable walls.

The first wall is the very thing that initially drew Henry to simplified spelling: It looks silly.

“Simplified spelling always looks like a child wrote it because we associate phonetic spelling with the attempts and trials of [learners] trying to sound things out before they can photographically memorize certain words,” Henry says. “The mockery that met the movement at every turn came about because it was such a childish and silly-looking thing.”

Next comes impractically. Reading fluency is based on our ability to quickly identify words and patterns. Even if a written word doesn’t match its pronunciation perfectly, or barely at all (looking at you colonel), we come to strongly associate the spelling with the sound through a lifetime of repetition. Replacing one spelling for another would be jarring and mentally taxing, as most readers probably felt when trying to parse the opening passage. And at a certain age, even if someone improved through strenuous, prolonged practice, they would always feel like they were translating their native language rather than communicating through it. 

“You’d be perpetually caught in two worlds,” Henry says. “The world of the language that’s second nature to you and the world of the language that people are trying to impose on you. It’s that friction, that tension, that makes it impractical.”

Finally, as ever, stands the wall of tradition. English spelling may not be rational, but it embodies the rich history Henry outlined at the start of our conversation. Spelling physics F-Y-Z-E-E-K-S may be phonetically pure, but it would mask the word’s Greek origins (the PH being an evolution of the Greek letter Phi). Similarly, laugh ending in an F sounds makes no sense, but it helps chart the history of the language’s seismic Teutonic shifts. For many writers and word lovers — the very people any spelling reformer needs to convince — there’s a hand-me-down charm to these marks of distinction.

“Just look at our national spelling bee,” Henry points out. “There’s a whole glorification of complicated words. People pride themselves on mastering the complications and origins of our words. They want to hold onto that.”

Abbr. FTW

Failure may be a theme of Henry’s book, but that’s not to say that spelling reform never experienced success. English has naturally trended toward simpler grammar and constructions over time. And while efforts to revamp English spelling top-to-bottom may have flopped, more modest changes have been quietly collecting for centuries.

According to Henry, the most successful individual reformer is none other than Noah Webster. After his simplified shellacking, Webster focused on compiling his American dictionary. After decades of work, the 70-year-old lexicographer released it to widespread acclaim. Like his Blue-Backed Speller, it became a go-to reference for Americans teaching their children to read and spell.

But Webster also snuck in some of his simplified spellings. He removed the U’s from words like color and honor. He shaved plough down to plow and draught to draft. He dropped the K in musick and rearranged centre to center. To this day, many of these revisions continue to distinguish British and American spellings.

“If Webster was a politician, and he decided to impose these same spellings from the top down, I don’t think it would have worked,” Henry says. “By coincidence and circumstance, he was there at the right time, in the right moment, with the right book.”

Another success story comes from the world of marketing. Not long after Carnegie and Roosevelt’s botched attempt, advertisers began to adopt simplified spellings to distinguish their products on store shelves, making them feel fun and original next to their plainly-spelled competition.

For instance, during the Roaring Twenties, many advertisers began substituting hard C’s at the beginning of product names with a bevy of Ks. The linguist Louise Pound derisively called this trend the “Kraze for K,” yet many of these brands are still available today. In fact, their names have become so ingrained in our culture that they feel neither simplified nor spiffy. Think Kleenex, Kool-Aid, Kit-Kat, Krispy Kreme, and Rice Krispies.

“Previously, [simplified spelling] had been the domain of education reform. Now, it was the domain of advertisers looking to make more money, save time, save ink, [and] save paper,” Henry says. Musicians have also tapped into simplified spellings to promote their coolness by flouting convention (Def Leppard and Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”). 

Then, of course, there’s textspeak. Text messages were originally limited to 160 characters, and it often took multiple taps of a single button on the keypad to reach a desired letter. As Henry recalls, it took users seven button taps to type out a simple “hey.” Like the typesetters of yore, texters adopted habits and preferences to save time, space, and, Henry jokes, their thumbs. Gr8, ppl, brb, nvm, and Ily — the abbreviated style list goes on.

And before anyone says this kind of thing doesn’t count, Henry reminds us that OMG and LOL have enjoyed entries in dictionaries for going on 15 years, with new simplified spellings being introduced all the time. In 2021, Merriam-Webster added dox, which is a simplification of the slang phrase dropping dox, with the dox in that phrase being a simplification of the word documents. (Double simplification!)

The future of spelling 4 U & me?

At the moment, these simplified spellings proliferate mostly in their own spheres of influence: marketing, text messages, Reddit threads, and so on. But will there come a day when such spellings are included in student papers and Atlantic articles, while teachers and editors complain that the “proper” spelling is 2nite and not 2night?

It’s possible, Henry answers. “Shakespeare probably didn’t see the evolution of language in his lifetime because he was in it, and life is so short. But he was spelling in a way that’s incorrect for us now, and we are spelling in a way that might be incorrect in 300 years, at least in some small ways.”

He adds: “What’s preventing us seeing it is just time. If we’re both still around in 300 years, we would see a lot of simplifications of words all around us, like though spelled tho and through spelled through. I think these are the early rumblings of what might happen over the next three centuries.”

The reason to understand this history of simplified spelling isn’t to show us what our language and its written form will evolve into. The point is that it will evolve, and no person or group, no matter how powerful or influential they are, can “change something as ubiquitous as the language on a large scale.” 

Language is instead something we all influence “every day, every time we communicate.” We influence it through our misunderstandings, mispronunciations, and mispellings (or is it misspellings?). We influence it with the technologies we create and how we choose to use them. We influence it when we ignore our parents’ and teachers’ irritation with how we speak and write and do our own thing anyway. And we influence it when we get irritated at our own children for doing their thing. 

“The core of the book is that language is always changing — whether consciously or unconsciously, whether directly or indirectly — and no one should fight it,” Henry says. “Language has to evolve just like culture, just like people. It’s hard to accept because we want to exert control over the things around us, but it’s like letting a child grow up. It’s just the natural course.”

(Though, he adds that he wouldn’t mind if we could all agree to make acquiesce easier to spell. Just sayin’.)

* Author’s Note: If you’re curious, here is the article’s opening paragraph in standard English spelling:

“In July 1768, Benjamin Franklin sent a most unusual letter. Now, Franklin was an avid trickster and no stranger to peculiar missives. As a teen, he submitted a dozen letters to his brother’s newspaper under the guise of a middle-aged widow, and he even sent a letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels jokingly requesting they research how to make farts smell better. What was odd about this letter was not the content, but the writing. Franklin had penned the letter in his version of simplified spelling.”I used an online generator to translate the passage into Franklin’s phonetic alphabet. I initially tried to write it out, but found I lacked Polly Stevenson’s patience for those inconveniences and difficulties.

This article When enough is “enuf”: The strange and futile history of English spelling reform is featured on Big Think.

The last time America went through anything comparable to what we are going through today, it was coming off the Great Depression and World War II and about to head into the post-war economic boom, as represented in the graphic above.

America in the year 1945 and America in 2025 have many parallels that are worth contemplating today. Like today, that America faced a rare epic juncture in the nation’s history and even in world history. The technological and economic forces driving through the era were just as transformative as today’s, and the political stakes around the outcome were just as high. The systems that were about to scale up in the next 25 years for them were dramatically different from the systems that came before — just like the systems that are about to scale up for us.

America has been through this drill before, like exactly 80 years before, but what’s even more remarkable is that we have been through this kind of fundamental reinvention two other times in the history of the country — once around the Revolutionary War in the late 18th century and then again around the Civil War in the middle of the 19th century. The most uncanny thing about this cycle of reinvention is that each one happens almost exactly 80 years after the last.

This essay is going to lay out the remarkable parallels between today’s America and the nation during each of its previous periods of fundamental reinvention. It will compare our pivot year of 2025 to the previous pivot year of 1945 and the end of World-War II, and then to the end of the American Civil War in 1865, exactly 80 years prior. It will then go back another 80 years to 1785, just after the Revolutionary War as the founders were gearing up for the Constitutional Convention.

In each of these periods, Americans found themselves at a juncture. The old systems that had long served them well had been breaking down over the previous 25 years and needed to be superseded. At the same time, they were facing a period of explosive growth — driven by new technologies that required widespread innovation throughout the economy and society — that would last for the next 25 years. The graphic above captures that juncture between the old world dying and the new world struggling to be born in 1945.

At each of these junctures, smack in the middle of the dying world and the new world struggling to be born, political passions run extremely high, and the country polarizes around two political options for its future. The more you understand this pattern of the past, the more you will understand what’s really going on today.

My new series, The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, will go beyond explaining today, and explain what the next 25 years of our coming long boom could bring. The graphic above from the initial overview essay shows what’s happening now and can act as a reference point when looking at the comparable graphics for our past historical eras.

Much of the material to come in this series will be future-focused. I’ll detail our opportunity to harness the world-historic general-purpose technology of artificial intelligence to transform our economy and society in myriad ways. I’ll also explain how other transformative technologies, such as clean energies and bioengineering, could be used to bring fundamental system changes and help solve the most daunting challenges that we now face.

But to help convince you to take these future projections seriously, I’m going to walk you through the three other times America has faced a comparable historic juncture and met the moment with a fundamental reinvention that lasted roughly 25 years and created models that helped point the new way forward for the rest of the world.

The post-World War II boom and the remaking of the international order

If you have any living relatives from the GI Generation, ask them to explain what they know about the last great period of American reinvention, which is captured in the graphic at the top of this piece. (My 95-year-old mother is among the last of that generation, and I am doing just that.) This is not ancient history — this is within living memory of some Americans still with us today.

The GI Generation has been called the Greatest Generation, and that’s because its members, including John F. Kennedy (JFK), not only fought against fascism as young people in World War II, but also, just as importantly, helped build out the new America and new world order in the great boom that followed, with JFK becoming the first of seven US presidents from the generation. They were the players during this crucial juncture. What did they experience?

By the time World War II ended in 1945, the GI Generation and all Americans of that era had already lived through several major developments that have parallels today. They had watched the rapid deterioration and dysfunction of the old economic systems that worked relatively well for previous eras — until they didn’t. At the end of the Roaring Twenties, they saw the great stock market crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression, a period of widespread unemployment and hardship for the vast majority of working people not just in America but throughout the developed world.

By 1945, Americans had lived through a period of ferocious domestic politics with two sides in a titanic struggle that often flirted with violence but stopped short of outright civil war. The more conservative side was marked by the rise of the America First movement and an American version of fascism that increasingly took over the Republican Party through the 1930s. The other, more progressive side was marked by the emergence of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and a new kind of Democratic Party that tried out early experiments in what scaled up into the modern welfare state after WWII. (See the graphic at the top of this section.)

In the pre-war period, Americans watched the rise of the new powers of Japan and a resurgent Germany and endured a period of such ferocious geopolitical struggle that it led to an all-out world war. By 1945, the entire international order needed a wholesale reinvention — and that’s exactly what happened. In just a handful of years, the world saw the creation of the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, NATO, and many other completely new international institutions.

The level of reinvention on the domestic front after the war was just as extraordinary. Americans of that era seized on the new technologies that had emerged before and during the war and dramatically scaled them up. Nuclear fission was only discovered in 1938, but after the war, the nuclear power industry exploded in growth alongside our nuclear bomb arsenals. Many of the technologies developed before the war and refined during it — such as mainframe computers, commercial aviation, and plastics — were poised to take off after its conclusion.

The point of revisiting this 20th century history is to help you see all the parallels to our American moment.

The post-war boom brought an incredible build-out of new public infrastructure in the form of the interstate highway system, suburbs outside of all central cities, and a huge expansion of schools and institutions of higher education to accommodate the Baby Boom.

The economy was deliberately and fundamentally restructured to avoid the mistakes of the old system, which had led to huge wealth inequalities and the financial crash and depression. The rich were taxed 90% on income in the highest tax bracket — that rate had never been contemplated before, but it stayed in place for 20 years. America built its version of a welfare state that protected average workers and citizens, and it led to a big push for the Great Society programs and the expansion of civil rights in the 1960s.

All of this happened in the space of just 25 years after the war, from 1945 to 1970. During this period, similar changes occurred throughout Europe and the West, but by the 1970s, the entire post-World War II boom, what many have called the Golden Age of Capitalism, had started to slow with oil shocks and stagflation.

The point of revisiting this 20th century history is to help you see all the parallels to our American moment. We have our own old 20th century systems that are breaking down and causing more problems than they solve. If you’re on the right, you will rail about the old bureaucratic systems of government. Fair enough. If you’re on the left, you will rail against old carbon energy systems that are causing catastrophic climate change. True too.

We also have our versions of transformative general-purpose technologies. Clean energy in the form of solar cells and electric vehicles are poised to replace carbon energies and the internal combustion engine. We have bioengineering tech that could create materials to supersede plastics. Artificial intelligence, the most transformative technology of all, is ready to reinvent pretty much everything.

We have our version of a ferocious domestic political struggle that is far from settled, too. President Donald Trump and his MAGA Administration have won the most recent battle, but that isn’t the same as winning the war. He is accelerating the dismantling of the old domestic bureaucratic state and the Pax Americana, but he seems to have no real plan for what to build in its place. The story of the next 25 years is just beginning. 

But that will take another essay. Let’s go deeper into American history for now.

The 80-year American reinvention that actually went into Civil War

Go back another 80 years from 1945, and you arrive at 1865 and the end of the Civil War, the most ferocious political battle Americans have ever gone through. By the time we finally settled that one, 750,000 Americans were dead.

This juncture is the best one to drive home the point about why political passions run so high at these historic moments: They mark fundamental system changes, and the stakes are extremely high, particularly for those on the side of the system that has to die.

In the 1850s, America started facing up to the fact that its economy was built on two fundamentally incompatible systems: one based on free labor essential to a growing manufacturing economy in the North, and one based on slave labor essential to the agricultural economy of the South. These two systems had been in tension from the founding of the country, but the contradictions had become unsustainable by the middle of the 19th century.

Freeing the slaves was framed as a human rights issue, but it also was an economic issue that was central to how the political and economic system of the Southern states worked. The political leaders and economic powers of those conservative Southern states were so threatened by the looming system change of dismantling slavery that they banded together in the Confederacy and declared a war of secession.

The war took four years to resolve the slavery issue once and for all, but once settled, America went into an explosion of reinvention that rolled out for the next 25 years. The most dramatic difference came to the South with what we call the Reconstruction, which is another way of saying the Reinvention.

Each of these American reinventions is partly driven by new technologies that have reached the point where they can start to scale.

The Reconstruction started out as an idealistic plan to reinvent the Southern states, primarily through integrating freed slaves into the free market economy and giving them the vote. We added the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution and kept troops stationed throughout the South to enforce myriad changes. We now look back on the Reconstruction more as a failure than a success because white powerbrokers unwound many of the reforms and undermined the voting rights of former slaves for all practical purposes when these troops were pulled out in 1877.

America as a whole after the war went through an unambiguous period of great progress from 1865 to 1890. Although President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated just days after the end of the war, during his time in office, he and the progressive Republican Party that dominated Congress passed laws that helped transform the country in the coming decades.

The Homestead Act, which gave 160 acres of free land to settlers, drove westward expansion and became a cornerstone of that era’s version of the American Dream. The Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act dramatically expanded access to higher education for average Americans and spurred scientific advancement in many industries. Lincoln also signed the law that funded the Transcontinental Railway that eventually reached all the way to San Francisco.

The mention of trains brings up the technological side of all these historic junctures. Each of these American reinventions is partly driven by new technologies that have reached the point where they can start to scale and so more fundamentally transform the country. The discovery and early development of the new tech comes in the 25 years prior to the inflection point, but its major impact comes in the 25 years after we cross it.

America had seen trains before the Civil War, but they were small scale and centered around cities — the entire country had less than 30,000 miles of iron track. By 1890, though, the nation had about 170,000 miles of track connecting the entire continent. Thanks to the revolutionary Bessemer steel process, these tracks could be made of steel, too, which was more durable, safer, and capable of supporting heavier loads. With an ability to move freight and luxury passenger cars anywhere, America was a different nation.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” That’s the opening line of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which some of you can probably recite by heart.

A “score” meant 20 years, or the span of a generation, in the formal language of Lincoln’s time, so “four score and seven years ago” was his way of saying “87 years ago.” Travel 87 years back from 1863, the year Lincoln gave his speech, and you arrive at 1776, the year the Declaration of Independence was signed.

With the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln was saying that America was founded 87 years ago, and now, Americans of his era were being called upon to refound the nation on the principle that all men are created equal — for real this time. He was calling for a reinvention of America two years before the war was won.

So now let’s go back another “four score” years in American history, from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1785, when our founders were gearing up to invent America for the very first time at the Constitutional Convention.

The original American founding and key role in The Enlightenment

Now the story gets a bit more complicated because we need to step further back to take in an even bigger picture.

The United States in 1785 was a dinky nation of barely 4 million people scattered across 13 former British colonies stretching along the long coast of the Atlantic. The best way to understand the America of that time is to think of it as part of a much bigger Western Europe that was going through civilization-scale change in what we now call The Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment lasted from roughly 1680 to 1800, and during it, this expanded version of Western Europe created nothing short of a new civilization based on the invention of at least six new foundational systems that we are still working within today.

I’ll later do a whole essay on this, but for now, think of those core inventions as mechanical engines, carbon energies (starting with mined coal at scale), industrial production, financial capitalism, nation states, and, finally, representative democracy.

In other words, The Enlightenment invented six things with the potential to fundamentally change the world (and that did change the world with time). A couple of them had to do with foundational technologies, a couple laid the foundation for a different kind of economy, and a couple, introduced at the end of the period, laid the groundwork for a new kind of politics and government.

To give credit where credit is due, the nations of Western Europe, particularly Great Britain, invented the first five of these. But the former colonies of the United States can take credit for inventing representative democracy. (France gave it a shot around the same time but ended up devolving into a dictatorship.)

A very different world is now within reach.

The point is that what America invented from 1785 to 1810 was a civilization-scale innovation with ramifications for the entire world. The founding fathers wiped clean the proverbial whiteboard and started sketching out how a nation of free and equal people could create a true democracy — one that captured the will of the majority of people, but also protected the rights of the minority in a pluralistic society and that was built to withstand the return of tyranny. They came up with a plan that they concretized in a constitution, established a way to amend it over time, and then started the grand experiment.

The point of this essay is that America might be at another historic juncture of that magnitude. We in 2025 might be at the point of having to face up to what it would take to fundamentally invent a new kind of civilization.

Why? The shortest answer is the arrival of artificial intelligence, which signals the beginning of an age of intelligent machines. This world-historic development will increasingly allow humans to actually do a wide range of things that humans in all previous eras would only understand as magic.

Beyond AI, there’s a wave of other potentially world-changing 21st-century technologies, including tools that give us the ability to bioengineer all living things. Soon, we may be able to create abundant clean energy with the fusion process powering the stars. A very different world is now within reach.

America may be entering a time of such fundamental invention that we need to go back to the spirit of the founders, clean the proverbial whiteboard, and start sketching out how to invent new economic, societal, and governmental systems that take full advantage of 21st-century technologies and our new knowledge of how the world actually works — and how it can now be made much better.

At the very least, we’re due for America’s standard every-80-year reinvention. Even if it’s “only” as significant as the one the nation underwent after WWII, that level of change might be more than enough for some people.

The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 series of essays, interviews, and gatherings is my attempt to help figure out what we could do in the next 25 years to pull off this next reinvention of America in a way that benefits the vast majority of Americans but also works better for everyone on the planet over the long haul. 

If that sounds overly ambitious, that’s because we’re living through an extraordinary moment in history that calls for thinking way outside the box. If you are interested in a project of that epic scope, then join my Substack network and help me figure this out.

This article America is going through its every-80-year reinvention is featured on Big Think.

Sexual selection may explain the start of art. As [Charles] Darwin put it in The Descent of Man: “The playing passages of bower-birds are tastefully ornamented with gaily-coloured objects; and this shews that they must receive some kind of pleasure from the sight of such things.” The satin and great bowerbirds courting females with bottle tops and chili peppers are of course driven mostly by instinct, says the conventional wisdom, while human beings have culture. 

Hmm. I think both ends of that claim are partly wrong: People are driven more by instinct than we admit, and bowerbirds have more culture than we assume. Bowerbirds are unusually large-brained birds. The Cambridge zoologist John Madden surveyed the behaviors of bowerbirds and concluded that “despite a paucity of data in comparison with primate studies, it could be argued that bowerbirds may be considered to fulfill the same criteria on which we base our use of the term culture when applied to our close relatives, the great apes.” For example, a spotted bowerbird that found itself swept off course by a storm, ending up in satin bowerbird country, learned to collect blue items instead of its usual white, green, and red.

As for whether people have instincts, plenty of experiments show that people have innate tendencies and that the way these work is often through making people more likely to learn some things than others, so culture and instinct are not opposites, but work together. Nature operates via nurture, not versus it. As the anthropologist Joe Henrich has documented, this means, for instance, that when people make mistakes they tend to be in an adaptive direction such as mistaking safe animals for dangerous ones rather than vice versa. Learning is a means of evolving. 

This means it is highly likely that when smaller-brained human ancestors first began decorating their bodies, their homes, their clothes, and their tools, it was likely very much more at the behest of instinct rather than the result of any kind of rational calculation. Bowerbirds might help us understand how that happened.

Take, for example, the Acheulean handaxe. This is the name given to a widespread tool used mainly by Homo erectus, which turns up again and again in the archaeological record, over an immensely wide area from Europe to southern Africa to Asia and over an unbelievably long period from almost 1.8 million years ago to just 300,000. It’s tear-drop-shaped, symmetrical, and sharp-edged. Years ago I spotted that the one that sits on my desk – my wife found it on eBay, but it probably came from North Africa originally — was exactly the same size and shape as the computer mouse I used at that time. This sent a shiver down my spine: two objects designed to fit the human hand but separated by at least half a million years. 

Nobody knows quite what Acheulean handaxes were mainly used for but skinning animals, slicing vegetables, and whittling wood are probably on the list, though throwing them as sharp-edged projectiles has also been suggested. It is not immediately obvious to us today why this design was so well suited to some particular task, let alone why it worked equally well in places as far apart as Africa, Europe, and India.

The far greater problem the handaxe poses is why it never changed much either in space or time. It experienced more than one and a half million years of extreme technological stagnation. Every other technology hominins invented, from the spear thrower to the Swiss army knife has evolved pretty rapidly thanks to innovation. Not the Acheulean handaxe. That it could be so universal and change so little over such a long period — hundreds of thousands of generations — defies cultural explanation. 

If it was a product of culture, it would surely show fairly rapid change and significant geographical variation: That’s what culture does. Yet archaeologists have consistently and universally assumed that the Acheulean technology was indeed purely the product of culture: within-tribe imitation according to a social tradition. They have assumed that because, well, they always assume that about human beings. The possibility that we are looking at a product of instinct is just never even considered. In the words of four scientists arguing for a different explanation: “When nonhuman animals display complex behavior, the default assumption is that it is under genetic control. For complex behavior in humans and other hominins, however, the default position is to invoke culture and not genes.”

It was the anthropologist Rob Foley who first made the suggestion in the 1980s that Acheulean handaxes might be partly the product of genetically inherited habits rather than purely cultural learning. He was largely ignored. Two evolutionary anthropologists, Pete Richerson and Rob Boyd, took up the idea in 2005, describing it as “bewildering” that so little variation would appear in a cultural tradition. Then four anthropologists based in Canada and the Netherlands, led by Raymond Corbey of Leiden University, revisited the debate in 2016, adding several new strands of argument. 

They pointed out that scientists struggle to explain the sudden arrival of fast-changing and cumulative stone technology in the upper Paleolithic after about 300,000 years ago, usually reaching for a “cognitive upgrade or increased population size” as the trigger, neither of which is persuasive. Instead, Corbey argues, if the previous technology was largely instinctive then the arrival of cumulative cultural innovation is more easily explained: It was a switch from expressing an instinct for learning something to a pattern that was very much more dominated by social learning. Corbey points out that evolution is fond of endowing even highly intelligent animals such as bowerbirds with genetically determined behaviors if only because it is a shortcut for the individual to get the behavior down pat. When I contacted Corbey to explore this further, he reminded me that “the relevant database is a gorgeous challenge. It comprises a few million known handaxes and billions of unfound ones, on a conservative estimate.”

Of course, most cultural anthropologists reacted with disdain to this genetic theory, rabbiting on instead about “preferred cultural conservatism” and “the psychological bias for majority imitation that subsequently became a social norm,” which is little more than a restatement of the problem. Corbey responded to his critics by pointing to the “Baldwin effect,” an idea proposed by the American psychologist James Mark Baldwin in 1896. 

Baldwin said that animals which adopted new habits or found themselves in new environments would then find that any genetic mutations which helped them cope with those circumstances would be favored. As those mutations spread, the new habits would become more heritable and instinctive, therefore. So what starts as a fully learned behavior could end up as a partly inherited one. 

This might superficially resemble the inheritance of acquired characteristics, but it would not be. In Baldwin’s words: “It would look as though the acquired traits had sunk into the hereditary substance in a Lamarckian fashion, but the process would really be neo-Darwinian.” 

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck famously proposed a theory of evolution in which offspring inherited traits that were acquired during their [parent’s] lifetime: a body-builder would have muscular children, for example. But the Baldwin effect is subtly different. For example, by taking up the consumption of milk, human beings in a few parts of the world put themselves unwittingly in a good position to promote mutations that allowed the digestion of lactose in adulthood, and sure enough, the genomes of people changed. Culture can therefore drive genetic change. I cannot emphasize enough just how much both most social scientists and most evolutionary biologists struggle to see this point.

In the case of handaxes, the significance of this insight is that if early hominins started knapping stone tools, any mutant human being with a genetic propensity to be good at this skill from the start would thrive, and leave more offspring, so the skill would itself gradually become more heritable. As Corbey puts it: “If phenotypically plastic individuals grow up time and again, over hundreds if not thousands of generations, in a technological niche while manipulating stone, and provided that the cost/benefit ratio is right: Would not selection in the long run favor features of the organism befitting their technological capacities, so crucial for survival?”

This goes so against the grain for cultural anthropologists — and most of the rest of us — who think of human beings evolving away from instincts and towards culture […]. But evolutionary biologists who have looked into the mechanics are agreed that the Baldwin effect is a real phenomenon. So even if Homo erectus’s ancestors did not have a genetic tendency to enjoy making stone tools, their descendants probably did. Even if the first bowerbirds were simply copying successful rivals, their descendants found themselves with highly specific instincts to (learn to) build highly specific bowers. It is no more fanciful to suppose that Homo erectus had an instinct to make handaxes than that a satin bowerbird has an innate instinct to make a highly complex bower to a particular design. 

At the very least the hypothesis should be taken seriously. This does not mean handaxe-making requires no learning; bowerbirds still have to learn how to perfect the building of bowers by watching others and practicing. But it is directed learning, towards an instinctive, adaptive end. I repeat: A lot of learning is like that — nurture reinforcing nature, rather than overcoming it.

This article The surprising evolutionary link between bowerbirds and human art is featured on Big Think.

On February 18, NASA announced the recently discovered asteroid, 2024 YR4, has a 3.1% chance of striking Earth in 2032. We can sleep a little easier, though, because the following day this was revised down to 1.5%. And the odds were then slashed again down to a reassuring 0.004%, though the chances of the asteroid hitting the Moon in 2032 stand at 1.7%, per NASA’s statement on February 24.

However, fears of celestial collisions — and calculations of their likelihood — are far from new. They go back to the very origins of modern science itself. In fact, in many ways, they provided early proof of the vast promise of the scientific method, in an age before it was clear scientists really could predict the future.

The birth of cosmic risk calculations

Back in the early 1700s, science was in its early infancy. The word “scientist” didn’t yet even exist. Scientific inquiry hadn’t yet undeniably proved its power to accurately predict, let alone to reinvent and transform, our world. To many, it instead seemed a trifling pursuit: fiddling with microscopes; little better than alchemy. 

Reflecting this, in 1726’s Gulliver’s Travels, the Irish litterateur Jonathan Swift satirized early scientists as buffoons. In particular, he lampooned them for pompously proclaiming they had predicted the paths of “ninety-three different Comets” with “great Exactness.” Swift depicted them as hapless neurotics: too distracted from daily jobs and joys by abstract theories, too quick to spook themselves with flimsy projections, having become confident the world would be destroyed by a cometary collision “one-and-thirty years hence,” which would reduce Earth “to ashes.” 

Swift was taking aim at the scientists clustered around London’s Royal Society, the first scientific society of its kind, which included Newton among its ranks. In Swift’s crosshairs was Newton’s colleague and friend, Edmond Halley. In 1705, Halley decided to apply Newton’s new-fangled mathematical method of calculus to compute comets’ paths. Having passed close by Earth in 1682, he forecast that the one that now bears his name — Halley’s comet — would return in 1758. That is, precisely “one-and-thirty” years after Swift’s sarcastic attack in 1726’s Gulliver’s Travels.

This was the first prediction of its kind. Back then, this was a bold application of an unproven method. When the comet did return, exactly as predicted, Halley was proven right, and Swift was proven wrong. This was an early triumph: proving science isn’t idle tinkering, nor fearmongering cozenage because it can accurately forecast the future at cosmic scales.

Among themselves, Royal Society members had already made murmurs about the possibility of comets interfering with Earth. Halley himself calculated that had his comet arrived 31 days later, it would have spelled doom. The idea soon spread. Seven years before Halley’s comet returned, the French polymath Pierre Louis Maupertuis was likewise warning a direct collision could decimate our planet “from top to bottom.”

When, in 1770, another comet was observed very close to Earth — which remains, to this day, the closest encounter on record — astronomers felt the need to begin calculating the probability of a deadly collision. Like Newton’s calculus, probability theory was then a method of mathematics in its relative youth, experiencing spurts of innovation and expansions of application.

The Finnish-Swedish mathematician who computed the comet of 1770’s path, Anders Johann Lexell, himself reassuringly stated that “the probability of such an event is almost infinitely small.” Others, like the French philosopher Jean-Baptiste-Claude Delisle de Sales, concurred, writing (more poetically) that in “the calculation” of such probabilities, “terror, by dint of spreading thin, disappears.”

But the first to put actual numbers on the odds was the French astronomer Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande. In a small pamphlet, written in 1773, he considered the possibility of a direct “shock,” before similarly dismissing it as “infinitely” unlikely. Assuming a comet’s path intersects Earth’s orbit at some arbitrary point, he calculated a 1/76,000 chance of a direct collision, given the relative smallness of both objects compared to the size of their orbit.

But Lalande saw a more probable threat: that a comet passes near enough to exert gravitational influence on Earth’s oceans, raising juggernaut tidal waves — several thousand meters tall — sweeping the circumference of the planet with destruction and death. For this, given similar assumptions of intersecting orbits, Lalande saw a 1/8,000 chance of disaster. But to reassure, he nodded to “mortality tables” on Earth. Even though thousands of people, he claimed, die every hour, we do not worry hourly of our own death, because there are so many people.

So too with, in Lalande’s words, “the enormous masses which roll over our heads”: there are fathoms more orbits possible than those directly intersecting our own. Accordingly, Lalande computed the probability of such close encounters is yet lower. Given available knowledge, guesstimating there are 300 roaming rocks in our Solar System, he proposed a 1/64,000 annual chance of a flyby proximate enough to raise deadly tidal waves.

It is interesting that, back then, Lalande thought this risk tolerable: not enough to enter “the moral order of hopes or fears.” But then again, in the 1700s scientists didn’t yet grasp how old the Earth really was or how long it might yet host life. Many still believed Earth’s biography could be bookended by a span of thousands, or tens of thousands, of years.

Lalande’s technique was rudimentary, but it was an important start. It is very likely the first time anyone properly applied probability theory to the question of existential risk or threats of human extinction. Unfortunately, he was misunderstood. Rumors percolated, eventually snowballing into panic in Paris, claiming Lalande had declared that a comet would definitely strike Earth within a fortnight. Remote possibility was mistaken for impending inevitability. Lalande was forced to clarify his position in national newspapers. 

Then, as now, communicating risk had its difficulties. After Lalande’s lead, another French astronomer provided more detailed calculations, arriving at a likelihood of 1/752,730 per year. These calculations impressed Pierre-Simon Laplace, another pioneer of probability theory and one of France’s most prominent scientists, who — reflecting on a direct collision — remarked that “the small probability of this circumstance may, by accumulating during a long succession of ages, become very great.” Luridly, Laplace depicted planet-spanning desecration, imagining civilization collapsing as a result. 

Quoting Laplace, journalists — proving Swift’s sarcastic suspicion had yet to be fully overcome — facetiously quipped that “the probability of such a disaster is daily increasing.” “Here, then, is a very rational end of the world,” they smirked: one prophesied by elliptics and perihelions, not raptures or revelations. Many still dismissed the scientists.

By 1810, the German astronomer Wilhelm Olbers — who theorized comets were the fragments of an exploded planet, once occupying the yawning Mars-Jupiter gap — decided to put a number on Laplace’s “long succession.” Again deploying probability, he output 4,000,000 years between close approaches and 220,000,000 between collisions. Magazines — again facetiously — declared: “fortunately, we have time to prepare.” 

The year after Olbers’s forecast, a new comet appeared in night skies. Olbers predicted it would become extremely bright. He was proven right. It was visible for months, trailing a luminous tail 1,000,000,000 miles long.

In the 1830s, trepidation set in again when it was realized Biela’s comet — set to hurtle by in 1832 — does intersect with Earth’s orbit. Olbers again put probability to work, calculating a very “close approach” — perhaps even encounter — will occur roughly every 2,500 years. When it did pass, all was fine, but John Herschel, Britain’s leading astronomer, remarked it had been a close shave. Had the object arrived days earlier, he claimed, it could have struck us.

Writing a few years afterward, the Russian prince and poet Vladimir Odoevsky penned a short story imagining a future encounter between Biela’s comet and Earth. Notably, he cast it in the year 4338 AD. At the date of writing, this was 2,500 years hence. Clearly, Odoevsky was inspired by Olbers. He depicted a future utopian Earth — replete with imaginative and world-transforming innovations — threatened by incoming impact. 

Having already deployed geoengineering to tame the planet’s weather, humankind is confident it can act together to repel the risk. Odoevsky imagined scientists meticulously modelling the comet’s trajectory and speeds, and governments rallying to launch “projectiles” to deflect the incoming intruder. Unfortunately, Odoevsky never finished writing his story, so we don’t know if he imagined humanity succeeding. Given the triumphant scientific tone of his fragmentary tale, it appears likely he foresaw our species prevailing.

Clearly, by now — that is, 1835 — science had done enough to prove itself in the eyes of the litterateurs. From the steam engine to the development of fizzy drinks, things had come a long way in the century since Jonathon Swift — that is, from a time when authors eyeballed scientific inquiry as a hobbyhorsical punchline, to one where they lauded it as a potential world-saver.

In the decades since, various other panics came and went, as our Solar System’s roaming rocks returned and departed to and from Earth’s skies. But, by the opening of the 1900s, new discoveries and developments, such as the invention of radiometric dating, proved our Earth was, indeed, billions of years old and had likely hosted life — uninterrupted — for that period. This made many scientists confident that large catastrophes hadn’t befallen our planet in the past, and, thus, were also unlikely to occur in the future.

As the geologist Kirtley F. Mather put it in 1940: The “lurid pictures of a sudden catastrophic debacle resulting from collision” with some “comet” are “products of a vivid imagination wholly without foundation in astronomic fact or theory.”

Although appetites for visions of collision and calamity remained healthy beyond, the prospect of cometary catastrophe became derided in the annals of serious science. The prospect became actively derided after 1950, with the publication of Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision. Luridly, Velikovsky conjured and confected various ancient impacts, conscripting them as explanations for world history’s major movements. It became wildly popular, provoking venom from the scientific establishment. With some notable exceptions, collisions were no longer a serious consideration.

The asteroid wake-up call

This quickly changed in the 1980s when evidence began building — before eventually becoming undeniable — that the dinosaurs had been toppled, 65 million years ago, by a planet-quaking impact. Catastrophe, abruptly, was back on the menu.

Then, in 1994, Comet Shoemaker-Levy slammed into Jupiter. This garnered the first direct witness of a collision of bodies within our Solar System. Providing dramatic visuals, the timing couldn’t have been better. Combined with prior discoveries about the dinosaurs’ fate, it provoked people to do something. Having been founded two years previously, NASA’s Spaceguard initiative, and other international efforts, gained momentum and funding. 

Odoevsky’s hope had come true, two millennia earlier than he had dared dream. Shifting from satire in the 1700s to science fiction in the 1800s, using scientific prediction for planetary defense became reality at the end of the 1900s.

Since then, as of April 2024, scientists — using the techniques Newton and Halley pioneered over three centuries ago — have tracked around 37,000 near-Earth objects, including Comet 2024 YR4.  Today’s efforts to survey our skies, scouring the cosmic neighborhood for roaming risks, remain a monument to science’s early and enduring success: as a means to predict the far future and mitigate the deadly risks it contains. 

It is an undeniable triumph. Through the cooperative action and clever calculus of humans, our planet — hurtling through space — has developed something like an immune system. Perhaps, moving forward, we might develop antibodies for the other perils jeopardizing our shared world.

This article Asteroid anxiety: Astronomy’s 300-year quest to predict cosmic collisions is featured on Big Think.

More instances of a dying person’s final utterances — their last words, called “famous” if the speaker is prominent or notable or the words themselves wry or ironic — are inscribed in the public record than any baby’s first words. As a counterbalance, let me suggest a few first words spoken by young humans that deserve to be better known, if not given pedestals in their own right because, in their way, they helped make our world.

A good candidate is the first actual first word from a baby ever recorded. It dates to 1602 when a doctor named Jean Héroard wrote it down — as he wrote down every burp, meal, bowel movement, and outing in the life of his charge, the French dauphin who would grow up to become Louis XIII. According to Héroard’s records, it was eight o’clock in the morning, and a servant was arriving at the palace for work when the baby shouted hé, or “hey.” 

Héroard doesn’t label hé a first word, though. This he reserves for an exchange months earlier when a wet nurse teased the prince: “Well, sire, when I am very old and go with a stick, will you love me more?” Said the baby, “No” — which had to be a mere burp or babble given that the baby was only four months old and too young to know how to mean.

If 1602 seems relatively late for someone to record a baby’s first word, given that human babies have been producing them for hundreds of thousands of years, I agree. It’s possible that a first word was mentioned in Arabic, Chinese, Persian, Tamil, or even Sanskrit, written on an object or surface that’s been destroyed or forgotten. I’d love to find it.

I do know that expecting a baby’s first word isn’t universal. Neither is making any hoopla about it when it happens because any sustained attention to infants beyond what keeps them alive isn’t intrinsic to parenting. In many societies, other milestones, such as patience, reciting kinship lineages, or even a laugh, take precedence over linguistic achievements. For most of human history, parents, and particularly mothers, had more important things to do than surveil their babies for linguistic powers. Thus, it’s not surprising that the first recorded word I found came from a royal court.

Another famous first word is an ancient one, bekos, which I hesitate to give any attention to because it’s not an actual first word. However, it does show that ancient people were cognizant of infants’ linguistic threshold, and they certainly recognized that young children could talk. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetichus I, who lived from 664 to 610 BC, wanted to determine how far back in time his people stretched. He instructed two children to be raised in isolation, kept safe but never spoken to.

“He wished to hear from those children, as soon as they were done with meaningless noises,” Herodotus wrote in The Histories hundreds of years later, “which language they would speak first.” 

The Pharaoh figured this would be the original, “natural” language of humanity. As the story goes, after two years, the children reached out to their guardian, a goatherd, and said “Bekos.” Psammetichus interpreted this expression as the Phrygian word for “bread” and concluded that those people, not the Egyptians, had the older pedigree. Bekos itself is not as remarkable as its role in a 2700-year-old anecdote that’s been used to describe ancient attitudes toward children, the linguistic preoccupations of the Greeks, and the ethics of language experiments involving children.

Among actual first words, another famous one is tem, a baby version of the French salutation tiens, which was spoken by Geneviève Taine, a young French girl, and recorded by her father, the French intellectual Hippolyte Taine. In an essay about her language development published in 1877, “On the Acquisition of Language by Infants and the Human Species,” he unpacked tem, a “remarkable” word, with immense paternal pride. 

It “now signifies for her give, take, look,” the father wrote, “in fact she says it very decidedly several times together in an urgent fashion, sometimes that she may have some new object that she sees, sometimes to get us to take it, sometimes to draw attention to herself. All these meanings are mixed up in the word tem.” I can sense Taine’s delight at how the word represented an “outbreak of volition” from his daughter. As a father, I shared his sadness when Geneviève stopped saying it. “This is no doubt because we did not choose to learn it, for it did not correspond to any one of our ideas … we did not use it with her and therefore she left off using it herself.” 

Not unreasonably, Taine thought his daughter was recapitulating the language of the distant past, saying that such a word, baggy with meaning and spoken with force, as primitive humans must have done. This notion — that children represented earlier stages of cultural evolution — was already prominent in biology. Taine just extended it to language from embryology, which makes tem the first first word to be used in an evolutionary argument, peering into the distant human past. 

Tem is also famous for what it prompted: When Taine’s article was translated into English, Charles Darwin published contents of a diary he’d kept in 1839 of his son William’s development, which contains another famous first word, mum (meaning “food”). “And now instead of beginning to cry when he was hungry,” Darwin wrote, “he used this word in a demonstrative manner or as a verb, implying ‘give me food.’” 

Darwin’s article appeared in German, Russian, and English at the same time, creating a transatlantic fad of child diary-keeping among natural historians — most of whom were men suddenly visiting their home nurseries, writing down observations, and publishing the diaries. 

“The importance of Darwin’s paper was not so much in its content but in the fact that in one swoop it made the study of child development a respectable branch of human biology,” writes Willem Levelt in A History of Psycholinguistics. The scientific interest in child development that Darwin’s article sparked led to new sciences of development, new types of parenting expertise, and from there the obsessive parenting cultures and consumer markets all targeting a baby’s unique potential — and its family’s economic fears and dreams.

Most of those diaries revealed first words that were unextraordinary as words. But let’s be honest: The words your child or children produce are the most famous ones simply because it’s them. Linguists who track such things say that in English, the most frequent first ten words are mommy, daddy, ball, bye, hi, no, dog, baby, woof-woof, and banana — though your child’s first words may vary. 

In fact you, as the parent, get to decide what’s “first.” One certainly may get more pleasure out of debating the meaning of this or that babbled utterance than telling the story of the One True First Word.

This article In praise of history’s famous first words is featured on Big Think.

Encephalization — the increase in brain size relative to the body — is a key feature in human evolution, but exactly how this process occurred is still unclear. Looking at studies comparing the cranial capacity of early modern humans to other hominin species, some researchers have concluded that brain size grew gradually over time. Others have argued that the human brain grew in spurts separated by long periods. 

To complicate matters, there is confusion over how evolutionary processes, such as the branching of lineages and the splitting of an ancestral species into two distinct species, contributed to the diversification of brain size seen in early humans and other hominins.  

Now, new research provides fresh insights into the patterns of brain expansion within and between the hominins. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals that brain size increased within lineages comprising a single species, with the fastest expansion happening in the most recent human ancestors.

Brain expansion

Evolutionary anthropologist Thomas Püschel and his team at the University of Oxford studied fossils from early human ancestors (hominins) dating back 7 million years, creating the most complete dataset on brain evolution so far. Since fossils are incomplete, they used advanced computer models to estimate missing details.

Their analysis showed that while larger-bodied species often had bigger brains, brain size and body mass didn’t always increase together. Instead, brain size tended to grow gradually within individual species, influenced by a mix of genetic, environmental, and behavioral factors rather than a single cause.

Furthermore, the researchers found that, within individual species, the increases in brain growth accelerated in the more recent lineages.    

“The variation we found suggests different intensities and durations of selective pressures within individual hominin lineages, challenging the idea of a single, uniform driver of brain evolution,” Püschel told Big Think.

“Our findings suggest an accelerating within-species increase in brain size over time, supporting hypotheses that propose a potential co-evolutionary feedback loop involving sociality, culture, technology, and/or language.” 

These processes may have reinforced certain selective pressures, whereby greater cognitive capacities allowed for more complex behaviors, which in turn further selected for larger brains. 

“Genetic mutations may have influenced brain growth potential, but it’s more likely that a combination of genetic, ecological, and behavioral factors interacted to shape encephalization differently across species and time,” Püschel added. 

Püschel and his colleagues are already performing additional analyses of the dataset they have compiled. 

“We’ve begun incorporating environmental and climatic predictors to explore how these factors may have influenced brain evolution,” he says. “Many longstanding hypotheses have linked encephalization to climate, but no clear consensus has been reached. Our approach allows us to test some of these ideas more robustly.” 

In a recent preprint, Püschel and his colleagues published preliminary evidence that colder and more variable temperatures may have driven encephalization within species by promoting adaptations that protected against hypothermia.  

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The father of modern statistics is widely acknowledged to be John Graunt, who was born in London in 1620. According to John Aubrey, who counted him as “my honoured and worthy friend,” Graunt “was bred-up (as the fashion then was) in the Puritan way.” He went into the family haberdashery business, where he showed that he had “an excellent working head.” The business thrived to such an extent that by the age of twenty-one he was running his own shop, specializing in buttons and lace collars. At the same time he was also appointed a freeman of the Drapers’ Company, the guild to which the haberdashers belonged.

As if this were not enough, Graunt also “rose early each morning to study before Shop-time.” The field which he chose to study was not only original but quite outside the scope of his work. In this, Graunt’s life bears a curious resemblance to that of his contemporary, Dutch pioneer Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. But where Van Leeuwenhoek pioneered microscopy, Graunt pioneered statistics. Before starting work each morning he began copying down details from the City of London bills of mortality (i.e. death registers). It has been suggested that his original motive for doing this was professional — that he was researching the extent, age and composition of his living clientele — though this seems unlikely. Either way, Graunt’s interests soon extended far beyond such limits.

The collection of bills of mortality was a comparatively recent phenomenon. As the population of England became increasingly urbanized, it was found necessary to collect details of these citizens for the purposes of tax and military service. The first regular bills of mortality for the City of London were collected in 1603, the year of Queen Elizabeth I’s death, when there was an outbreak of plague. Weekly lists were made of the number of people who had died, with the figures categorized according to various causes of death. Paradoxically, listing these causes of death serves to bring the city vividly to life. Take, for instance, a typical week’s list:

Aged: 13
Drown’d: 8 (…four at St Katherine’s Tower) 

Evil: 3
Feaver: 60
French Pox: 6
Griping in the guts: 134
Impostume [abcess]: 6
Stopping in the stomach: 9
Teeth: 38
Wind: 3
Worms: 2

Other weeks include such causes as ‘Murthered and shot’, ‘Found dead in streets’, ‘kild by several accidents’, ‘Stone & strangury’.

Graunt would publish his Natural and Political Observations on the London Bills of Mortality in 1662, when he was forty-two. It contained his analysis of the Bills of Mortality using ‘shop arithmetic’, which is far more inventive than it sounds. The bills of mortality also included the numbers of all children christened. Graunt took these christening figures, along with the mortality figures, to calculate the rate of mortality of infants before the age of six. First he chose the categories of death that he knew only included babies or very young children — such as ‘Stilborn’, ‘Overlaid and starved at Nurse’, ’Infants’ — and added these together. Then he used his own observations and intuition, and calculated accordingly. For instance, he reckoned that half the deaths from smallpox and measles occurred in children under the age of six; similarly, for one third of any plague deaths. From this he ‘inferred’ that 36 per cent of the overall deaths in London were of children under six. And making use of the number of baptisms he was then able to calculate the rate of infant mortality. Armed with such figures he went on to calculate “that of 100 persons born, 36 die before age 6 and 7 survive to 70.”

Graunt may have used only shop arithmetic, but not for nothing does he emerge as the first statistician. He was also able to estimate the size of an army which could be raised in London “based on the assumption that there are 107 males for each 100 females” (Graunt was the first to note this discrepancy).

More tellingly, Graunt was also well aware of the inaccuracies present in the figures he was dealing with. Few other than Descartes have begun with such healthy skepticism regarding their basic data. For example, Graunt observed that the figures for ‘French pox’ (syphilis) were invariably too low. This was because families wished to be spared the disgrace, so that “onely hated persons, and such, whose very Noses were eaten off, were reported.” On the other hand, those who were recorded as dying of the more respectable ‘old age’ were inevitably exaggerated.

On publication, Graunt’s Observations attracted the attention it deserved. Within a month it had been read by Charles II himself, who recommended that Graunt should be made a Fellow of the Royal Society. There was a little quibbling about letting a mere shopkeeper enter such exalted ranks, but the king would hear nothing of such objections: “If they find any more such Tradesmen, they should be sure to admit them all, without any more ado.”

Alas, Graunt’s fall from grace was equally swift. When the Great Fire of London broke out in 1666, he was accused of having ‘some hand’ in this. At the time he was an officer of a water company, but there is no certain evidence of any negligence on his behalf, nor of his encouraging the fire, despite the widespread incompetence of the firefighters.

The fact is, Graunt had converted to Catholicism – at the very moment when public opinion was turning against ‘Papists’. Furthermore, Graunt’s haberdashery premises were burned to the ground in the fire, leaving him facing bankruptcy. He would die in 1674, aged fifty-three, ‘descended into poverty’. Not even his work would be spared — his ‘friend’, the unscrupulous William Petty, would put it about that he had sponsored Graunt’s work, providing the original ideas which lifted his activities from mere fact-collecting to original statistical analysis.

This article The dark brilliance of John Graunt: “Father of modern statistics” is featured on Big Think.

Hennig Brand was on to something. Or rather, he thought he was.

By the 17th century, alchemists had been trying to make gold for over a thousand years. Though the search had ultimately proved fruitless for his numerous forebears, Brand, a merchant and an alchemist living in Hamburg, Germany, was not discouraged. He now considered a radical, yet surprisingly simple idea: That gold could be found within the human body itself, and the easiest way to harvest it was by distilling down a warm, golden-hued liquid widely and thoughtlessly discarded each and every day.

It was 1669, and the quest to obtain gold from urine had begun.

Brand was not as naive as one might expect. If gold was indeed produced within the human body and excreted in urine, it would be present in very tiny amounts, he reasoned. So, he was going to need a lot of urine, far more than even he could hope to produce in a decade. Brand turned to his wealthy wife Margaretha for funding, who acquiesced (undoubtedly with some reservations). With her money and an unabashed willingness to be “that guy,” he procured more than fifty buckets of urine, roughly equal to 5,500 liters, and retreated to his basement laboratory.

Brand knew what he needed to do first: boil down the urine to remove all of the water. Fumes soon wafted out of the basement windows onto the street and squeezed through cracks and crevices to pervade the ground and upstairs floors of his house.

“Brand must have had some very, very patient neighbors,” University College London chemistry professor Andrea Sella commented in a BBC4 documentary. “I don’t really know what his romantic life was like, but I can’t imagine he was all that popular.”

After the boiling process, Brand was left with a thick paste, which he then heated at an extremely high temperature for several days. He eventually obtained a reddish, glowing liquid, which — amazingly — burst into flames after only momentary contact with air. When he cooled the substance in water, he found that it eventually turned white. Brand definitely didn’t find gold, but what he found was just as, if not more, exciting (though at the time he definitely didn’t realize it). It was a new element, the first to be discovered in hundreds of years. He called it “icy noctiluca,” because even though it burned brighter than anything anybody had ever seen on Earth, it left nearby objects chilly. Today, we call it phosphorus.

“He was looking for riches, but didn’t realize that he’d unearthed a fundamental notion: that elements can be concealed within a hidden world,” British nuclear physicist Jim Al-Khalili remarked of the discovery.

From his immense stock of urine, Brand distilled just 120 grams of phosphorus. He used some of it to try to make gold, but couldn’t make a go of it. Eventually, he sold the secret of how he made it in order to recoup some of the initial costs and probably to appease his wife. That secret eventually made its way to the alchemist Robert Boyle, who not only refined the method of producing phosphorus, but realized that the element could be used to create fire on demand. It was Boyle who first placed phosphorus on the tips of wooden splints – matches!

Most importantly, Boyle chronicled his methods and shared them with his colleagues. He even wrote them down in a book, The Skeptical Chemist, which is today recognized by many scholars as the first true chemistry book. Through his actions, Boyle introduced a revolutionary notion into the secretive, underground world of alchemy, that ideas should be shared openly.

“So phosphorus did have transformational powers after all,” Al-Khalili opined. “It may not have changed lead into gold, but it turned an alchemist into the first modern chemist. Boyle had set the stage for future element hunters. Unlike most alchemists, he shared his methods, and was able to pass on the tools they needed to unlock the mysteries of matter.”

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Friedrich Nietzsche has been described as — and accused of — many things, some of them strikingly contradictory. Nazi ideologues selectively appropriated elements of his philosophy, such as extreme individualism and his allegory of the Übermensch, to suit their agenda. And during the notorious Dreyfus Affair in France, anti-Semites vilified supporters of the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus as “Nietzscheans.”

He was seen by others as a skilled eviscerator of received ideas on science and its allegedly corrupting effect on knowledge, and yet more saw him as a dangerous nihilist. Nietzsche was also thought to have serious misgivings about the sustainability of Christianity in the context of Enlightenment and industrialization, culminating in his provocative declaration, “God is dead,” in his 1882 book, “The Gay Science.” Nevertheless, his reputation survived and recovered from its incorporation into Nazidom, and today his influence, or at least readership, is widespread. Nietzsche has been read and commented on by such diverse characters as Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Movement and former U.S. President Richard Nixon, both of whom found something (and doubtless something different) in his “Beyond Good and Evil.” Nietzsche’s legacy persists, evident in global societies, conferences, videos, and books.

Amid all this hubbub of opinion and research into the man and his ideas, however, hardly anyone has commented on, or sought to explain, another aspect of Nietzsche: his productivity, and how it changed during his career because of his adoption of a new writing technology. Consider this: Nietzsche wrote four books between 1870 and 1881, or almost one every three years, which is pretty good. After 1881, however, he managed to deliver 10 manuscripts to his publisher in the seven years to 1888, whereupon he became too ill to write any longer. That was a book and a half per year, which is really good. By 1881 Nietzsche had become almost blind, an infirmity that would surely have hampered his longhand writing. How did he manage to improve his work rate? What he did was something seemingly out of character, given his views on modernity and science: He bought a typewriter. To be precise, he purchased a top-of-the-line portable Malling-Hansen writing ball, which was sent specially to him from its inventor in Copenhagen.

On the face of it, there’s nothing so remarkable about this. A practiced typist can produce a page of text very much faster than can someone trying to write the same words in longhand. And as he became more used to the modern technology, this was doubtless a factor in Nietzsche’s efficiency with words. But it’s more than efficiency. It’s more than the fact that the efficiency of the Gutenberg press was in its capacity to print page after page of the same words much faster than was humanly possible before its invention. And it’s more than the fact that the efficiency of the Jacquard loom was coded into a program that could replace aspects of the ancient human role in weaving.

These examples represented significant breaks with how we produce through our interaction with technology. Nietzsche became more efficient. But Nietzsche was not an industry. He was a thinker. Typing transformed Nietzsche’s consciousness — it affected how he thought about and expressed the world as he understood it. The literary scholar Walter Ong has said that writing as a technology was not simply an exterior aid but an “interior transformation of consciousness”: It took hold of human consciousness 3,000 years ago and changed it, with the written word representing thought itself. Written words were embedded into the consciousness of the literate to imprint a kind of thought grammar that reflected the world as they read and wrote about it.

Nietzsche’s near industrial-scale productivity and efficiency came with a cost — or was it a benefit? — to how he thought and wrote before. Blindness forced him to stop writing longhand with pen and ink and instead use his fingertips to identify the fixed arrangement of letters on the Malling-Hansen writing ball. Inevitably, the grammar of the mechanical writing ball overrode the schooled grammar of longhand writing and the thought that it produced. The sudden mechanical punctuated strike of the typewriter contrasted starkly with the ruminative flow of the pen; the typewriter encouraged a binary decision, to depress the key or not; whereas the pen with its store of liquid ink, held by surface tension in the nib, or in a small reservoir in the fountain pen, was a more latent and nonmachinic technology. The first is an incipiently digital form of thought expression, the second more innately analog; one the beginning of the forming of what literacy theorist Maryanne Wolf would call the “digital brain,” the other a brain formed in print culture and in the Romantic ambivalence toward science, Enlightenment, and machines.

Once he had mastered the skill of the touch-typist, Nietzsche’s thoughts must have really flown onto the pages of typescript, enabling him to produce a new manuscript regularly in under a year. However, like the saying “for the person with a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail,” Nietzsche’s machine-made words, and therefore his thought, adopted a new form of technological determinism. The typewriter, with its capacities and its limits, its opportunities, and its curtailments, restructured his consciousness and therefore reorganized his philosophical and creative expression. What was able to be thought and written in, say, “The Birth of Tragedy” of 1872, when Nietzsche’s eyesight still held and longhand was his written form, was something no longer possible once his eyes failed him and he got behind the Malling-Hansen. A very different writing technology helped to determine another way of thinking and the expression of these thoughts through writing. The agency and control inherent in wielding a pen, even though this too shaped and formed thoughts for millennia, was transformed when tapped out from a rigidly positioned set of mechanical keys. How was that difference expressed?

The German philosopher of technology Friedrich Kittler has claimed that the analog typewriter in general was useful for certain forms of thought: the brief, the succinct, the forms that thrive on concision and quickness. Kittler looks at the case of Nietzsche and argues that “Nietzsche’s reasons for purchasing a typewriter were very different from those of his colleagues who wrote for entertainment purposes, such as Twain, Lindau, Amytor, Hart, Nansen, and so on. They all counted on increased speed and textual mass production; the half-blind, by contrast, turned from philosophy to literature, from rereading to a pure, blind, and intransitive act of writing.”

What would in the mid-20th century come to be called the “culture industry” would thrive on this modern technology and the productivity it enabled in commercialized culture, such as literature, movies, and television. But it posed an existential problem for philosophy and philosophical thought. The transformation in Nietzsche’s writing due to his écriture automatique was so marked, indeed, that it was even noticed at the time. In 1882, the Berliner Tageblatt commented on the onset of Nietzsche’s “complete blindness” and wrote that “with the help of a typewriter [he] has resumed his writing activities.” However, the article gave notice: “It is widely known that his new work [‘The Gay Science’] stands in marked contrast to his first, significant writings.” For Kittler, the contrast was indeed marked. He notes that the character of Nietzsche’s writing and therefore, his thought processes had, via the mediation of the typewriter, been significantly recast. As Kittler saw it, a celebrated Nietzschean style comprising sustained reflection, long sentences, and complex reasoning had changed “from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.” Nietzsche was an early adopter of the technology. He took it to the heady realms of Continental philosophy and — if we consider his immense influence — began to change it through a creative mind that was reshaped by the keys that had replaced the pen.

Nietzsche may not have appreciated this evaluation, but he did seem to realize in his now-sightless world that something important had occurred in his thinking processes. As Kittler again tells us, in one of the few letters Nietzsche wrote on a typewriter, and anticipating Marshall McLuhan, Nietzsche stated, “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.” He undoubtedly was aware of his increased productivity, but as to the quality and substance of the content, as its creator, he perhaps was not best placed to judge. Kittler, for his part, was clear on what was happening with this technology at the general level of philosophic thought.

Philosophy, or the thinkable and expressible elements of it via mediation, changed fundamentally with the gradually more widespread adoption of “automatic writing” and with it the culture it would produce for most of the 20th century. Kittler noted a turning point for Nietzsche in his “Genealogy of Morals” from 1887. This book, an immensely influential volume on moral concepts, Kittler reads as symptomatic of an evolutionary change in human thought not only in Nietzsche but in Western philosophy itself. Genealogy, in other words, prefaced the technological evolution of machine memory in computing, which was being played out in nascent form in the action of Nietzsche tapping out his philosophy through a fixed array of letter keys. Kittler writes: “In the second essay of ‘Genealogy of Morals,’ knowledge, speech, and virtuous action are no longer inborn attributes of Man. Like the animal that will soon go by a different name, Man derived from forgetfulness and random noise, the background of all media. Which suggests that … during the founding age of mechanized storage technologies, human evolution, too, aims toward the creation of a machine memory.”

The typewriter that changed Nietzsche had a long time yet to cast its spell on humanity. From that time until more recently, what Maryanne Wolf called the “writing brain,” the “mechanical” brain that had been formed out of the effects of the Gutenberg press, would serve to “industrialize” not only the mind but the economies, cultures, and societies that humans would erect. And this mechanical cast of mind would be the basis for the modern analog world in all its forms, especially its 20th-century articulations with its successes and failures.

Robert Hassan is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of several books, including “The Age of Distraction” (Routledge) and “Analog,” from which this article is adapted.

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Each one of us — in a very physical and physiological way — is 13.8 billion years old. This is the age of the Universe. It took our cosmos this long to forge the elements and build up the cumulative complexity that makes us what we are. It took the Universe 13.8 billion years to create creatures capable of realizing they are the result of an agglomeration this lengthy.

This is another way of understanding one of Carl Sagan’s most famous sayings. In 1973, Sagan memorably declared we “are made of star stuff.” By this, he meant that the matter within our bodies is the byproduct of deceased stars. We, quite literally, are ancient stardust.

But people haven’t always appreciated this. Far from it. What’s more, Sagan was far from the first to claim we are forged of “star stuff.” The debate — about whether our bodies are comprised of the same ingredients as suns — has raged for centuries. This is the story of how we figured out we are descended from the chemical cauldrons that are suns, and how this transformed our sense of who and what we are.

A seismic shift in worldview

As far back as the early 1500s, the pioneering Swiss alchemist Paracelsus was confidently stating our bodies “are not derived from the heavenly bodies.” The stars “have nothing to do” with us, he stressed: their material bequeaths no “property” nor “essence” to us. Going even further, Paracelsus declared that, even if there “had never been” any stars, humans would have been born — and would continue being born — without noticing any significant difference. He acknowledged we, of course, need our Sun, for warmth and light. But “beyond that,” the distant stars “are neither part of us nor we of them.”

Paracelsus was not alone in this. The dominant view, tracing back to Aristotle, had long assumed that the Earth and other celestial bodies weren’t just separated by a chasm in space, but by distinctions in all other qualities too. The terrestrial and heavenly realms were thought of as separate spheres of existence — governed by entirely different laws and constituted from different materials.

But in the decades after Paracelsus passed away in 1541, a revolution began, merging these two domains by proving the heavenly and Earthly were governed by the same rules. This was thanks to Galileo, his telescope, and the founding of the modern scientific method. As Francis Bacon summed up in 1612, the “separation supposed betwixt” the celestial and the terrestrial had been proved “a fiction.” The forces shaping things down here, Bacon stressed, are the same as those driving orbits up there.

This was a seismic shift in worldview, the proportions of which are hard for us to appreciate today. Throughout the 1600s, ponderers like René Descartes began announcing it means we can conclude the “matter of the heavens and of the earth is one and the same.” But even though the following century saw the building of ever-bigger telescopes — to better spy on distant stars — there still remained no way of conclusively confirming this fact. For all anyone knew, the heavens could be made of elements completely alien to those found on Earth.

As the 1800s opened, the stars still seemed distant and unfamiliar enough that the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel could dispassionately compare them to a “rash” besmirching the night sky. 

Similarly dismissive, the influential French polymath Auguste Comte asserted in 1835 that our species would never ascertain the elemental ingredients of suns. He boasted that not even the “remotest” posterity will unlock knowledge about the bodily properties of objects beyond our Solar System.

“We must keep carefully apart the idea of the Solar System and that of the Universe,” Comte continued curmudgeonly, “and be always assured that our only true interest is in the former.” For Comte, this proved no tragedy or privation. “If knowledge of the starry heavens is forbidden,” he explained, “it is no real consequence to us.” 

Inventor of words like “sociology” and “altruism,” otherwise impressively prescient, Comte was being overconfident. It’s no understatement to say this was — and remains — one of the worst-ever predictions about the future of human inquiry.

In 1859, just two years after Comte died, the field of spectroscopy was founded by Gustav Robert Kirchoff and Robert Bunsen. Using analysis of light emitted and absorbed by objects to ascertain their chemical constitution, their method eventually proved the stars are made of the same elements we find laced throughout mundane matter on Earth. This was thanks to work conducted by Margaret and William Huggins from their private observatory in South London. They proved Paracelsus wrong, and Comte along with him.

In ensuing decades, scientists began announcing that “the whole visible Universe” — from our “central star” to the outermost “nebulae” — had been “reached by our chemistry, seized by our analysis, and made to furnish the proof that all matter is one.” Ninety-one years before Sagan said the same thing, in August 1882, the French spectroscopist Jules Janssen made the claim: “these stars are made of the same stuff as we.”

People found comfort in this. During a 1918 speech, the Canadian poet and physician Albert D. Watson declared that, thanks to the spectroscope, “loftier qualities of our being” were being revealed — hitherto invisible to us. “We are made of universal and divine ingredients,” Watson explained.

He saw this as salutary: It means we should start acting accordingly, to live up to the station implied by our “ingredients.” If we are made of “universal” elements, so too should our “conduct, ambitions, and aspirations” assume an identical scope. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust may still apply, but at least each passing life is a corpuscle made from the same ash as stars.

Others felt similarly. In 1923, the Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley mused that “man, beast, rock, and star” are all part of the same corporeal family. Astronomy’s “recent” breakthroughs, he explained, have confirmed “the uniformity of all chemical composition.”

“We would ask for no higher immortality,” Shapley concluded, than to be “made of the same undying stuff as the rest of creation.” 

Shapley reiterated the same message, six years later, in an interview making the cover of The New York Times. It was accompanied by a striking illustration, depicting a human figure against a backdrop of spiral galaxies and streaking comets. The title read: “The Star Stuff That Is Man.” In terms of bodily makeup, we seemed siblings to the stars. 

It’s telling Shapley used words like “undying” and “immortality.” It was, at this time, still an open question as to whether the Universe itself was eternal. The evidence had not yet been gathered to decide conclusively either way. Assuming the cosmos was eternal, as most scientists back then did, it was also possible to hold that life itself had also never begun: that living things simply have always existed and forever will, circulating like dust motes in an undying cosmic swirl.

But then, as the century wore on, evidence began accumulating indicating the Universe itself —  and therefore, also, matter as a whole — had a hot beginning. Scientists also began remarking that, if this is true, there must have been a time when life also — cosmically speaking — could not have existed, anywhere. 

Through the 1940s, the Russian polymath George Gamow developed theories explaining how the most abundant and lightest elements — hydrogen and helium — had been forged in the Universe’s fiery, explosive beginning. But our bodies are comprised of heavier, more complicated elements than these:  carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulphur.

It fell to the intransigent English astronomer Fred Hoyle to expose — through the 1940s and 1950s — how the heavier elements of our living world had all been cooked within dying stars: by fusing simpler nuclei into more complicated arrangements, before puffing them out into space via the solar death rattle that is a supernova explosion. 

In this way, the evolutionary ancestry of all matter had been revealed. Hoyle unveiled the processes through which heavier elements are built up from the lightest, by the systole and diastole of dying stars. He also, through this, revealed our umbilical link to some of the most powerful energetic events in the cosmos. 

The children of stars

We aren’t siblings of stars, it turned out. Given we are made from elements originally forged within senile suns, it is truer to say we are their children. This is our genetic link to the Universe: our shared cosmic heritage, the ancient atomic alchemy of the cosmos.

Adding a Shakespearean spin to the motif, the journalist George W. Gray — whilst reflecting on Hoyle’s revelations — mused that “we are such stuff as stars are made of.” “The sense of kinship of life stuff with star stuff is inescapable,” Gray continued, and it touches “physicists” as much as “sentimental laymen.”

From here, the motif became common parlance for popular science. Just a few years prior to Sagan, the German writer Hoimar von Ditfurth repeated the phrase in his 1970 book Children of the Universe. The cosmos, Ditfurth reflected, “used an entire Milky Way, with its hundreds of billions of suns in order to create the commonplace objects that surround us.”

Continuing, Ditfurth marveled: “if certain vast cosmic events had not taken place, nothing in our everyday world would now exist.” This is why, in a very literal sense, each one of us is roughly 13.8 billion years old. 

Each of us isn’t just a product of events in our early childhoods, which continue shaping the way we are today. The same link — of the present to the past — applies just as much to events, interlinked, leading all the way back to the Big Bang. Had they not happened, or happened differently, we wouldn’t be here to ponder today.

Across the ages, one of the eldest assumptions has been that the basic building blocks of our world are sealed away from time. That is, that while the things built from matter, from mountains to monkeys, have ancestries and biographies — in the sense they are born, develop, and decay — atoms themselves don’t suffer such inconveniences. The elements were assumed eternal: not subject to change.

One of the deepest, most surprising, revelations of modern science — uncovered thanks to our probing into things at the largest and smallest scales — has been that matter itself has its biography. That is, the elements have a family history, where what’s simpler sometimes becomes the parent of things more complex. The truth of common descent stretches far beyond biology. When Sagan pronounced that “we are made of star stuff,” he was contributing his bit to this centuries-long effort: representing our cumulative, collective fight to figure out our place in this cosmos and our relationship to it. It turns out this relationship is parental, in the most profound sense. Our very atoms betray the birthmarks of our amniotic link to this aging, explosive Universe.

This article How humanity discovered we’re all made of “star stuff” is featured on Big Think.

I use the internet a lot. I used it to research this article, to get this job, and to check my social media on company time. I use GPS to check the traffic, and I use Google to ask things I’m too old to ask: What’s the best way to cook rice? How do you paint a wall? What does this red light in my car mean?

But for all its connected convenience, the digital age still cannot solve all of my problems. It can’t tell me where I’ve left my car keys or where I saved that document I need for this form. It can’t tell me which of my friends has been lying to me or who stole a comically named street sign from a village nearby. So, what’s a problem-soaked man to do? Who can help me when even ChatGPT can’t?

Well, it’s time I dusted off my necromantic tomes and called in the undead.

Wise old demons

In medieval Europe, there were very few businesses in which the Church didn’t have a share. They brewed beer, printed books, and ran education. So, it’s no surprise that the Church had a lucrative hustle with all things divination.

Divination is the act of trying to predict the future using supernatural forces. It’s in tarot cards, tea-leaf reading, and the runes of the I Ching. In Western Cameroon, they even use burrowing tarantulas to reveal the future. But in medieval Europe, one common form of divination was consulting evil spirits. Clerics would summon demons and use their holy powers to compel the demons to tell the truth. They would ask questions about where their lost property was or whether there was buried treasure nearby. One of the most common requests was for the demon to reveal who a local thief might be.

The demons did not always have the answer. A demon did not have the omniscience of God or even any particularly special supernatural power at all. People would summon demons because they were old and well-traveled. They had been known to live for millennia and had moved across the various planes, temporal and spiritual. In their anguished, demonic roaming, they had earned a bit of wisdom. So, why not sit down with old Pitchfork McDemon to share a bit of advice? As the historian Sophie Page puts it in Divination, Oracles & Omens for a new exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford:

“Some medieval thinkers thought of demons as the first natural scientists, permitted by God to pass the aeons observing and interpreting humans to puzzle out each sin an individual was likely to succumb to. As the demons wandered eternally in the sublunar realm, they noticed things of great interest to the necromancer, such as where treasure was buried, who had stolen objects of value, who was an unfaithful lover, who had been wrongfully imprisoned, and the guilty secrets of princes.”

How to summon responsibly

It’s a risky job to sit down with the Devil’s minions. It’s an essential part of a demon’s job description to be devious, malicious, and prone to bursts of bloody violence. So, if you’re going to try and tame the archfiends of the abyss, you will need some support. Here’s Page’s step-by-step guide on how to go about medieval necromancy in a productive, yet safe, manner.

First, get your tools together. You will need to “own, borrow or commission a book that describes essential ritual formulae and images, and optional instruments to add vivid theatricality such as a wand, a pentagram, a bell, or special clothing.”

Second, choose the time and place. You should “select a space to work, perhaps [your] own bedroom or isolated woods. Timing is also important: [a summoning] usually relates to planetary movements and the goal of the operation. For example, Saturn’s associations with old age, wealth, and violence made the hours or days it ruled over particularly suitable for experiments to identify a thief or find hidden treasure.”

Finally, remember your personal protection equipment. There are a few options here, but it’s always best to grab hold of as many as you can to prevent any accidental possessions or cataclysmic pandemonium. As a minimum, you should brandish a sword with a fiercely loyal dog by your side. You should always summon your demon onto a small lead plate called a lamina so they are tiny and foot-squashable. Even then, you should try to interact with the demon only through a medium like a mirror. Sacrifices can help – any small animal will do. Finally, it’s useful to ward off the corrupted perfidy of a demon with something innocent and pure. So, grab a young child — a son, a daughter, or, as a last resort, some distant cousin perhaps.

Finally, even after all of that, be prepared to treat everything the demon says with a pinch of salt. You are compelling them to speak, but they might yet lie. They also have their limitations. For example, they cannot reveal the crime of anyone who has confessed their sin. They cannot see into holy places or holy hearts.

The end of an era

Happily for sacrificial bats and young cousins all over Europe, necromancy was waning by the end of the 18th century. Society and theology moved away from forcing the demonic to local whims, and nearly three centuries of witch hunts made it riskier than ever. While there was such a thing as church-sanctioned necromancy, it wasn’t good to be seen as the local necromancer. After all, if you spent your day job working with the Devil, might you have been turned?

The history of necromancy is an interesting window into our past more broadly. Not only does it reveal, again, how often and how desperately humans want to know the future. But it also shows us just how interconnected the spiritual and the practical were for the everyday believer. Today, a lot of religious belief exists in the mystical, liminal space between faith and the unknown. We talk in metaphors, symbols, and undefined imagery. Back in medieval Europe, religion was a practical matter. Demons weren’t just agents of the apocalypse, working to bring down the holy order. They were the internet of the pre-digital age.

“Hey, Siri-Demon, do you know where I left my keys?”

This article The “Demon Method”: How necromancy once solved everyone’s problems is featured on Big Think.

Three major tribal instincts evolved at different stages of the Stone Age. They helped our forebears learn the ways of their group and act upon them. In more academic terms, they encode group patterns and then enact these patterns. You can think of these systems as as both a radar that continually maps the social environment and an autopilot that helps you navigate safely through it.

Tribal instincts changed the human experience of group living in several ways. First, they accelerated the acquisition of learned skills. With tribal instincts, I don’t have to rely on effortful trial and error experience, as I can pick up many skills through observation. If I see a peer knocking fruit from a high branch with a stick, my brain encodes this action and when I am next in the situation I feel impelled to try it. If other group members witness me, they can pick up the skill in the same way, and so on and so on, until everyone in the group knows it. As a practice becomes common to a group this way, it takes on meanings and functions beyond its original instrumental value. It’s what “we” do. It contributes to similarity within the in-group and distinctiveness from out-groups, heightening feelings of connection and loyalty. It also powerfully enables collaboration. When I learn a skill through observing group mates, the code is tagged in my head as shared by the group. Because I know that they know it, I can anticipate their moves, understand their intentions, and make complementary contributions. The power of such known knowns has been discovered independently in many different fields — linguists call it “common ground,” game theorists “common knowledge,” cognitive scientists “second-order knowledge,” psychologists “metacognition.”

This transformative tribal wiring — honed by a million years of evolution — put our Stone Age forebears on the path to living in highly cultural and highly collaborative groups. You may have heard the well-worn twentieth-century canard that our forebears knew only small bands of close relatives who foraged together primitively (like a chimpanzee troop) until the “agricultural revolution” of about ten thousand years ago enabled permanent settlements, surplus production, and the time for impractical symbolic activities (such as building the Stonehenge temples). 

The new science of the past decade has upended this narrative, not just its chronology but even its phylogeny. Archaeologists have uncovered “princely burials” and temple buildings that occurred tens of thousands of years before any agriculture. Temples paved the way for farms and settlements, not the other way around. Traces of large-scale hunts from hundreds of thousands of years ago bespeak the start of clan-level organizations. And fully a million years ago, our forebears already foraged with coordination far beyond that of other primates. These discoveries cast the human journey in a new and ennobling light. From almost the very start of humanity, we have been tribal animals.

The social breakthroughs of Homo erectus owe to the first of these psychological systems, the peer instinct. This is an adaptation for copying the learned responses of others, particularly habits shared by multiple others. Once this brain system was in place, early humans began encoding how the others in their band hunt game, gather plants, evade predators, seek mates, and so forth. They also felt impelled to follow these codes, particularly when in the presence of peers who could coordinate in these activities. In survival-relevant tasks like foraging and self-defense, working in concert raises returns and reduces risks. The peer instinct helped early humans reap the rewards of coordinated activity. 

This accumulation of peer codes also made the human experience fundamentally more social. We are less alone than other primates because we carry around our peers in our heads. We are continually reminded by our peer codes of how our group mates typically respond to particular situations. We are kept company — and sometimes feel suffocated — by the steady stream of suggestions from our unconscious about what’s normal to think, normal to do, or normal to say in a situation. Other primates can collaborate in the minimal sense of foraging side by side, sometimes mutually benefiting each other, such as by spooking prey. But it’s only as social as the parallel play of young toddlers. They are not cognitively intertwined and working together from a common plan.

Peer codes pop up automatically in relevant situations, thanks to the brain’s associational engine. We don’t always follow them, but we feel more motivated to do so when our peers are present. If you grew up in the US, you’ve probably encoded the response of smiling for a camera. If so, you don’t have to try to smile; it happens on autopilot, especially if it’s a group photo. Conforming to the cultural code helps you mesh with others, and you will be acceptable and understandable to them. In Russia, there is a different cultural code: It’s normal to wear a serious expression for a portrait (which is why Putin and his henchmen often appear so dour).

The peer instinct makes us far more sensitive to those around us than other primates are. When preschoolers who have learned to solve a puzzle one way see peers who solve it another way, they tend to switch to the method of their peers. Chimps and orangutans put through the same procedure don’t switch; they stick to the method that has worked for them in the past. So much for “monkey see, monkey do.” It’s we humans who are the chief copycats and conformists.

This article The “peer instinct”: The ancient tribal instinct behind human culture is featured on Big Think.

In the realm of human evolution, few theories have captured the public imagination quite like the “Stoned Ape Hypothesis.” Originally proposed by ethnobotanist Terence McKenna in his 1992 book Food of the Gods, this provocative idea has recently resurged in popular discourse, thanks in large part to its discussion on Joe Rogan’s widely followed podcast. Rogan, a big fan of psychedelics, frequently calls it “the greatest theory of all time,” and if you hear the theory’s premise while stoned, you might just agree. According to the big idea, the evolution of our primitive ape ancestors into beings we consider truly “human” resulted from a revolutionary leap in cognition and consciousness brought about by the widespread use of psychedelic substances. 

However, matching the enthusiasm for the theory is the skepticism that opposes it, and critics have branded it “pseudoscience,” successfully demoting it from a legitimate scientific hypothesis to fringe status. Since most academics approve of this characterization, I’ve long felt motivated to “steelman” McKenna’s theory, which I think will prove to be more right than wrong. This motivation has since evolved into an obligation, as I believe that scientific understanding of the evolutionary story, and the story of ourselves, will be stifled if the record isn’t corrected. 

For this reason, I am proposing a “New Stoned Ape Theory” that revises McKenna’s hypothesis in light of decades of scientific advancement, while preserving its core insight that psychedelics catalyzed human evolution in significant ways. To understand McKenna’s theory, and why it wasn’t just a flight of fancy, it’s best to start with the great mystery it tried to solve. 

The evolutionary mystery of the cognitive revolution

Between about 100,000 and 40,000 years ago, there was a period of rapid cognitive development in human evolution known as the “cognitive revolution,” or “Great Leap Forward.” During this period, which followed the transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, there was a relatively sudden appearance of complex behaviors, such as abstract thinking, long-term planning, technological innovation, symbolic language, and artistic expression. It would not be an overstatement to say that this evolutionary transition represents the “birth of humanity.”

How these cognitive advances occurred so quickly has been a subject of debate and investigation in anthropology and evolutionary biology because our standard paradigms have struggled to account for them. After all, genetic change was traditionally understood to be a slow, incremental process, but the increase in brain size and computational power during this period was anything but gradual. 

McKenna’s highly amusing and admittedly speculative answer to the puzzle was that psychedelic substances helped spark the rapid evolution in human cognition, consciousness, and culture. According to his story, our early hominid ancestors would have inevitably encountered psychedelic fungi while foraging for food in locations like the African savanna. The psilocybin in these mushrooms would have provided adaptive advantages to those who consumed them, including enhanced cognition, creativity, and elevated states of consciousness. 

While empirical studies have demonstrated that psychedelics like psilocybin can produce these effects, it is another claim altogether that these changes occurring in a subset of individuals somehow became heritable genetic changes that spread throughout the entire species and drove its evolutionary development. For evolutionary theorists, this sounded too close to Lamarckism, the idea that acquired traits could be passed down to offspring, a theory that fell out of fashion with the emergence of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Just as we don’t expect a naturally thin-framed man who bulks up through bodybuilding and dietary supplements to birth children who automatically inherit the brawny build, it doesn’t make sense to think that psychedelic-induced cognitive changes would be passed down to offspring. And certainly not to a degree that would change the fundamental nature of the entire species.  

McKenna, though, had more than a few answers to these criticisms, which makes the theory difficult to judge as flat-out right or wrong, since some of his explanations could be more or less correct. One idea is that magic mushrooms, after being widely recognized as beneficial, became such a regular part of the diet for some groups that the adaptive effects could have influenced cognition and behavior enough to shape evolutionary change. Advocates of McKenna’s theory cite evolutionary mechanisms that had been overlooked or underappreciated by the neo-Darwinian paradigm known as the Modern Synthesis, such as epigenetic changes, and the Baldwin effect, which allow for Lamarckian-like evolution. However, critics argued that these effects are still likely too subtle to account for the significant evolutionary changes associated with the cognitive revolution.

One promising alternative explanation, which you could say represents the “status quo alternative” to McKenna’s theory, is that social and cultural factors played a unique role, such that increasing social complexity created a natural selection pressure that strongly favored intelligence over physical attributes. While this may solve some of the puzzle, the mystery remains, because this answer leads one to then ask what drove the emergence of society and culture, which would seem to bring us back to progressive developments in cognition and language in individuals. The main question then becomes: Is there more to the puzzle that McKenna’s theory could help explain, or is this “all we need” to account for  the change, satisfying the sacred scientific principle known as Occam’s razor? 

Given the evolutionary story emerging from our most cutting-edge paradigms, I do not believe the skeptic’s response captures the complete “causal picture” that we get if we add McKenna’s general idea to an explanation that involves cultural evolution. 

The “New Stoned Ape Theory” — based on the “entropic brain hypothesis” proposed by psychedelics researcher Robin Carhart-Harris, in conjunction with the modern paradigms of neuroscience and complexity theory — offers a framework for understanding the potential impact of psychedelics on human evolution. 

Unlike its predecessor, this new theory provides specific cognitive, cultural, and evolutionary mechanisms to support its claims — claims that would have been difficult to validate without certain key concepts that have emerged from the study of complex adaptive systems, which offers a lens that unifies our understanding of emergent phenomena, such as organisms, brains, and societies.

To be clear, the New Stoned Ape Theory does not support all the claims of the original theory. For example, it seems unlikely that a substance known to produce strong hallucinogenic effects — cognitive effects that can make many routine tasks challenging — became part of the typical human diet. And if psilocybin actually did for the reasons McKenna cites, why would psychedelics then mostly disappear from our diet, rather than being a regular part of our contemporary lives, the way a drug like caffeine is? While these objections keep me from accepting the original theory in its entirety, the New Stoned Ape Theory preserves the general premise of McKenna’s profound insight. 

The cognitive revolution as a period of phase transitions 

The most central concept in the New Stoned Ape Theory is the mechanism of transformation known as the phase transition — a sudden change in how a system is organized that leads to new functions and properties. We learn about basic phase transitions in school, such as the transformation of water into ice. Complex adaptive systems like brains and societies also undergo phase transitions, which produce a change in the system’s overall functional structure and control architecture. A phase transition may lead to an evolution of the current system, or it could produce an entirely new system — a metasystem that adds a new level of structure to the existing order, such that novel features come into existence. One such “metasystem transition” is the evolutionary leap from humans existing relatively independently to the formation of a cultured society, i.e., a civilization. 

When considering the mystery of “the cognitive revolution” through a complexity theory lens, we understand that the “Great Leap Forward” was a period of phase transitions, both at the level of the individual, with the brain and mind, as well as the collective level: the level of society and civilization. The New Stoned Ape Theory proposes that the general premise of McKenna’s theory may be “more correct than not,” in that psychedelics likely did play a significant causal role in catalyzing a seismic leap in human evolution, and that this kind of process may be cyclical — in particular, recurring and nested — in a way that recursively drives not just evolution, but also emergence. 

According to the New Stoned Ape Theory, psychedelics likely served as a “chemical catalyst” for a special kind of “cognitive-cultural phase transition,” characterized by a shift in perspective at the individual level that propagates through culture (“goes viral”) and restructures the worldview of society, bringing about a transition at the societal level. The theory also proposes that such transitions may have indeed played a causal role in some of the most significant emergences in human development, such as self-awareness, symbolic language, civilization, and religion. 

The New Stoned Ape Theory is based on the Entropic Brain Hypothesis, which itself is rooted in a revolutionary paradigm in neuroscience known as the Bayesian Brain Hypothesis (also known as the Free Energy Principle, the Active Inference Paradigm, or the Predictive Coding framework). To fully grasp the New Stoned Ape Hypothesis, we must first understand the paradigm of the Bayesian brain.

The Bayesian Brain: You are a prediction machine 

The Bayesian Brain theory is really a new evolutionary theory that explains what brains and minds are in a way that gets at the essence of life. According to this idea, life is all about prediction. Essentially, organisms stay alive in an unpredictable and chaotic world by encoding a model of its relevant rules and features. This model serves as a real-time map of the world that we use to anticipate future events well enough to maintain a stable state of existence against the forces of nature that threaten death and entropic decay. 

This means that the “world model” your brain encodes is not just a map, but also an instruction manual for surviving and thriving. For a simple example: When you touch a hot stove for the first time, your brain learns that this action leads to pain, forming a model for what you might expect when touching a stove. This abstract manual encodes a cognitive-behavioral strategy — think of this as a computer program with a predetermined set of mental and bodily responses mapped onto a certain set of known sensory inputs that reflect various environmental states. The brain is described as “Bayesian” in this view because it’s constantly collecting and learning from new evidence in order to minimize the errors of its predictive models. (For example, you eventually learn that the stove is only hot sometimes: when the burner is turned on, or shortly after it’s been switched off.) In this way, the Bayesian brain mirrors the Bayesian statistical method used in AI and the process of science. 

In this evolutionary picture, biological adaptation is a kind of learning, and human learning is a kind of adaptation. Although it is not widely recognized yet, this theory of brains is also highly relevant to understanding society and culture. Why? Because the “beliefs” of our predictive model encompass both low-level things, such as a hot stove, and also higher-level concepts, such as how your tribe is socially organized. Humans who are part of a cultured society have a particularly sophisticated type of world model that we call a “worldview.” A worldview can be structured according to a religion, a political ideology, or a scientific paradigm. For most people, it’s some combination of those things, along with more “instinctive” beliefs that stem from your genetic programming and unique lived experience. A worldview attempts to make sense of all these things; it is an uncertainty reducer, a cognitive dissonance-minimizer, and a sense-making lens. 

Because our worldview represents a belief structure that shapes the logic of the predictive model that is keeping us alive, our belief systems, and their underlying neural networks, can be quite rigid. Somewhat ironically, evolution has made them rigid to a degree because the process has sculpted them to be “optimally” reliable, which means resilient to modification and collapse. As a result, they are often less flexible, and therefore less adaptable, than what is actually optimal or ideal, because evolution can apparently sometimes work against itself — a rather interesting paradox of life. In order to change one’s belief structure in a significant way, a certain amount of chaos or disorder must be injected into the system, which is where the Entropic Brain Hypothesis comes in.

The entropic brain hypothesis

The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, a Bayesian-Brain-based theory, emphasizes that the human brain operates on a spectrum between order and chaos. In our normal operating state, the mind is relatively ordered, because it is structured according to a particular worldview and belief structure. 

The upside of this ordered cognitive structure is that it allows for consistent patterns of thought and behavior that are aligned with our established beliefs and expectations. The downside is that we are all trapped in one particular way of understanding the world, with a perspective that is inherently biased by our particular genes, life experiences, and the cultural beliefs of our “tribe.” So, although worldviews allow us to make predictions that help us navigate reality efficiently, they can also lock us into rigid, sometimes maladaptive, thought patterns and modes of behavior. And because neuroscience as a field has demonstrated a causal relationship between the brain and mind, we know that a rigid belief system corresponds to a relatively fixed pattern of neural connectivity. 

However, psychedelics possess a unique ability to shake things up, and it is this property that necessitates a revisitation of McKenna’s Stoned Ape idea.

Psychedelics as “worldview shifters”

According to the Entropic Brain Hypothesis, psychedelics affect cognition by increasing the entropy (disorder) in brain activity. Think of turning up a knob that adjusts the “chaos level” of the computational system — temporarily disrupting the established patterns of neural connectivity that underlie our normal conscious experience. This increase in neural entropy can be clearly seen in brain imaging studies. For example, fMRI has shown that not only are the usual patterns of brain connectivity disrupted (such that strongly linked areas become less coupled), but also that regions that don’t typically communicate begin to interact. This neural shake-up helps explain the profound alterations in perception, cognition, and existential perspective that characterize psychedelic experiences. While these experiences are temporary, their effects can be long-lasting, and studies have shown that even a single psychedelic experience can lead to persistent changes in perspective and personality.

Once we understand this, it is easy to see how an entropy injection from a drug like psilocybin can temporarily dissolve a belief structure and catalyze a worldview shift. In the same sense that magic mushrooms can produce a visual hallucination (a type of prediction error), the psychedelic can also provide the “neural flexibility” for a more complex and sophisticated perspective to emerge and replace the older one. 

Such a process is described by Carhart-Harris’ REBUS model, an extension of the Entropic Brain Hypothesis that stands for “relaxed beliefs under psychedelics.” As this 2019 paper states, “via their entropic effect on spontaneous cortical activity, psychedelics work to relax the precision of high-level priors or beliefs, thereby liberating bottom-up information flow.” The authors go on to explain how this model can account for a broad range of phenomena associated with the psychedelic experience. 

The two claims of the New Stoned Ape Theory

Now, we’re ready to state the two claims of the New Stoned Ape Theory. The first is that psychedelics act as chemical catalysts for cognitive phase transitions, or sudden changes in cognitive architecture that precipitate radical new insights or shifts in worldview. By increasing neural entropy, psychedelics create a state of heightened plasticity where entrenched beliefs and cognitive patterns become more malleable. Like a kaleidoscope suddenly rearranging its fragments to reveal an entirely new pattern, the mind undergoes a rapid reorganization, coalescing around a novel perspective that fundamentally transforms one’s worldview and sense of self. 

The second claim is that because these paradigm shifts produce insights that are useful or interesting, they don’t remain isolated within individuals. Instead, the new perspective or worldview spreads as a meme, a unit of cultural transmission that propagates through society, reshaping the cognitive systems they inhabit through a subtle but potentially powerful restructuring of neural connectivity patterns. If the psychedelic-inspired idea or worldview spreads sufficiently fast and far, it may become part of the zeitgeist and reshape the collective consciousness through cultural evolution. 

To summarize the theory in a sentence: Psychedelics, as “worldview shifters,” can create a cognitive phase transition whose spread creates a social phase transition — a shift in culture. It’s that simple!

Using the same logic of the Entropic Brain Hypothesis at a higher scale of agent, the social organism, we can presume that social phase transitions are more likely to occur during times of chaos — only not in a neural sense but rather a social context, such as periods of civil unrest and war. This further suggests that psychedelics become cognitive tools for cultural movements that become revolutions — by producing worldview-shaping solutions in times of existential threat. This means that only a very small subset of any given population needs to directly experience chemically induced altered states to spark a social phase transition, because the psychedelic-inspired ideas spread to receptive minds without the need for drugs. 

The psychedelic movement of the 1960s illustrates this phenomenon nicely; despite its relatively brief duration, it had a profound and lasting impact on culture, art, science, and social values. Many of the ideas about spirituality, environmental awareness, and the evils of war that were central to the psychedelic counterculture became mainstream. Even the way of dressing, the atmosphere of music, and the way people spoke changed essentially overnight. A whole new “cultural vibe” was birthed from the psychedelic era that is still very much with us today. 

Overcoming previous criticisms  

In this version of the Stoned Ape Theory, there is no longer the problem of explaining how drug-induced cognitive changes became heritable genetic changes, or how such changes spread across the entire human species. You no longer have: 1) the far-fetched-sounding story of mind-altering substances somehow becoming part of the typical human diet, and then for some reason largely dying out; and 2) you don’t need to rely too heavily on poorly understood evolutionary mechanisms, like epigenetics and the Baldwin effect. While those mechanisms are certainly still part of the evolutionary story, the shift to an explanation that emphasizes the causal role of cultural evolution bypasses much if not all of the earlier criticism.

In the context of our Bayesian Brain paradigm, it is easy to imagine how a new cultural worldview could create a top-down selection pressure that could shift the genetic makeup of an entire population, favoring genomes that encode predictive models that are consistent with a more accurate and adaptive paradigm. It would be no more mysterious than the question of how one bird that learned to open nuts created a viral strategy that then spread across the entire species, a classic example of the “Baldwin effect.” That first innovator saw a solution to a survival problem that was hidden in plain sight, one that everyone could utilize if they just had the right way to look at the world. But as obvious as this solution can look in hindsight, it initially required a “crazy” new way to look at the world, a way that might make the other birds think, “What kind of drug was Robin on when he figured that out?”

A more modest theory might try to attribute less grand human advances to psychedelics in an effort to come across as less extreme, and therefore more plausible to the careful-minded critic. But I think such an approach would be more of an attempt at diplomacy than truth. The drastic developmental advances that drive cognitive and cultural revolutions require a very special type of cognitive state to emerge, known as “criticality,” which is characterized by a “mental tipping point” or “neural avalanche.” The human critical state is triggered uniquely well by psychedelics, and any alternative explanation for a major human phase transition must propose a causal catalyst for such transformations in cognitive and societal structure. 

While it is certainly true that similar critical brain states can also be achieved by meditative practices, deep contemplation, and the occasional fever dream, the historical use of psychedelics across cultures throughout time singles them out as a common worldview-shifting tool. From the ancient Greek Mystery Schools using kykeon (ergot), to the use of peyote by indigenous North American cultures, ayahuasca in Amazonian shamanic practices, iboga in African Bwiti spiritual ceremonies, and soma in ancient Vedic rituals — it is clear that these substances have served as spiritual “psychotechnologies” in cultural practices for eons. Given the historical evidence, I believe psychedelics should at the very least be considered as a causal factor for any major cognitive-cultural shifts that currently lack a sound and complete alternative explanation. If the human brain is forced into an otherwise-rare critical state every time a psychedelic substance is ingested, this would have been a not-too-infrequent experience for our foraging ancestors, and all the ancestral psychonauts who made “trippin’” an intentional revelatory practice.

Psychedelics reveal the nondual nature of reality 

But psychedelic experiences don’t just create an arbitrary change in our worldview and perspective — we also seem to take on a mode of perception that recognizes the interconnected nature of our world, a lens that would have a unique adaptive advantage as a predictive model. This perception of interconnectedness can manifest at various scales: from recognizing that human civilization is one interdependent network (a “superorganism” or “global brain”), to perceiving the interdependence of all living things in the biosphere (the Gaia Hypothesis), or even sensing a special kind of personal relationship to the evolving cosmos as a whole.

Such a holistic perspective corresponds to what we now call a “systems thinking” lens, which is a kind of “meta-perspective” that brings about a whole new level of analysis that would have been a serious upgrade to a more primitive predictive model. Systems thinking frames real-world phenomena as part of larger, interconnected wholes rather than isolated parts. In this mode of meta-reasoning, individuals suddenly become aware of the complex web of relationships and feedback loops that constitute reality, which were previously hidden by a reductionist perspective that viewed the world as a collection of separate entities. This higher level of conscious awareness promotes practical insights and societal solutions that emerge from thinking about the challenges we face as an interconnected species. If psychedelics promote systems thinking, they would routinely inspire more adaptive and effective predictive models that would be favored by evolution, especially during times of division, which scream out for unifying perspectives. 

From brain imaging studies with subjective reporting, we know that psychedelics illuminate nature’s interconnectedness via ego dissolution — a phenomenon affecting consciousness in which the boundaries between self and environment become blurred or disappear entirely. While meditative and contemplative states that could promote paradigm shifts may also dissolve the ego, nothing does it quite like a powerful psychedelic. The resulting meta-perspective that transcends ordinary, ego-bound consciousness is known as “nondual awareness” in Eastern philosophy, and scientists have even developed questionnaire measures to assess changes in nondual awareness after altered states of consciousness. Such a state of perception would be fundamentally “spiritual,” in the sense that it connects us to something larger than ourselves. This lends support to the idea that psychedelics could’ve sparked the birth of religion, and with that first sophisticated strategy for collective survival, the seeds of civilization. 

What does it all mean? 

As we come to the end of our story, it’s time to think about our story and our future. The New Stoned Ape Theory suggests psychedelic-inspired revolutions that advance human and cultural evolution occur in recurring cycles, and that we can spot them by looking for signs of heavier-than-usual psychedelic consumption during periods of social turbulence, which functions as an “entropy-injection” for social systems that mirrors the entropic effects of psychedelics. The Bayesian update of McKenna’s brilliant but half-baked hypothesis emerges as we appear to be entering a new period of psychedelic renaissance amidst a backdrop of civilizational chaos, and perhaps that is not a coincidence. 

With the widespread decriminalization of psilocybin (magic mushrooms), DMT (the psychoactive ingredient in ayahuasca), and marijuana — which has subtle psychedelic properties — the New Stoned Ape Theory would predict that a global psychedelic era is coming, signaling a shift from a postmodern to “metamodern” worldview. This worldview, characterized by a shared meta-perspective and a systems-thinking style awareness, will unify cultures and align their interests while preserving their diversity, since a more complex and computationally powerful organization simultaneously requires greater diversity and greater integration, or human interconnectedness. This worldview may be an adaptive solution that is forced upon us by the threat of World War III, and the need to minimize conflict in order to solve all of our other existential crises, which are enough to keep us busy without us trying to kill each other. And it just might be a psychedelic substance that inspires the precise packaging of that worldview, as it must be designed to have synergy with the emerging psychedelic mindset that will drive its cultural transmission. 

This leads me to a line of speculation that is perhaps more radical than McKenna’s theory, though it is maybe the same bigger picture he had in mind. If the biosphere is truly one interconnected organism, with human civilization forming something like “the brain of Gaia,” could psychedelics be what the global system feeds to its “brain” to make it self-aware? Could the next great leap in evolution be the emergence of a fully integrated “noosphere,” the mind of a planetary system that has “come to life” or “woken up” through a unified planetary-scale human cognition? 

For fear of attracting the same kind of skepticism that has kept McKenna’s theory in the fringe and out of science, I’ll leave this speculation out of the formal New Stoned Ape Hypothesis, but something tells me that the apparent fact that the evolutionary process — a process of both planetary and human progress — has been driven by consciousness-elevating substances, is more than just a fortunate coincidence of our world. In light of our new perspective, it becomes a natural and sensible part of the story of a cosmos that is becoming increasingly conscious — a cosmic whole that, like a developing organism, is waking up. The most psychedelic part of this psychedelic story is that it seems to be doing so through us. 

This article A new spin on the “Stoned Ape Hypothesis” is featured on Big Think.

For the 1939 New York World’s Fair, a ride was advertised for the Amusement Zone whisking visitors on a “rocket trip” to Venus. Upon arriving on our neighboring planet, ridegoers were to be greeted by animatronic dinosaurs. A company with experience building such marvels had been commissioned to make them, having recently secured the first patent for the mechanics behind reanimating prehistoric beasts.

Credit: Popular Science, March, 1937, pp .75-76.

Unfortunately, the interplanetary ride wasn’t finished. The dinosaurs never got made. However, had attendees at the World’s Fair come face-to-face with them during their trip to Venus, the encounter wouldn’t have surprised them one bit.

This is because, a century ago, it was common — for both non-experts and scientists alike — to assume Venus was populated with dinosaurs. As one newspaper reported in 1946, “…if you want a date with [a] Diplodocus, Venus is your destination.”

The following is the unlikely story of how this belief — in Venusian brontosaurs — was toppled, and how this helped lead to awareness of climate change here on Earth.

“Blank slate” worlds

For centuries, astronomers suspected Venus shines so bright in night skies because thick, reflective clouds encompass it. This was confirmed when, during a transit in front of the Sun, our neighbor’s silhouette was observed to be fuzzy, like a mirage, not crisp or clear-cut.

Venus has a thick, swirling atmosphere. Aside from its identical size, this is why it is often called Earth’s twin. Highly reflective, making it dazzle even in dawn skies, these globe-girdling clouds completely obscure the Venusian surface. They prove impenetrable to traditional telescopes.

Unlike Mars, whose atmosphere is paper-thin, Venus’s shrouds enabled it to become a “blank slate” onto which wishful fantasies could be projected. The planet accordingly became a well-worn destination for dreamers and speculators, where many couldn’t help but imagine its veiled surface teeming with life.

Venus served as Earth’s mirror image, often assumed to have mirrored species. Indeed, by the close of the 1800s, everyone accepted that planets have histories. That they are born, age, and die. But there was not yet appreciation they can have very different histories. The assumption, instead, was invariably that the Solar System’s rocky planets simply embody earlier and later versions of one developmental story.

Indeed, at this time, it was thought our Solar System originated from a nebula collapsing in on itself. The planets — in sequence, from the outer rim inward — were thus supposedly born during this gradual compaction. The outer planets were supposed older, and the inner ones younger, with Mercury being the baby of our celestial family.

Credit: C. Flammarion, Astronomie Populaire (Paris, 1881), pp.93

Where Mars, being farther from the sun, was our planet’s senior, Venus became its junior. Where desiccated, decrepit Mars — a universal desert — was presumed to represent a future stage of Earth’s biography, Venus was seen as a juvenile version of Earth.

Note that assuming every world represents earlier and later permutations of one biographic arc doesn’t accommodate sensitivity to the ways a planet’s unfolding history can be made to change course. There wasn’t yet appreciation that certain events might alter the trajectory of a world, forcing its entire future to change track, hinging on actions or accidents in the present. 

It is, of course, also no coincidence this was an era long before widespread receptivity to the suggestion that, here on Earth, human industry might be currently causing something similar to take place.

Nonetheless, presuming Venus to be a younger Earth, it became common during the decades straddling the 1900s to imagine it passing through something resembling our own Mesozoic era. Swampy and sweltering, covered in jungle: hence also, inevitably, the presence of prehistoric reptiles.

Of course, evolutionary theory was, by now, widely accepted. But the suggestion that evolution won’t everywhere lead to similar results was not. It took several more generations for inquirers to fully extrude this further lesson from Darwin’s teaching.

Dinosaurs on Venus

Probably the first to depict Venusian dinosaurs was a Victorian novel called Journey to Venus from 1895. Perfectly encapsulating the era’s attitudes, all the protagonists want is to butcher the lumbering beasts.

Credit: G.W. Pope, Journey to Venus (1895), pp.120-121.

Not long afterward, Venusian dinosaurs slithered their way into more serious scientific theorizing. By 1924, Popular Science Monthly was pronouncing  our neighbor “may be luxuriant with vegetation and dominated by monsters.” Illustrations accompanied this declaration, including one denizen of Venus markedly more dragon than dinosaur, complete with fiery breath.

Credit: Popular Science, November (1924), pp.37.

The American Weekly, five years later, likewise reported our “younger” twin planet is populated by “enormous dragonflies,” “gigantic crawfish,” and “ammonites.” These latter, readers were assured, will eventually “shake off their shells” to evolve into octopuses “of the earthly type.” Once again, history and evolution were assumed to have only one track. But, of course, dinosaurs were here the main attraction, those “undisputed masters” of Venus.

The longing for dinosaurs luxuriating on a tropical Venus continued well into the 1940s. Children’s books repeated the adage every planet represents earlier and later phases of one “life-history,” before reiterating that Venus, being “youthful,” will host beasts “long extinct on Earth.”

Credit: Harry Harper, Flights into the Future (London: Thames Publishing, 1948), pp.76-81.

In 1950, a man sent a letter to New York’s Hayden Planetarium, putting himself forward as an applicant for a rocket trip to Venus. He was desperate to go, he explained, because he yearned to find out whether “there are really dinosaurs living on it.” 

Now that the Space Age was simmering, Venus could be recast as a tourist destination. Brochures were mocked up, enticing prospective visitors with zoos and “big game hunting” — thus renewing the Victorian dream of hunting dinosaurs to extinction all over again.

Venus flyby

But the bubble burst one fateful day in 1962. On December 14, NASA’s Mariner II probe streaked within 35,000 km of Venus. This was humankind’s first successful flyby of another planet, spurred by the Space Race, now in full swing.

As Mariner’s data beamed back to Earth, people clung to hopes for signs of life. But this rapidly became untenable. In February 1963, the New York Times relayed the bad news: “300F Reading on Venus Indicates No Life There.” Mariner II, shockingly, had revealed our neighbor to be an utterly inhospitable hellscape.

Though some had previously inferred this might be the case, here was undeniable confirmation. When, in 1967, the Soviet Venera IV Probe became the first mission to enter the Venusian atmosphere, and alight on its surface, this was further affirmed. Venus is hell. Not only is its surface hot enough to melt lead, it is also fearsomely pressurized.

Mournfully, dreamers had to say goodbye to their favorite destination. The science fiction author Brian Aldiss published a miscellany in 1968, gathering gems from the now-defunct genre of wondrous Venusian jaunts. Its title: Farewell Fantastic Venus!

Earth’s climate future

It didn’t take long for scientists to start conjecturing our twin wasn’t always so hellish. In the Solar System’s early days, Venus may have been quite clement, oceanic, even habitable. But, then, something happened to trigger its terrible transformation.

Andrew P. Ingersoll provided an explanation in 1969, becoming the first to adumbrate a model for what we now call a “runaway greenhouse.” This delineates a process whereby increases in temperature cause water to evaporate, creating a moist atmosphere better at retaining heat, and triggering temperatures to continue rising in a reinforcing loop. 

So it was that Venus, once a cipher for Earth’s deep past, shapeshifted into a warning regarding our future. Indeed, the revelation that our sister planet is a pressure-cooked hellscape proved that planetary histories don’t everywhere unfold according to the same predetermined script. Which implied, in turn, that a world’s trajectory can be altered, perhaps catastrophically, in wildly diverging directions, in ways not dictated by implacable destiny.

Since the 1900s, scattered voices argued that, by emitting prodigious amounts of CO2, human industry might be perturbing our planet’s atmosphere. But concluding we should do anything remained far from mainstream. Yet, in a very timely manner, Venus provided a cautionary tale.

By 1973, Carl Sagan was urging it is “of first importance” to understand our neighbor’s history to avoid “an accidental recapitulation” here on Earth. Isaac Asimov soon made similar noises. Other experts concurred, remarking that studies of Venus had “opened up the possibilities of runaway on Earth.”

We can’t be sure, but more recent investigations imply CO₂ emissions alone likely cannot trigger “runaway” on Earth. However, Venus’ example nonetheless provoked a deeper appreciation of the sensitivity of planetary atmospheres, fomenting investigation into what the worst-case terrestrial scenarios might be.

So, this is how, through being forced to say farewell to fantastic Venus, we discovered climate change on Earth. 

Ultimately, it is a hopeful story. Indeed, sometimes, today, climate problems can seem insoluble. But only through looking to our past can we gain any proportionate sense of humankind’s potential to learn and become better at conducting ourselves collectively in this world. After all, only a century ago, there were velociraptors on Venus. Then, through probing our Universe, and toppling this wistful belief, we became aware of a big problem close to home. 

Solutions will be far from simple. But becoming aware of an issue is the first step to finding a fix. This way, looking to the past nurtures sparks of hope for our future.

This article How the search for dinosaurs on Venus exposed a warning for Earth is featured on Big Think.

In the summer of 1861, weeks after Confederate troops fired the first shots of the Civil War, educator and abolitionist Frederick Gunn assembled his own troops—about 30 boys and a dozen girls who were students at his Washington, Connecticut, boarding school. Gunn, an early proponent of outdoor education, had led students on camping trips before, but this time he had something a little more regimented in mind.

Like the gathering Union forces, they would march—42 miles to be exact—to a beach on the Long Island Sound, where they would set up camp, waking in the morning to a bugle call and falling asleep under the stars after singing patriotic songs by the fire. During the day, between fishing and foraging, they would perform military drills in preparation for their eventual service in the Union Army. The Gunnery Camp, as it came to be known, was so successful (“a jocund ten days,” one student remembered), that Gunn made a tradition out of it.

The American summer camp had begun.

While much has changed in the century and half since Gunn trained future soldiers on a Connecticut beach, summer camp has always involved “adults projecting their own ambivalence about modern life onto children,” according to Michael Smith, a professor at Ithaca College who has researched the history of camp in the United States.

As the country rapidly industrialized after the Civil War and many families relocated from the country into loud, crowded cities, that ambivalence concerned the detrimental effects of urbanization. Suddenly, instead of spending their days outside working on the family farm, kids were languishing in cramped apartments or enduring long shifts in dark factories.

“There was a lot of anxiety about what that was doing to the character of children,” Smith says. A few months away in nature, adults hoped, “would help children reclaim the physical and spiritual heritage of their hardworking pilgrim and pioneer forebears.”

The first independent summer camp, not affiliated with a school, was founded in 1876 by a Union veteran with the goal of whipping so-called “weakly boys” into shape. The North Mountain School of Physical Culture outside Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, cost $200 for four months and was based partly on founder Joseph Rothrock’s own childhood experience in the outdoors. At the age of 12, after illness had kept him housebound for years, Rothrock’s parents sent him to a relative’s farm, where morning chores and roaming the countryside with other kids proved to be an antidote to his maladies.

Around the same time that Rothrock was taking city kids to the woods, a Dartmouth dropout named Ernst Balch looked on in dismay as wealthy families with young boys spent their summers at the tony resorts of New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Instead of catching their own dinner from a stream, they were waited on; instead of learning to pitch a tent, their beds were made by housekeepers. Disturbed by “the miserable condition of boys from well-to-do families,” Balch founded Camp Chocorua in 1881. In addition to swimming and hiking, campers cooked meals, cleared trails, and washed clothes, “activities Balch believed would develop self-reliance instead of dependence,” says Smith.

Soon, summer camps began popping up all over New England, and they weren’t only for boys. In 1892, Camp Arey in New York began admitting girls. In 1902, Laura Mattoon founded Camp Kehonka in New Hampshire, where girls wore “bifurcated garments,”—also known as skorts—so they could romp and tromp freely. And in 1910, Luther Halsey Gulick and his wife Charlotte established the Camp Fire Girls, a corollary of the Boy Scouts, and started Maine’s Camp Wohelo, short for work, health, and love.

Camp Fire Girls hiking in 1915 wearing early skorts—some of the young women also appear to be wearing headbands with feathers. Cultural appropriation of Native American dress and other traditions is an issue summer camps are still coming to terms with. (Wikimedia Commons / PUBLIC DOMAIN)

By the end of World War I, according to Smith, summer camp had evolved “from a loosely organized collective of camps for very poor or very well-to-do children into a nationally recognized youth-serving institution.” At the turn of the 20th century, there had been fewer than 100 summer camps. By 1918, there were more than 1,000.

During the years between the two world wars, as anxieties over the rise of fascism suffused the adult world, advocates began to see summer camp as a way to instill the principles of democratic cooperation into the next generation. H.W. Gibson, a prominent naturalist and former Gunnery camper, argued camp should lead to the “development of a better citizenship and the kind of character that will continue to produce when campers return to their homes and their schools and their communities.”

When WWII began, it was only natural that campers would contribute to the war effort, which they did through Victory gardens or by volunteering on farms that were short on labor. A June 1942 Camping Magazine article suggested some new activities for campers, including “coordinating a camp defense unit,” and “making a list of things you might want to do with your leisure time in a foxhole on the Bataan Peninsula.” Meanwhile, the American Camping Association pledged to prioritize “adolescent fitness for combat,” says Smith.

In the wake of the war, however, American summer camp morphed into the recreational version we recognize today, where kids practiced assembling s’mores, not a mobile defense unit.

“Many psychologists and youth workers feared the experience of growing up during WWII had produced a generation of troubled, insecure youth,” says Smith. Increasingly during the 50s and 60s, when Smith says “a significant number of kids experienced camp in some way,” parents hoped the experience could provide a refuge for children’s innocence instead of a training ground for soldiers, citizens, or even self-sufficient adults.

America’s summer camps have reflected other social and cultural trends. In the first decades of the 20th century, during the Progressive Era, camps for marginalized groups of kids had begun to appear, including Massachusetts’ Camp Atwater, the first summer camp for Black children. Summer camps in much of the country would remain segregated, however, for another half century.

While a handful of radical labor organizations had offered integrated summer camps during the 1930s and 40s—the most famous of which was Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, short for Workers’ Children Camps, where counselors led discussions on racial discrimination—perhaps the first mainstream integrated camp was founded by the women of the Methodist Council of Little Rock. Camp Aldersgate opened in 1947 on land that had once been a turkey farm. Its first years were tumultuous; as children swam in the lake and socialized in the dining halls, camp staff dealt with death threats, bomb threats, and the occasional gunshot.

As children swam in the lake, camp staff dealt with threats and the occasional gunshot.

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act made segregated summer camps illegal, though true integration was slow in coming. (Today’s summer camps are still coming to terms with a long tradition of exclusion—the Boy Scouts ban on gay youth, for example—and cultural appropriation of Native American names and symbols.)

Camp advocates have clung to “the potential for a few weeks at camp to solve innumerable social problems,” says Smith, even if they can’t quite agree what those problems are. Others continue to argue that, at its core, camp should be a therapeutic experience, a place where children can “develop more complete personalities and eventually contribute more fully to civil society as adults,” Smith says.

These days, about 26 million children attend some kind of camp each year, and the institution continues to “evolve but endure,” Smith says. While these spaces may always reflect the worries and insecurities of adults, for children summer camp remains about something even more profound: fun.

This article The anxious history of the American summer camp is featured on Big Think.

Martin Luther King Jr. is the person most often associated with it, but Bayard Rustin, known to some as “Mr. March on Washington,” organized this landmark historical event in 1963. Rustin had many collective identities. He was black, gay, American, socialist, Quaker, pacifist, and he was also a political organizer.

Rustin’s influential social activist career spanned five decades, beginning in the 1930s as a college student at Wilberforce University. His first noteworthy organizing campaign, which focused on the economic dimension of racial oppression, came during 1941 when he was recruited by A. Philip Randolph to be the youth organizer for an earlier March on Washington movement that never occurred. The aim was to protest racial discrimination in the United States armed services and in employment. As part of a deal that Randolph struck with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who agreed to sign an Executive Order banning racial discrimination by federal agencies and all unions and companies engaged in defense work, the march was canceled — to the dismay of Rustin and the political rioters who subsequently burned down the movement’s Harlem, New York, Office.

Racial identity was activated to engage some people to support this march, as part of a shared project to end racial discrimination. But identity-driven collective action, as this case illustrates, also created difficulties as expectations diverged about what kind of action racial struggle demanded of blacks. A difference in perspective about whether to march or not is another instance of group heterogeneity. When building democratic political movements under an identity-like connection to address shared goals, we cannot ignore group differences in background, perspective, or empowerment. And it is important to note that such differences appear within and between groups. In addition to this lesson, as a political organizer, Rustin also learned that when our collective identities are scripted too tightly, which can happen by specifying their meaning in ways that some people find too restrictive, we can become boxed in.

Feeling as though one must act in a certain way because one is black, which is illustrative of being boxed in, can be an obstacle to collective action to achieve a shared goal, such as ending economic oppression. On some accounts of what it is to be black, says Rustin, “one is supposed to think black, dress black, eat black, and buy black.” And one is also supposed to associate exclusively with blacks (not whites, not Jews), especially when it comes to political struggle on behalf of the race. One complaint that Rustin had about more militant 1960s-era black activists such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, to whom he attributes such views, is that by working with overly restrictive black identity scripts they ignored black heterogeneity, especially along class lines. Rustin believed that this was counterproductive to building a broad political movement to address economic problems in alliance with poor and working-class whites, class-conscious white liberals, and labor union activists, among others.

After black people used nonviolent protest to win civil rights, Rustin said: “What had previously been a movement seeking exclusively racial goals was now called upon to challenge the fundamental class nature of the economic structure.” And this new agenda required a different and broader alliance of political forces. Rustin was not naive; he understood that a “successful liberal political alliance is enormously difficult to build and, once pieced together, even more difficult to maintain, given the inevitable tensions, rivalries, and antagonisms of the various partners.” Still, he believed that forging such an alliance was necessary. Rustin insisted that realizing the goals of a new civil rights agenda meant that blacks needed allies who share “common problems and pursue common goals.” And the main challenge was picking the right allies on the basis of their “specific programs and proven willingness to cooperate with a political partner.” 

Part of the sweeping economic reform that blacks could pursue with the right coalition allies included projects such as securing tax reform to redistribute wealth, federal jobs and basic income guarantees, and workforce development. Rustin faced the task of coordinating the collective pursuit of these and other projects in a manner that was attentive to intra- and intergroup heterogeneity. We call this Rustin’s dilemma. We face this dilemma with all kinds of projects, economic and otherwise.

[His] is not a story about heroes and villains. Rustin’s presumption that militant black activists calling for self-defense condoned the active use of violence in pursuing black rights was itself a case of boxing in with an overly restrictive script. Even he had to guard against this tendency. And it is not a story strictly about success — measured by either the outcome of political movements and coalitions or the uptake of civic responsibilities that it takes to form and sustain them. Rustin believed that successful protests should “produce a feeling of moving ahead” and should win new allies while forcing people to take notice of injustice in the struggle to leverage organized collective power for tangible change.

Rustin’s dilemma was an enduring feature of his life as an activist. It was also dynamic, as the differences in background, empowerment, and perspective he encountered with various coalition partners changed over time. Citizens in democracies continue to face their own versions of this dilemma today. As they seek to coordinate the pursuit of projects with diverse others, whether organizing a protest, an interfaith dialogue, or even a community garden, they run into the challenge of attending to group heterogeneity. And this is especially true in the face of tight scripts for racial, ethnic, partisan, and religious identities, among many others.

When facing Rustin’s dilemma, we can, of course, insist on the correctness of our own convictions. But given that heterogeneity persists, we face the further question of what to do next. Once Rustin and his intended coalition partners established their different conceptions of black identity, different policy priorities, or disagreement about protest tactics to adopt, they faced a further question: now what? Should they continue to communicate and negotiate? Should they establish a narrower set of projects on which to coordinate? Should they split up and pursue their projects separately? Identifying their different perspectives, backgrounds, and forms of empowerment was only the start of a longer process.

Alongside the challenge of heterogeneity, Rustin faced this “now what” question repeatedly over the course of his life. Citizens in democracies today also face this question. Taking up these responsibilities will lead us to use the right processes, and develop the right ethos, for holding ourselves and others accountable to heterogeneity as we answer the “now what” question [to] break free from, rather than propagate, tight identity scripts.

This article Why resolving “Rustin’s dilemma” helps strengthen any democratic coalition is featured on Big Think.

On the morning of December 6, 1917, a bright, windless day, a French freighter called the Mont Blanc began to slowly pull out of the Halifax harbor in Nova Scotia. At the time, Halifax was one of the busiest ports in the British Empire. There was a war on in Europe, and the harbor groaned with the churn of ships, men, and weapons. The Mont Blanc was headed for France that day, carrying over twenty-five hundred tons of explosives, including TNT. While passing through a narrow channel in the harbor, a larger ship, the Imo from Belgium, accidentally rammed the bow of the Mont Blanc. 

The collision itself was not catastrophic. The Imo sailed on, in fact. But the crew of the Mont Blanc knew that their ship was a floating time bomb. They tried to put out the fire, but not for very long. Then they scrambled into lifeboats and paddled for shore. For a few heartbreaking moments, the Mont Blanc drifted in the harbor. It brushed up against the pier, setting it on fire. Children gathered to watch the spectacle.

Many of the worst disasters in history started quite modestly. One accident led to another, until a fault line opened up in a civilization. About twenty minutes after the collision, the Mont Blanc exploded, sending black rain, iron, fire, and wind whipsawing through the city. It was the largest bomb explosion on record. The blast shattered windows sixty miles away. Glass blinded some one thousand people. Next, a tidal wave caused by the explosion swamped the shore. Then fire began to creep across the city. In the harbor, a black column of fire and smoke turned into a hovering white mushroom cloud. Survivors fell to their knees, convinced that they had seen a German zeppelin in the sky. 

At the moment of the explosion, an Anglican priest and scholar named Samuel Henry Prince happened to be eating breakfast at a restaurant near the port. He ran to help, opening up his church as a triage station. It was, strangely enough, Prince’s second disaster in five years. He had responded to another local cataclysm in 1912, when a luxury cruise liner called the Titanic had sunk some five hundred miles off the coast of Halifax. Back then, Prince had performed burials at sea in the frigid waters. 

Prince was the kind of man who marveled at things others preferred not to think about. On the awful day of the explosion, he was astounded by what he saw. Prince watched men and women endure crude sidewalk operations without obvious pain. How was one young soldier able to work the entire day with one of his eyes knocked out? Some people experienced hallucinations. Why did parents fail to recognize their own children at the hospital—and, especially, at the morgue? Small details nagged at Prince. On the morning of the explosion, why was the very first relief station set up by a troupe of actors, of all people? 

That night, a blizzard hit Halifax, the epic’s final act. By the time the catastrophe had rippled out across the land, 1,963 people would be dead. In silent film footage taken after the blast, Halifax looks like it was hit by a nuclear weapon. Houses, train terminals, and churches lie like pick-up sticks on the snow-covered ground. Sleighs are piled high with corpses. “Here were to be found in one dread assembling the combined horrors of war, earthquake, fire, flood, famine and storm—a combination for the first time in the records of human disaster,” Prince would write. Later, scientists developing the atomic bomb would study the Halifax explosion to see how such a blast travels across land and sea. 

After helping rebuild Halifax, Prince moved to New York City to study sociology. For his PhD dissertation at Columbia University, he deconstructed the Halifax explosion. “Catastrophe and Social Change,” published in 1920, was the first systematic analysis of human behavior in a disaster. “Life becomes like molten metal,” he wrote. “Old customs crumble, and instability rules.” 

What makes Prince’s work so engaging is his optimism. Despite his funereal obsessions, he saw disasters as opportunities—not just, as he put it, “a series of vicissitudes mercifully ending one day in final cataclysm.” He was a minister, but he was clearly enchanted by industry. The horrific explosion had, in the end, “blown Halifax into the 20th century,” forcing many changes that were for the better. His thesis opened with a quote from St. Augustine: “This awful catastrophe is not the end but the beginning. History does not end so. It is the way its chapters open.” 

After Prince’s death, the field of human behavior in disasters would languish. Then, with the onset of the cold war and a new host of anxieties about how the masses might respond to nuclear attacks, it would come back to life. After the fall of communism, it would stagnate again—until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Prince seemed to anticipate the temptation for people to avert their eyes. “This little volume on Halifax is offered as a beginning,” he wrote. Don’t let it be the end, he pleaded. “Knowledge will grow scientific only after the most faithful examination of many catastrophes.” The remainder of the century would prove rich with material.

This article The groundbreaking optimism of catastrophe expert Samuel Henry Prince is featured on Big Think.

The following is the conclusion of Chapter 2 from the book The Techno-Humanist Manifesto by Jason Crawford, Founder of the Roots of Progress Institute. The first section of this chapter told the story of progress as one of increasing human agency. The entirety of the book will be published on Freethink, one week at a time. For more from Jason, subscribe to his Substack.

Chapter 2, Section 2: Surrender of the Gods

The story of progress, then, is one of humanity gradually wresting our fate away from the gods and taking it into our own hands. It is a process of increasing mastery over nature.

The concept of “mastery” over nature makes many people cringe. The acceptable notion today is to live in “harmony” with nature. Conservationist Aldo Leopold called in 1949 for “harmony between men and land”;¹ by now the phrase has become an environmentalist cliché.² The United Nations extolled this “harmony” in their foundational 1982 World Charter for Nature, in at least nine Resolutions on Harmony with Nature, and in their Sustainable Development Goals.³

This vision of harmony rests on a romantic view of nature as a loving mother who provides for us and protects us. In statements for “International Mother Earth Day,” the UN has called Mother Earth “the source of all life and nourishment,” praised her as “[t]he one thing that remains to sustain the many waves of humanity,” and admonished humanity as her “delinquent child,” challenging us to repair relations with her.⁴ Greenpeace paints the same picture: one of their articles states that “we need nature to do what it does best: sustaining life it gives homes to”; another claims that nature “gives us what we need,” “protects us,” and even “could solve future problems.”⁵

The ideal of “harmony” with nature is often pitched in superficially humanistic terms, on the premise that “humanity’s well-being [is] derived from the well-being of the Earth.”⁶ But in practice it becomes a call to decrease human agency: to do less, limit impact, cede control. Reduce, relinquish, retreat. The UN calls for “decreased intake of new material resources” and “reduced environmental footprint.”⁷ “Degrowth” advocate Jason Hickel says that the objective “is to scale down the material throughput of the economy.”⁸ Indeed, a formula commonly used in environmental science is “IPAT”: impact = people × affluence × technology.⁹ Reducing impact, by this definition, means a smaller population using less technology to be poorer.

But slowing growth and limiting development isn’t living in harmony with nature—it is surrendering in a battle with nature, capitulating to her unreasonable demands. To truly live in harmony with nature, we must first dispel this romanticized vision of it. To love and respect nature, we must see it clearly for exactly what it is.

Nature is not a loving mother. It is supremely indifferent to human needs. It gives us sunshine, but also heat waves and drought; rain, but also flood; lush prairies, but also deserts and swamps. “Immune, inanimate, inhuman, it indifferently manifests itself in the thunderbolt and hailstorm, rabid bat, smallpox microbe, and ice crystal.”¹⁰

Untamed nature is fearsome, and was seen this way through most of history. The romantic view of nature is a modern luxury bred of technology and urbanization. Environmental writer Emma Marris says:

Wilderness has been seen throughout Western history as a source both of inexhaustible resources and of real peril…. Many European colonizers preferred towns and fields, where things were altogether safer, and they thought it progress when the land claimed for civilization expanded and savage nature shrunk. It wasn’t until societies attained a little safety, prosperity, and leisure that nature in its wildest aspect began to seem rather romantic.¹¹

Comfortable in our climate-controlled homes and on our manicured lawns, we can easily forget nature’s perils, but those who were truly in touch with the land, just a few generations ago, could not. The poet Robert Service described them in “The Law of the Yukon,” which he wrote in the voice of Nature herself, as she speaks of the men who came to challenge her:

One by one I dismayed them, frighting them sore with my glooms;
One by one I betrayed them unto my manifold dooms.
Drowned them like rats in my rivers, starved them like curs on my plains,
Rotted the flesh that was left them, poisoned the blood in their veins;
Burst with my winter upon them, searing forever their sight,
Lashed them with fungus-white faces, whimpering wild in the night;
Staggering blind through the storm-whirl, stumbling mad through the snow,
Frozen stiff in the ice-pack, brittle and bent like a bow;
Featureless, formless, forsaken, scented by wolves in their flight,
Left for the wind to make music through ribs that are glittering white…¹²

Further, nature is not harmonious. “Harmony” means “agreement or concord.”¹³ But nature is full of strife and conflict. Every organism on the planet competes for resources. Different species literally eat each other alive and invade each other’s bodies to exploit them. Members of the same species vie for dominance and mates, even with their own kin. An adult male tiger, if it comes across cubs that are not its own, will kill them, and then mate with the mother.¹⁴ A black eagle, when it hatches, will peck its weaker sibling to death.¹⁵ Tennyson, reflecting on the mercilessness of nature, aptly described her as “red in tooth and claw.”¹⁶

This conflict is inherent in non-rational nature. The selective pressure of evolution creates organisms that ruthlessly compete with and mercilessly dominate anything that gets in the way of their survival and reproduction. Nature may, for a time, be in “balance”—as births are balanced with grisly deaths, and predators with prey—but it is never in “harmony.”¹⁷

It is only human rationality that has enabled us, slowly, to transcend eternal warfare and reach some semblance of peace and cooperation. It is only human rationality that has any hope of creating harmony.

But that harmony requires the ability to commit to agreements and abide by norms. It is not possible to reach agreement with blind, non-rational nature. The only way to truly live in harmony with nature—to find agreement or concord with it—is unilaterally: to arrange its parts and direct its forces so as to best support human life. Nature absolutely enforces its immutable laws, which we ignore at our peril, but there is no reason to resign ourselves to the chance configuration of matter and energy it gives us. Using the former, we can control the latter.

Bacon said that to command nature, we must obey it.¹⁸ In the same spirit, we can say that to live in harmony with nature, we must master it.

To master nature is not to abuse or waste it; this isn’t a call to trash the planet or to pave it over for a parking lot. Nature is immensely valuable. It deserves our love and respect; we should care for and protect it. But we can conceive the value of nature entirely in human terms.

First, the environmentalists are right that human flourishing depends on the environment. The soil, the rivers, the forests support our lives and well-being. Stewart Brand says we should “think of ecosystem services as infrastructure. A bridge is infrastructure, and so is the river under it. … Radio spectrum is infrastructure, and so is an intact ozone layer.”¹⁹ We should maintain natural infrastructure diligently, as we would a sewer or a power grid. And we should be mindful that nature is a complex system, whose behavior is difficult to predict or control. But there is no reason to consider the original, “pristine” state of nature as an ideal, or to minimize our impact on it. On the contrary, we should upgrade and improve it—as we do when we clear fields, dredge rivers, or control animal populations.

We should return to grand geological engineering projects, such as canals, dams, and land reclamation. Once we were boldly ambitious on this front. The Suez and Panama canals severed continents from one another and shortened travel distances by thousands of miles.²⁰ (Would these projects survive environmental review or activist obstructionism today?) Much of the land in major coastal cities including New York, San Francisco, and Boston was reclaimed from the ocean.²¹ Technologist Casey Handmer recently proposed to revitalize the Salton Sea and eliminate drought on the Colorado River by using solar power to desalinate water sourced from the Gulf of Mexico.²² Whether or not this plan should be adopted, it represents the scale we should be thinking on.

The environmentalists are also right that nature has great spiritual value. The grandeur of the mountains, the seclusion of the forest, the sense of freedom on the open seas, are aesthetic experiences that restore and inspire us. But even to enjoy the beauty of nature, we control it. “The setting aside of wild nature is no less a human choice, in service of human preferences, than bulldozing it,” says the Ecomodernist Manifesto.²³ The most beautiful spots in nature are rare; we discover them, map them, and cordon them off in national parks. We find trails through the woods, mark and maintain them, upgrade them with stairs and railings for comfort and safety. We clear campgrounds and control dangerous animals. We ensure supplies of clean water. We stock medical necessities within reach. Our enjoyment of nature is an artificial experience.

A human-centered value system can also recognize a value in animal welfare. It is a psychological value: we feel sympathy for animals as fellow living creatures, and we hate to see them suffer or be abused. We value animals to the extent that they are attractive, show capacity for joy and pain, and do not pose a threat to human life. People care more about polar bears, elephants, and dolphins than about snakes, shrimp, or mosquitoes.²⁴

Animal welfare is a luxury we purchase with technology and wealth. Tribal hunters would readily sacrifice animal welfare for their needs: some native American tribes would run an entire herd of bison off a cliff, creating a pile of corpses to use; one such site in Montana contains “up to eighteen feet of compacted buffalo remains.”²⁵ Today, in contrast, many people pay extra for eggs from free-range chickens. In the future, synthetic foods such as lab-grown meat may replace livestock entirely.²⁶ But any comfort we are willing to provide to animals, and any scruples we have concerning their treatment, are based entirely on our sympathy for them (and must fit within the resources we can reasonably devote to this cause).

In short, this is an affirmation of anthropocentrism: placing humans at the center of our moral code.

One movement within environmentalism, known as ecomodernism, rejects the romanticized view of nature and embraces a more human-centric approach. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger, founders of the ecomodernist Breakthrough Institute, wrote in 2011 that we must “abandon both the dark, zero-sum Malthusian visions and the idealized and nostalgic fantasies for a simpler, more bucolic past in which humans lived in harmony with Nature.”²⁷ Ecomodernism “offers a positive vision of our environmental future, rejects Romantic ideas about nature as unscientific and reactionary, and embraces advanced technologies, including taboo ones, like nuclear power and genetically modified organisms, as necessary to reducing humankind’s ecological footprint.”²⁸

The ecomodernism of the Breakthrough Institute and of writers such as Stewart Brand is closely allied with techno-humanism, and I agree with them on most issues. But my anthropocentrism is even more radical: there is no need to reduce our “ecological footprint,” and no reason, as stated in the Ecomodernist Manifesto, that “humanity must shrink its impacts on the environment to make more room for nature.”²⁹

Another wing of the environmentalist movement explicitly rejects anthropocentrism in favor of “biocentrism.” As biologist David Graber³⁰ explained, this refers to “those of us who value wildness for its own sake, not for what value it confers upon mankind”:

I, for one, cannot wish upon either my children or the rest of Earth’s biota a tame planet, a human-managed planet, be it monstrous or—however unlikely—benign. … We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me—than another human body, or a billion of them. Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. [emphasis added]³¹

The intrinsic value of nature, then, is different from the aesthetic value of a beautiful landscape, or the psychological value of animal welfare. It is explicitly divorced from human happiness, from any value to humanity.

But the very idea of the intrinsic value of nature is incoherent. There is no way to value nature for its own sake, because nature is not one thing with goals or desires. The interests of different species and different individuals are in constant tension. If we optimize for the zebra, we harm the lion. The climate that is best for the gila monster is terrible for the emperor penguin. To repeat, nature is inherently full of strife and conflict.

If there were some standard of what is good for nature, then we could actively work to improve it. If it’s bad for species to go extinct, isn’t it good to de-extinct them through genetic engineering? Environmental ethicists have called de-extinction a “misallocation of effort,” a “risky ecological experiment,” and a flat-out “bad idea.”³² If it’s bad for the climate to change, isn’t it good to stabilize the climate through geoengineering? Almost four hundred scientists signed an open letter calling for an international non-use agreement on solar geoengineering, and a mere experiment with the technology planned at Harvard “was halted after objections by environmentalists and Indigenous leaders.”³³ If thriving, biodiverse ecosystems are good, isn’t it good to create new ones—say, on Mars, through terraforming? Carl Sagan wrote, “If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes.”³⁴ Although these criticisms are usually framed as practical concerns over specific harms, and reasonable people could differ on any particular issue, the consistent theme is: opposition to human intervention in any form.

If we can’t optimize on nature’s behalf, perhaps we should simply try to maintain stasis, limit change, reduce our “footprint”? Emma Marris writes:

For many conservationists, restoration to a prehuman or pre-European baseline is seen as healing a wounded or sick nature. For others, it is an ethical duty. We broke it; therefore we must fix it. Baselines thus … become the good, the goal, the one correct state.³⁵

But there’s no reason to privilege the configuration of atoms that just happened to exist before humans. And to do so would be profoundly unnatural. Every organism changes its environment: consuming resources, constructing shelter, producing waste. The algae cover the sea, the cattle graze on the grasslands, the beavers dam the rivers. Many animals dig tunnels or burrows, or build nests or hives. The coral reefs greatly altered the marine environment when they formed hundreds of millions of years ago.³⁶ Perhaps the greatest change to the environment in Earth’s history was the Great Oxygenation Event some two billion years ago—caused by cyanobacteria. (Owing to the mass extinction of anaerobic organisms that probably followed, it is also known as the Oxygen Holocaust.)³⁷

Humans modify our environment like every other species, we just do it more successfully and on a grander scale than most. And unlike the cyanobacteria, when we change the composition of the atmosphere, we have the potential to know what we are doing and to mitigate any harmful effects. But like all organisms, modifying our environment is how we live. To limit it is to limit human life. To limit us, and not other animals, is to single out humans for punishment and degradation.

What, after all, is “nature”? A bird’s nest or an anthill is natural; a two-story condominium is unnatural. A chimp cracking a nut with a stone is natural; a human using a nutcracker is unnatural. If a river changes course because it erodes its banks and overflows them, that is natural; if it changes course because humans dug a canal, that is unnatural. If its banks are eroding and humans build a levee to stop it from changing course, that is also unnatural.³⁸ Global warming is natural if caused by an interglacial period, but unnatural if caused by industrial CO₂. Global cooling is natural if caused by stratospheric injection of sulfur dioxide from volcanoes, but unnatural if caused by stratospheric injection of sulfur dioxide from balloons.

The only coherent definition of “nature” here is: the negation of humanity. The absence of human agency. Nature is whatever is not us, whatever we did not choose to do or create. It is the world as we found it, as it happened to us, rather than the world we made.³⁹ An essay published by the Sierra Club explains:

The wild persists as a place that remains undominated (if not untouched) by humans. A wild land is self-willed and sovereign—the rivers are free, the animals free, the fires free. … We need some spaces free of human intention, places where the herds still freely roam and the rivers are undammed.⁴⁰

To place intrinsic value on nature, then, is ultimately nihilistic and profoundly anti-human. Continuing the quote from David Graber above:

I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line… we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. … Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.⁴¹

Radical anthropocentrism is an extreme stance, and I don’t expect everyone to endorse it, even among techno-humanists. Many of my colleagues value animal welfare, biodiversity, or the environment in general, and aren’t comfortable with basing all of these on human well-being. Some, on utilitarian grounds, place fundamental moral worth on all sentient experience.⁴² Others may adopt a Christian view in which the Earth belongs neither to humans nor to animals, but to God (which can lean more or less anthropocentric depending on how much one emphasizes God giving man dominion over the Earth⁴³ versus our responsibility to be stewards of God’s creation⁴⁴). But I am stating my position here in order to stake it out, and because I believe my conception of the value of nature is the only consistent position that deserves the title of “humanism.”

In The Control of Nature, John McPhee describes the quest for human agency as the

struggle against natural forces—heroic or venal, rash or well advised—when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods.⁴⁵

Humanity grew up in a world ruled by those gods. Now, we wield godlike powers ourselves. Material progress has granted us this agency, and that is the greatest praise I can bestow upon it.

1. Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 196.
2. McKibben, “Hope, Human and Wild,” “New Deal for Nature.”
3. Doncaster et al, “Living in Harmony with Nature.”
4. United Nations, “Harmony with Nature,” 2018; Kórösi, “Harmony with Nature”; António Guterres, “International Mother Earth Day.”
5. Salvador, “Earth to Humans”; Bout, “5 Reasons We Need Wildlife.”
6. United Nations, “Harmony with Nature,” 2017.
7. Kórösi, “Harmony with Nature.”
8. Hickel, “Degrowth: A Call for Radical Abundance.”
9. “Population, Affluence, and Technology”; Oxford Reference, “IPAT.”
10. Rhodes, Energy: A Human History, quoting Elaine Scarry.
11. Marris, Rambunctious Garden, 18. Corroborating this, Charles Mann writes in The Wizard and the Prophet (p. 372) that in the mid-19th century, “‘wilderness’ meant to most people wastelands full of dangerous creatures: places to be subdued.”
12. Service, Spell of the Yukon, 21-22.
13. According to the top Google search definition, which cites the Oxford English Dictionary.
14. Singh, “Strategy to Avoid Infanticide.”
15. Mock, “Avian Siblicide.”
16. Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H, LVII.
17. Hans Rosling writes: “Have you heard people say that humans used to live in balance with nature? Well, yes, there was a balance. But let’s avoid the rose-tinted glasses. Until 1800, women gave birth to six children on average. So the population should have increased with each generation. Instead, it stayed more or less stable. Remember the child skeletons in the graveyards of the past? On average four out of six children died before becoming parents themselves, leaving just two surviving children to parent the next generation. There was a balance. It wasn’t because humans lived in balance with nature. Humans died in balance with nature. It was utterly brutal and tragic.” (Rosling, Factfulness, 87.)
18. Bacon, The New Organon, 6.
19. Brand, Whole Earth Discipline, 16.
20. Worthington, “Panama Canal,” “Suez Canal Crisis.”
21. “The Changing Shoreline of New York City”; Netzer, “Future Development of San Francisco”; St. Onge, “Putting Boston on the Map.”
22. Handmer, “It’s 2024 and Drought is Optional.”
23. “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.”
24. The technical term for this is the “phyloempathic hierarchy” (Paulhus, “The Phyloempathic Hierarchy”). This is a broad generalization. There are more philosophic approaches, based in utilitarianism, that use sentience as the basis of moral value, and take seriously the welfare of shrimp or wild animals (“Crustacean Welfare”, Matthews, “Wild Frontier of Animal Welfare”).
25. National Park Service, “First Peoples’ Buffalo Jump State Park,” UNESCO, “Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump.”
26. Alwahaidi, “Lab Grown Meat Could be the Future of Food.”
27. Nordhaus, “Long Death of Environmentalism.”
28. Shellenberger, “On Becoming an Ecomodernist.”
29. “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” Note that some ecomodernists are more human-centered than others. Alex Trembath, for instance, also writing for the Breakthrough Institute, says that “Anthropocentrism is one of the primary characteristics distinguishing ecomodernism from conventional environmentalism” (“Differences Between Ecomodernism and Effective Altruism”), and that “ultimately, the choice of how and where to protect nature will be a human one, driven not by what we have to do to survive, but what we want to do to thrive on an ecologically vibrant planet” (“Protecting Nature Because We Want to”).
30. Not to be confused with popular author David Graeber, of “bullshit jobs” fame.
31. Graber, “Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower.”
32. Erlich, “The Case Against De-Extinction,” llester, “A Risky Ecological Experiment,” Martindale, “Bringing Back Wooly Mammoths.”
33. Milman, “Can Geoengineering Fix the Climate?”
34. Sagan, Cosmos, 170.
35. Marris, Rambunctious Garden, 3.
36. Hallock, “Reefs in Earth History.”
37. Aiyer, “The Great Oxidation Event.”
38. For an excellent story of building levees to maintain the course of the Mississippi River, see “Atchafalaya” in McPhee, The Control of Nature, which is quoted towards the end of this chapter. Similar stories could be told of the Yellow River and other rivers around the world (Carter, “When the Yellow River Changes Course”).
39. One environmental ethics textbook explicitly states that “environmental ethicists often employ a conception of nature on which something is natural to the extent that it is independent of human design, control and impacts” (emphasis original). (Valera, Global Changes, 85.)
40. Mark, “The Garden, Reconsidered.”
41. Graber, “Hothouse Flower.”
42. Sebo, “Utilitarianism and Nonhuman Animals.”
43. Genesis 1:28. Historian Lynn White blamed Christian anthropocentrism for “our ecologic crisis,” saying that it “not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends” (White, “Historical Roots of Ecological Crisis”).
44. Francis, Laudato Si’, paragraphs 67–69, 116.
45. McPhee, Control of Nature, p. 69.

For The Techno-Humanist Manifesto‘s complete bibliography, visit The Roots of Progress.

This article Why harmony with nature is a myth is featured on Big Think.

On Aug. 24, in A.D. 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted, shooting over 3 cubic miles of debris up to 20 miles (32.1 kilometers) in the air. As the ash and rock fell to Earth, it buried the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

According to most modern accounts, the story pretty much ends there: Both cities were wiped out, their people frozen in time.

It only picks up with the rediscovery of the cities and the excavations that started in earnest in the 1740s.

But recent research has shifted the narrative. The story of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius is no longer one about annihilation; it also includes the stories of those who survived the eruption and went on to rebuild their lives.

The search for survivors and their stories has dominated the past decade of my archaeological fieldwork, as I’ve tried to figure out who might have escaped the eruption. Some of my findings are featured in an episode of the new PBS documentary, “Pompeii: The New Dig.”

Making it out alive

Pompeii and Herculaneum were two wealthy cities on the coast of Italy just south of Naples. Pompeii was a community of about 30,000 people that hosted thriving industry and active political and financial networks. Herculaneum, with a population of about 5,000, had an active fishing fleet and a number of marble workshops. Both economies supported the villas of wealthy Romans in the surrounding countryside.

In popular culture, the eruption is usually depicted as an apocalyptic event with no survivors: In episodes of the TV series “Doctor Who” and “Loki,” everyone in Pompeii and Herculaneum dies.

But the evidence that people could have escaped was always there.

The eruption itself continued for over 18 hours. The human remains found in each city account for only a fraction of their populations, and many objects you might have expected to have remained and be preserved in ash are missing: Carts and horses are gone from stables, ships missing from docks, and strongboxes cleaned out of money and jewelry.

All of this suggests that many – if not most – of the people in the cities could have escaped if they fled early enough.

Some archaeologists have always assumed that some people escaped. But searching for them has never been a priority.

So I created a methodology to determine if survivors could be found. I took Roman names unique to Pompeii or Herculaneum – such as Numerius Popidius and Aulus Umbricius – and searched for people with those names who lived in surrounding communities in the period after the eruption. I also looked for additional evidence, such as improved infrastructure in neighboring communities to accommodate migrants.

After eight years of scouring databases of tens of thousands of Roman inscriptions on places ranging from walls to tombstones, I found evidence of over 200 survivors in 12 cities. These municipalities are primarily in the general area of Pompeii. But they tended to be north of Mount Vesuvius, outside the zone of the greatest destruction.

It seems as though most survivors stayed as close as they could to Pompeii. They preferred to settle with other survivors, and they relied on social and economic networks from their original cities as they resettled.

Some migrants prosper

Some of the families that escaped apparently went on to thrive in their new communities.

The Caltilius family resettled in Ostia – what was then a major port city to the north of Pompeii, 18 miles from Rome. There, they founded a temple to the Egyptian deity Serapis. Serapis, who wore a basket of grain on his head to symbolize the bounty of the earth, was popular in harbor cities like Ostia dominated by the grain trade. Those cities also built a grand, expensive tomb complex decorated with inscriptions and large portraits of family members.

Members of the Caltilius family married into another family of escapees, the Munatiuses. Together, they created a wealthy, successful extended family.

The second-busiest port city in Roman Italy, Puteoli – what’s known as Pozzuoli today – also welcomed survivors from Pompeii. The family of Aulus Umbricius, who was a merchant of garum, a popular fermented fish sauce, resettled there. After reviving the family garum business, Aulus and his wife named their first child born in their adopted city Puteolanus, or “the Puteolanean.”

Others fall on hard times

Not all the survivors of the eruption were wealthy or went on to find success in their new communities. Some had already been poor to begin with. Others seemed to have lost their family fortunes, perhaps in the eruption itself.

Fabia Secundina from Pompeii – apparently named for her grandfather, a wealthy wine merchant – also ended up in Puteoli. There, she married a gladiator, Aquarius the retiarius, who died at the age of 25, leaving her in dire financial straits.

Three other very poor families from Pompeii – the Avianii, Atilii and Masuri families – survived and settled in a small, poorer community called Nuceria, which goes by Nocera today and is about 10 miles (16.1 kilometers) east of Pompeii.

According to a tombstone that still exists, the Masuri family took in a boy named Avianius Felicio as a foster son. Notably, in the 160 years of Roman Pompeii, there was no evidence of any foster children, and extended families usually took in orphaned children. For this reason, it’s likely that Felicio didn’t have any surviving family members.

This small example illustrates the larger pattern of the generosity of migrants – even impoverished ones – toward other survivors and their new communities. They didn’t just take care of each other; they also donated to the religious and civic institutions of their new homes.

For example, the Vibidia family had lived in Herculaneum. Before it was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius, they had given lavishly to help fund various institutions, including a new temple of Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility.

One female family member who survived the eruption appears to have continued the family’s tradition: Once settled in her new community, Beneventum, she donated a very small, poorly made altar to Venus on public land given by the local city council.

How would survivors be treated today?

While the survivors resettled and built lives in their new communities, government played a role as well.

The emperors in Rome invested heavily in the region, rebuilding properties damaged by the eruption and building new infrastructure for displaced populations, including roads, water systems, amphitheaters and temples.

This model for post-disaster recovery can be a lesson for today. The costs of funding the recovery never seems to have been debated. Survivors were not isolated into camps, nor were they forced to live indefinitely in tent cities. There’s no evidence that they encountered discrimination in their new communities.

Instead, all signs indicate that communities welcomed the survivors. Many of them went on to open their own businesses and hold positions in local governments. And the government responded by ensuring that the new populations and their communities had the resources and infrastructure to rebuild their lives.

This article Found: Records of Pompeii’s survivors is featured on Big Think.

The following is Chapter 2 from the book The Techno-Humanist Manifesto by Jason Crawford, Founder of the Roots of Progress Institute. The entirety of the book will be published on Freethink, one week at a time. For more from Jason, subscribe to his Substack above.

Chapter 2, Section 1: Surrender of the Gods

So far we have told the story of progress as one of humanity climbing out of poverty, isolation, disease and death into abundance, connectedness, health and safety. More fundamentally, it is a story of the expansion of human agency.

Our primitive ancestors lived at the mercy of nature. They ate what food they found: what edible plants happened to be growing nearby, what game they could catch. They fashioned tools, clothing, and shelter out of found materials: wood, stone, leaves and grass; the hide, hair, bones, or shells of animals. They might temper these materials with fire,¹ but they could not fundamentally transform them. And as nomads, they were forced to limit their possessions to what could be carried. Until about ten thousand years ago, they did not even have draft animals; they controlled no power sources other than their own muscles.²

They had little choice of where to live: when local food resources ran out, they moved on—and they were constantly on the move. They had little choice of what to do with their lives, as any division of labor within the tribe was extremely limited—hunting, foraging, tool-making—and much of that determined by social roles.³ They had little choice of whom to socialize with: they were a part of the community they were born into.

When their environment changed, they had to simply react as best they could. They had little to no ability to predict the weather, or to grasp changes in climate. They had no techniques to prevent disease, not even washing hands or boiling water. They fell victim to attacks from wild animals and to raids from other tribes. We don’t have vital statistics from this era, but estimates of historical world population show very low growth rates for a very long time, which implies high mortality.⁴

Every aspect of their lives was dominated by chance factors in their environment. Although they lived as best they could; although they applied all their intelligence, effort, and will; and although they were surely no less clever and brave than you or I—the life they could create was still merely a tiny enclave carved out of a vast world.

The advent of agriculture and settled society over ten thousand years ago was a major leap forward in human agency. For the first time, we ate not the plants we found and the game we caught in the wild, but the crops we had sown and the livestock we had raised. We chose where to live and we made our homes, finally able to invest in them for the long term.

The first settlers and agriculturalists did not have much choice in these things, and their options were poor. They probably worked harder than hunter-gatherers, and they had smaller stature, indicating worse nutrition.⁵ Some have interpreted the shift to agriculture as a mistake, even “the worst mistake” in history.⁶ More likely, hunter-gatherers were led or forced into agriculture by circumstances beyond their control, such as rising population density or changes in climate.⁷ To call this evolution a “mistake” is ahistorical: a mistake implies a choice, but primitive peoples had no ability to direct the course of their societies, nor even to comprehend when a change of this magnitude was occurring. The lesson instead is the extremely limited agency of hunter-gatherer societies: even if they enjoyed their lifestyle, they were unable to keep it when the environment changed.

In any case, those who did choose to settle down laid the foundation for a much greater and more powerful civilization. With permanent settlements, we could accumulate possessions, including things too heavy to carry. Crucially, we could build large furnaces. And with them, we could generate the intense heat needed to transform materials: to smelt metals, to blow glass, to kiln clay and limestone. We had leapt beyond wood, stone, and other found materials, to create new materials that vastly expanded our options: metal afforded new types of tools, glass and ceramic new ways of storing food, cement and brick new methods of building.

We began to harness energy beyond our own muscle and channel it to our purposes: wind, water, animals. We guided and magnified it using gears, levers, pulleys, and screws. These afforded new ways to grind grain, saw wood, or lift stones and beams—whether to lighten our load, or to increase our strength.

With new materials and energy sources, we began to refashion the world we had found into a new and distinctly human world. We plowed fields, paved roads, dammed rivers. We built cities full of homes, shops, palaces, temples. We connected the continents via great ships that crossed oceans, effecting a global redistribution of crops, livestock, and people.

In this new world a much greater range of professions was open. While most workers still labored in the fields, some could specialize in the crafts: blacksmithing, weaving, pottery, carpentry. A few could become merchants or sailors, and travel the world. A very privileged few were even able to devote themselves to knowledge, law, art, or religion.

By this era, humanity had already far surpassed any other species; our command of nature was unmatched. And yet, by today’s standards, these people were still helpless.

Every human endeavor was vulnerable to random shocks and failures. Agriculture could fail due to drought, frost, blight, or pests. Even under the best circumstances, productivity was very low: about 1,000 kg of cereal-equivalents per worker per year, barely enough to feed the worker himself and his own family.⁸ With small surplus and little ability to reserve it for hard times or to transport it to the relief of stricken regions, famine was common.⁹

Manufacturing processes were variable and unpredictable. The iron-maker could not set his furnace to a precise temperature, because he didn’t have a thermometer, nor a concept of temperature that allowed for any precision. The ore he fed into that furnace contained impurities from nature, but he had no way of testing for them, nor the scientific knowledge to identify them. As late as the 1800s, blast-furnace managers were expected to have a feel for their furnaces and to run them by instinct.¹⁰ Finished products, from horseshoes to boilerplates, were fashioned by hand, between hammer and anvil or hand-operated rollers, and could have no more precision than hand and eye could coordinate.

Transportation of all forms was subject to the vagaries of the weather. Ships sailed by the grace of the wind, and could not move if it ceased to blow. The ability to navigate the open ocean was not widespread; most merchant voyages hugged the coast or plied a few known routes that followed seasonal monsoon winds.¹¹ Travel on land was worse: slow, rough, and expensive; across a landscape filled with mountains, rivers, canyons, and other insuperable obstacles. Storms could cause shipwreck; rain could turn dirt roads to mud; snow could block a mountain pass for an entire winter.

Harnessing energy was also subject to chance. Windmills only turn when the wind blows. Water power was limited to river sites, and it would stop when the river ran low or froze over in winter. Neither can be stored, transported, or scaled up: they must be used when, where, and as they are found. For heating and lighting, too, we used found sources of energy: wood and coal, fats and oils, straw, brush, even animal dung—whatever was around that could burn. With little ability to purify our fuels, they gave off acrid smoke that damaged eyes and lungs.¹²

Disease was rampant. Epidemics were exacerbated by dense urban populations and by people living in close proximity to livestock. The control of disease was limited to very crude measures such as the quarantine and a few ineffective treatments such as quinine for malaria. When plague struck, people turned to prayer and repentance. The sick did not even have the knowledge or ability to keep from infecting their own dearest loved ones.

It was still a world ruled by the gods, and humanity lived and died at their whim.

Helplessness was such a feature of the human condition that it was seen as the right and natural order of things. In 1722, when inoculation for smallpox (a forerunner of vaccination) was gaining popularity in the West, one London reverend preached vehemently against it. Disease, he argued, was sent by God—“either for the trial of our faith, or for the punishment of our sins.” In any case, it was God’s prerogative alone to send disease, and indeed to arrange even “the most minute circumstances of life”:

“Shall we presume to rival him in any instance of providence, find fault with his administration, take the work out of his hands, and manage for ourselves? … Let the atheist then, and the scoffer, the heathen and unbeliever, disclaim a dependence upon providence, dispute the wisdom of God’s government, and deny obedience to his laws: let them inoculate, and be inoculated, whose hope is only in and for this life!¹³“

This trust in the wisdom of divine providence extended even to natural disasters. When a great earthquake and tsunami struck Lisbon in 1755, killing tens of thousands and destroying much of the city, commenters bent over backwards to justify this atrocity and absolve their God. Some called it a punishment for the wicked lifestyle of the inhabitants of Lisbon. Protestants said it was targeted at Catholics for prosecuting the Inquisition. Rousseau even blamed the destruction on humans, for choosing to build tall buildings in dense urban centers.¹⁴

This fatalism was gradually eroded by Enlightenment rationality and material progress. We mitigated the destruction from earthquakes not by abandoning cities, but by studying seismology and structural engineering, and then designing earthquake-proof buildings. When disasters strike today, from pandemics to financial crises, we do not attribute them to Providence; we call them failures of policy and leadership. We no longer consider random events to be uncontrollable—we insist on controlling them.

And we have now achieved unprecedented levels of control over our world. Both agriculture and manufacturing are now consistent and reliable. With irrigation, we no longer depend on rain; with pesticides and herbicides, we fend off attacks from nature. With chemical assays and computerized machinery, we process raw inputs from any source, of any makeup, and produce pure, consistent alloys, their composition measured to hundredths of a percent.¹⁵ And we have created not only abundance, but incredible variety: our supermarkets are stocked with dozens of flavors of every product from cereal to pasta sauce; our shopping malls are a paradise of material goods to suit every individual need, style, and taste.

We have mastered the use of energy. The invention of the engine enabled us to convert fuel into motion, breaking our dependence on inconstant power sources such as wind and water. Energy usage became reliable and scalable; we could deploy it anytime, anywhere. With industrial chemistry, we purified the fuel itself, so it burned with less soot, ash, and smell; with electricity, we tame the very lightning.

Social life is no longer limited to the community you happened to be born into. If your hometown does not excite you, you can find a more suitable one, almost anywhere on Earth. If you wish to learn your art or craft from a master, you can find the world’s best teachers and sit at their feet, virtually or literally. If your local community shuns you, you can find a supportive community online. You can participate in almost any marketplace on the planet: for both buyers and sellers, this opens up a world of choices and opportunities.

Despite algorithmic feeds and social media bubbles, we have much more ability than at any time in history to escape our provincial worldview and adopt a more cosmopolitan one.

We have radical agency over our information diet as well—even though that is a contrarian position today. In the past, people heard what news happened to reach them, often via gossip and hearsay; now we have instant access to all the information in the world. Despite algorithmic feeds and social media bubbles, we have much more ability than at any time in history to escape our provincial worldview and adopt a more cosmopolitan one. Before printed books and libraries, fact-checking was near impossible; before the Internet, it was often prohibitively difficult; now it is almost trivial. Few people exercise these abilities as much as they should—but that has always been the case, and those who do exercise them have an outsized influence on the world. Besides, if you think the average person today is misinformed, compare them to the sailor who feared monsters at sea, or the villager who joined in literal witch hunts.¹⁶

Our command of the material world results in greatly expanded choice in our individual lives. More than ever, we can choose what work to do, where to live and when to move elsewhere, whom to marry (if anyone) and when, how many children to have (if any) and when to have them, whom to associate and keep in touch with, what art and entertainment to experience, how to express ourselves in style and fashion.

Not everyone is happy with this new world of expanded choice. Some people feel adrift on a sea of options, and look wistfully to a bygone era when they would have been shepherded into traditional social roles. Some commentators worry that with the fading of those traditions, people are making choices that leave them personally unfulfilled or erode the social fabric, such as avoiding marriage and children.¹⁷ This much is true: with greater choice comes greater responsibility to make good choices. But if people make poor ones, it’s a mistake to blame that on the expansion of choice itself, or on the material advances that helped expand it, or on the scientists, inventors and industrialists who created those advances. Instead, we should challenge moralists, teachers and parents to provide better guidance for how to live a good life and create a good society in a world of greatly expanded choice.

Technology grants capabilities but also creates new hazards. But these hazards, too, we learn to control—and we are far better at this today than in the past.

Another result of material progress is a more secure and stable world. Our control of disease, for instance, has never been stronger. This may seem audacious to declare mere years after the worst pandemic in living memory. But consider: When the Black Plague struck in the 1300s, we did not even have the germ theory to understand what was happening, and mass death ensued. When an influenza/pneumonia epidemic hit the world in 1918, we had neither a vaccine for the flu nor antibiotics for the pneumonia. When covid arrived in 2020, the scientific community used genomic surveillance to track its history and its spread, tested hundreds of treatments in parallel, and developed a vaccine in record time based on novel mRNA technology.¹⁸ The Plague is estimated to have killed 30% or more of the population it swept through; the 1918 flu killed about 3%; covid about 0.3%.¹⁹

Human agency sometimes advances two steps forward and one step back. Technology grants capabilities but also creates new hazards. But these hazards, too, we learn to control—and we are far better at this today than in the past.

Consider toxins and carcinogens. Lead and asbestos were in use since antiquity; only in the 20th century did we deeply understand their health risks and thoroughly remove them from our environment.²⁰ Mercury and other poisons were once prescribed as drugs; now all pharmaceuticals undergo extensive toxicity testing.²¹ Occupational hazards once included inhalation of smoke or coal dust, or exposure to phosphorus, benzene, or even radium.²² Health concerns today, such as damage from microplastics, are subtle, long-term effects compared to what people routinely faced in the past.²³

Our maintenance of the planet follows the same pattern: we are far more aware of, careful about, and able to control and limit environmental damage than ever before. Primitive hunters drove megafauna to extinction around the world. Early agriculturalists deforested large swaths of land via slash-and-burn, which one historian calls “undoubtedly the greatest ecological destruction in history.”²⁴ In all such cases, those responsible had no concept of the downstream effects of their actions, no way to detect or measure them, and no scientific framework to understand them. Even if they had known what they were doing, they would not have been able to formulate a response, or communicate it to other tribes, or coordinate its implementation.

Contrast this with a modern example of unintended environmental consequences: the degradation of the ozone layer by chlorine-containing chemicals such as CFCs. The effects were located in a minute quantity of an invisible gas several miles above our heads. The consequences were even further removed, such as skin cancer from increased ultraviolet radiation. No society before the 20th century would have had the means to follow such a subtle chain of causation, or to link a chemical used in aerosols with skin lesions elsewhere on the globe, decades later. If CFCs had been invented in the Victorian era, rates of skin cancer would have increased mysteriously for decades without anyone understanding why—probably without anyone even noticing, since statistics on cancer incidence weren’t kept until the mid-1900s. Today, we have the infrastructure to detect the problem: a network of balloons, satellites, and ground-based instruments continually monitoring the composition of all layers of the atmosphere. We have the chemical knowledge to identify ozone, the geophysical knowledge to link it with ultraviolet radiation, and the medical knowledge to link radiation with cancer. We have the surplus wealth to invest in a scientific community that does all these things. We have the communications technology to spread the news when we discover problems like this. And we have the institutions to coordinate an international response, almost completely phasing out ozone-depleting chemicals worldwide.²⁵

The acceleration of material progress has always concerned critics who fear that we will fail to keep up with the pace of change. Alvin Toffler, in a 1965 essay that coined the term “future shock,” wrote:

“I believe that most human beings alive today will find themselves increasingly disoriented and, therefore, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environment. … Change is avalanching down upon our heads and most people are utterly unprepared to cope with it … Such massive changes, coming with increasing velocity, will disorient, bewilder, and crush many people.²⁶“

Toffler and others worried that as progress moves ever faster, the world will slip out of our grasp. But as we have just seen, the historical trend is the opposite: the world does change ever faster, but we get better at dealing with change. We can better comprehend change, thanks to scientific theories, instruments of measurement, monitoring systems, and global communications. We can better respond to it, thanks to technology, wealth, and infrastructure, especially our manufacturing and transportation infrastructure. And we can better coordinate that response, via corporations, markets, governments, and norms of international cooperation. Change has been accelerating ever since the Stone Age, but we can far better handle the changes in our fast-paced world than tribal hunter-gatherers, Bronze Age emperors, or medieval kings could handle the changes even in their relatively slow-moving ones. All of those societies faced existential risk from factors as simple as a shift in climate or a new pathogen: famine, plague, or war could and did cause civilizational collapse.²⁷

Other critics have feared that, since technology is distinct from ourselves, progress therefore weakens us and makes us dependent on an alien object, or even enslaves us to our machines. As early as 1863, Samuel Butler warned:

“Day by day… the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. …

Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.²⁸“

But if we are “slaves” to our machines, then the peasant farmer is a slave to the weather and the soil, and the hunter-gatherer is a slave to wild plants and game. To use the term “slavery” for any external influence or constraint is to destroy the concept. We exist in nature and must make our way in it; that is not slavery but natural law. We can choose to do so well or poorly, to have robustness or insecurity, to live using machines and systems of our own design, or at the mercy of luck and chance. To move from the latter to the former is not slavery but liberation.

To be continued in section 2 of this chapter, on mastery over nature.

1.  Whittaker, Flintknapping, 105-107.
2.  UCL, “Cattle Domesticated 10,500 years ago.”
3. Kuhn and Stiner, “What’s a Mother to do?”
4. Kremer, “Population Growth”; Clarke, “Mortality Trends.”
5. Karnofsky, “Was Life Better in Hunter-Gatherer Times?”; Marciniak et al., “Reduced Health for Early European Farmers.”
6.  Diamond, “Worst Mistake in History.” See Introduction for more on Diamond.
7. Boserup, Conditions of Agricultural Growth, 6; Richerson et al., “Agriculture Impossible during Pleistocene”; Matranga, “Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture.”
8. Mazoyer and Roudart, History of World Agriculture, 69.
9.  Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History, 10.
10.  Carnegie, Autobiography, 94.
11. Wim Blockmans et al. The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300-1600, 19; Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange, 81-82, 101. A notable exception is the Polynesians, whose navigational skills helped them expand throughout the Pacific islands.
12. Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, Village Life in Late-Tsarist Russia, 119. Even today, in the poorest regions, indoor air pollution is a top health hazard: see Ritchie, “Indoor Air Pollution.”
13. Massey, “Sermon Against Inoculation.” Spelling and capitalization have been modernized.
14. Almeida Marques, “Paths of Providence.” Rousseau was responding to Voltaire’s “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster,” which rebutted many of the apologists who said that the earthquake was a just punishment or that it was somehow for the best.
15. Stoddard, Steel: From Mine to Mill, the Metal that Made America, 157.
16.  Waters, “Sea Monsters on Medieval Maps.”
17. Coaston, “What’s your plan for Marriage and Dating?”
18. Hadfield et al, “Real-Time Tracking of Pathogen Evolution”; Milken Institute, “COVID-19 Vaccine and Treatment Tracker”; Vanderslott, “Vaccination.”
19. DeWitt, “Medieval Black Death”; Roser, “The Spanish Flu”; covid percentage is based on Our World in Data’s central estimate of excess deaths in “Estimated Deaths per 100,000 People.”
20.  Sohn, “Lead”; Dignam, “Control of Lead Sources in the United States”; Kakoulli, “Earliest Evidence for Asbestos.”
21. Gaynes, Germ Theory, 53; O’Shea, “Two Minutes with Venus, Two Years with Mercury”; Junod, “FDA: A Short History.”
22. Beer et al, “Systematic Review of Exposure to Coal Dust”; Jacobsen et al, “Phosphorous Necrosis”; “History of Benzene Use”; Orci, “Radium in Everything.”
23. Balch, “Microplastics are inside us all.”
24. Mazoyer and Roudart, History of World Agriculture, 126.
25.  Ritchie, “How we fixed the Ozone layer.”
26.  Toffler, “The Future as a Way of Life.”
27.  Tigue, “Bronze Age Collapse”; Niskanen, “Relevance of Joseph Tainter.”
28.  Butler, “Darwin among the Machines.”

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It’s unclear when ancient humans first arrived on the shores of Sulawesi, a 71,898-square-mile Indonesian island west of Borneo. The oldest-known skeleton dates back to between 16,000 and 25,000 years ago, while some stone tools and rock shelters seem to have been assembled more than 118,000 years ago. Fossil bits from long-gone megafauna, whose quantity and concentration suggest they were hunted to extinction, indicate that other hominin species may have colonized the island earlier still: at a maximum of 194,000 years ago when Indonesia was still connected to the rest of Asia via a land bridge.

Equally puzzling is the origin of the island’s vast collection of cave paintings. The oldest among them — a 14-foot-wide panel of spear-wielding stick figures surrounding what archaeologists describe as warty pigs and “dwarf bovines” — was initially dated to 45,500 years ago, making it not just the oldest in Asia, but one of the oldest in the entire world.

A recent study published in Nature has raised the age of this prehistoric work of art to a minimum of 51,200 years, further challenging our understanding of when and where humans first evolved the capacity to create figurative images.

How to date a cave painting

Found in 2017 at an archaeological site called Leang Karampuang, located near the island’s southernmost tip, the pig and bovine painting was dated the same way all cave art is dated: by measuring the decay of uranium atoms in the rock layer ancient artists used as their canvas. Until recently, this was done by physically excavating bits of rock and placing them underneath a spectrometer to detect the level of uranium decay.

Sun setting over Sulawesi, where ancient humans are thought to have arrived by boat. (Credit: Niek van Son / Wikipedia)

The technique, though tried and tested, has its drawbacks. To avoid damaging the cave art, researchers can only extract the smallest of samples. On top of this, samples often contain not only the original rock wall but also other, younger layers of sediment deposited after the cave paintings were created, which archaeologists refer to as “cave popcorn.” Taking the average of both new and old layers alike, physical sampling tends to yield conservative but not necessarily accurate minimum and maximum ages.

The recent study used a new measuring technique called laser ablation, which uses lasers to scan rock walls without taking physical samples. In addition to being faster, cheaper, and less destructive, this technique allows researchers to tell the layers of sediment apart and only measure those relevant to determining the age of the cave paintings.

While layers of younger sediment “would be impossible to avoid when microexcavating,” the researchers noted that with laser ablation “these areas of localized digenesis [popcorn] can easily be avoided (that is, not integrated) when calculating [Uranium]-series ages from map data.”

Map separating pigment from sediment. (Credit: Oktaviana / Wikipedia)

Although laser ablation produces a larger margin of error than physical sampling due to smaller sample sizes, the authors — led by Indonesian archaeologist Adhi Augus Oktaviana — said that it leads to older and therefore more accurate minimum age estimates. This makes the technique a valuable asset in studying cave paintings like the one discovered in Leang Karampuang, which has been poorly preserved and covered with mineral-rich popcorn deposited after the artwork was created. If popcorn’s inclusion in the physical samples led to a conservative estimate of 45,500 years, laser ablation confidently raised the painting’s minimum age to 51,200 — a difference as big as the time separating the present day from the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia.

The origins of art

The conclusion presented by Oktaviana’s team challenges our notion of when and where the capacity to create art evolved. “Presently,” the authors noted, “the earliest widely accepted evidence for image-making by our species is from the Middle Stone Age [c. 100 to 75,000 years ago], and comprises geometric motifs.”

While archeologists previously speculated that figurative images — images that represent objects and tell stories — emerged in Europe during the Late Pleistocene, the newly dated paintings at Sulawesi suggest that they emerged before ancient humans migrated into Asia between 50 and 70,000 years ago. Experts like Chris Stringer, a British anthropologist working with the Natural History Museum in London, recently told the BBC that Oktaviana’s study provides reason to believe that the emergence of figurative art may even have predated human migration from Africa itself. (Ancient art has been discovered in Africa, though it was not figurative art.)

But that’s if these drawings of warty pigs and dwarf bovines were indeed created by ancient humans. While measuring uranium can help us figure out how old a painting is, it unfortunately does not tell us anything about the hands that made it. Considering Sulawesi was populated by other hominin species before the arrival of Homo sapiens, it’s possible that these paintings were actually the work of our extinct relatives. The oldest known cave painting in the world, located at Maltravieso cave in Spain and thought to have been created around 66,700 years ago by Neanderthals, is but a series of hand imprints. Either other species of hominin were capable of creating figurative art — something for which we have yet to find definitive evidence — or we ourselves learned to make figurative art much, much earlier than previously thought.

This question is by no means trivial, as the emergence of figurative art not only played a crucial role in the evolution of our cognitive abilities, but also in the development of civilization, allowing our ancestors to record and easily communicate ideas, emotions, and social conventions.

As Oktaviana and co-authors explained in the study:

While the origin of figurative art remains riddled with questions, using laser ablation on other cave art in Europe, Asia, and Africa can potentially point us to answers in the future.

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In the early 1950s, small, peculiar love letters were pinned up on the walls of the computing lab at the University of Manchester.

Darling Sweetheart
You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking.
Yours beautifully
M U C

Honey Dear
My sympathetic affection beautifully attracts your affectionate enthusiasm. You are my loving adoration: my breathless adoration. My fellow feeling breathlessly hopes for your dear eagerness. My lovesick adoration cherishes your avid ardour.
Yours wistfully
M U C

These are strange love letters, for sure. And the history behind them is even stranger; examples of the world’s first computer-generated writing, they’re signed by MUC, the acronym for the Manchester University Computer. In 1952, decades before ChatGPT started to write students’ essays, before OpenAI’s computer generated writing was integrated into mainstream media outlets, two gay men—Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey—essentially invented AI writing. Alongside Turing, Strachey worked on several experiments with Artificial Intelligence: a computer that could sing songs, one of the world’s first computer games, and an algorithm to write gender-neutral mash notes that screamed with longing.

Turing and Strachey had been friendly since the mid-1930s, during their days at King’s College, Cambridge. Turing was a graduate student, working on his masters in mathematics while Strachey was an undergrad also studying math. Turing was celebrated as a young brilliant mind, invited to Princeton to complete his PhD and then recruited to join code-breakers at the famous Bletchley Park. Strachey struggled in school. His grades were poor. He didn’t seem particularly dedicated to his classes. He wasn’t admitted to any graduate research programs, but he continued to study. Despite his academic struggles, he proved himself to be a brilliant computer programmer. He went on to work as one of the most prolific, creative, and innovative computer scientists of the 1950s and 1960s.

For Strachey and Turing, writing love letters was arguably a starry-eyed benchmark of intelligence.

By the 1950s, the friendship between Turing and Strachey deepened and evolved into a collaboration. I see flirtatious undertones in their collaborations, but we have no evidence to suggest that they enjoyed a romantic relationship. They exchanged letters, many now lost, hashing out programming problems and articulating their hopes for the future of artificial intelligence. Strachey wrote Turing with updates about the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) machine he was working on at the National Physical Lab, the very same machine that Turing helped design before moving to Manchester to work on the “Baby,” the world’s first stored-program computer.

Strachey was limited by the ACE machine that he had access to in the National Physical Lab. He needed a more powerful machine to run his computer game. So Turing invited him to visit the Manchester Computing Lab and the Mark 1, which he would do on long weekends away from London. The Mark 1 was one of the largest computers operating in the world, second only perhaps to the ENIAC financed by the US Army Ordnance Corps. Remembering his first night working on it in Manchester, Strachey said, “I sat in front of this enormous machine with four or five rows of twenty switches and things, in a room that felt like the control room of a battleship.”

That very night, Strachey programmed the machine to play a song, likely the first ever example of its kind. Soon thereafter, he wrote code for the world’s first computer game. Tic-tac-toe was too simple, and chess too complex, so he decided to program the computer on draughts, otherwise known as checkers. At the time, it was the longest computer program in existence.

Alan Turing in 1936 at Princeton University. (Wikimedia Commons)

Turing and Strachey shared a passion for finding original ways of exploring machine intelligence. They are the field’s most influential queer figures, though they were not alone. Jacob Gaboury, professor of media studies at UC Berkeley, has documented the extensive queer community in the history of computing, including, alongside Turing and Strachey, Robin Gandy, Norman Routledge, and Peter Landin. In their letters, these men discuss all manner of relationships from romantic to professional to platonic. Gay folks tend to know how to find their chosen family. For Turing and Strachey, that included gay community members at King’s College, as well as those who studied mathematics or computers more generally.

On May 15, 1951, Turing delivered a short radio broadcast titled “Can Digital Computers Think?” for the BBC Home Service. It was a question both he and Strachey were exploring. In his lecture, Turing asks listeners to imagine the computer as a mechanical brain, similar to but not exactly like a human brain. A computer can learn, it can be trained, and with time, Turing said, it can exhibit its own unique form of intelligence. He noted one particular difficulty: the computer can do only what the human programmer stipulates. It lacks free will.

“To behave like a brain seems to involve free will,” Turing continues, “but the behavior of a digital computer, when it has been programmed, is completely determined.”

To solve this problem, he suggests a trick. The computer could use a roulette wheel feature to select variables randomly. Then, the computer would appear to make something original and new by adding in a touch of randomness.

Strachey was listening to the lecture, and wrote Turing in excitement. Turing’s radio lecture was, Strachey wrote, “most stimulating and, I suspect to many people provocative, but it fits extraordinarily well with what I have been thinking on the subject.”

In 1951, Turing and Strachey collaborated to program the Mark 1 to create the world’s first computer generated music—”God Save the Queen,” “Ba Ba Black Sheep,” and Glen Miller’s jazz classic “In The Mood”—for a room full of chatting and giggling onlookers. In a letter from the early 1950s, Turing and Strachey discussed training the computer like parents discussing a child. They wrote about themselves as mothers, and showed affection for the computers they were working on.

Still, they remained vexed by the challenges of endowing a machine with free will. To be sure, the computer singing songs and playing games was a demonstration of a machine making choices but making them within a predictable set of options—free will with limits. (Arguably, free will in humans follows the same model, but the number of options is exponentially higher.) Taking up Turing’s suggestion of using a roulette wheel to inject originality into the computer’s decision-making, Strachey used a random number generator programmed by Turing to write the Mark 1’s love letter generator. This program randomly selected words to fit into an already-made template; while this wasn’t exactly total free choice, the resulting letters were highly original.

Here’s how they made the love letter generator. It’s rather simple. They designed a template for each of the letters to follow:

Generate Salutation 1 and 2,
Do this 5 times:
Randomly generate one of the following templates:
1. “You are my” Adjective Noun
2. “My” Adjective(optional) Noun Adverb(optional)
Verb, Your Adjective(optional) Noun
Generate “Yours” Adverb, “MUC” (Strachey, “M.U.C Love
Letter Generator”)

Like a game of Mad Libs, the template gave each letter structure. Then a selection from the word bank would be inserted to fill in the blank. The word bank included a rich grab-bag of sentimental, saccharine, and adoring language. The salutations options likely included terms such as “dearest,” “fanciful,” and “honey.”

The program forsook specific names for gender neutral pet names, like “chickpea,” “moppet,” and “sweetheart,” and included adjectives conveying longing: “breathless,” “burning,” “covetous,” “craving,” “eager.”

The verbs did the heavy lifting. “Lusts after,” “pants for,” “hunger,” “clings,” and “adores” infused desire into these clunky, formulaic missives. Nowadays, anyone can craft a love letter using Strachey’s program, thanks to programmers who have recreated it online and whose recreation informs what we think we know of Strachey’s original code.

The love-letter generator that the pair developed was more than a theoretical and delightful experiment with machine intelligence. It had a personal dimension.

For Strachey and Turing, writing love letters was arguably a starry-eyed benchmark of intelligence. It intrigued them, hinting of a future in which a computer could write original prose. In the 1954 article about this program linked in this story’s opening paragraphs, Strachey explained the program’s “simple trick” that could yield “unexpected and interesting results.” That was what he and Turing sought; they both wanted to find out if a computer could create something that no human ever would. Originality was a key goal for machine intelligence, as they saw it. Indeed, in Turing’s famous 1950 article, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” he included “do something really new” as a vital criterion for intelligence and championed the machine’s brain, observing, “Machines take me by surprise with great frequency,”

Yet the love-letter generator was more than a theoretical and delightful experiment with machine intelligence. It had a deeply personal dimension, as both men were gay in an era when homosexuality was criminalized. In the computer-generated love letters as well as what we know about the personal letters between Turing and Strachey, they expressed perceptible coded queer desire, at least in the view of this reader. What they felt as queer men was, arguably, sublimated into the computer. If Turing and Strachey couldn’t be open about their desires, they’d program a computer that could do it for them.

With these love letters, we get Turing’s “something new.” They are that, and they are strange. In some ways, of course, it’s a trick, a random collection of words that, in their own way, build something strangely beautiful, if far less than poetic genius. But they don’t have to be poetry to nevertheless teem with longing and generate infinite possibilities for expressing sexual desire, for public declarations of love.

While these men were busy in computing labs, England was becoming increasingly hostile towards gay men. Being gay was outlawed with the Buggery Act of 1533; the Labouchere Amendment of 1885 further criminalized any act of “gross indecency.” Starting around 1945, homosexuality was discussed not as an individual failing, but as a social problem that could be studied and also solved. Then, in 1951, the newly appointed Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, led a wide-spread campaign to punish gay men and was reported to have a “single-minded determination to harass all homosexuals.” In 1952, the year after Maxwell Fyfe was appointed, the number of prosecuted gay men skyrocketed to 5,443 men (compared to just over 1,000 a decade earlier). According to some sources, that same year Strachey, using Turing’s random number generator, created his love-letter writing proxy. It is also the year Turing was prosecuted for “gross indecency,” following a fling with a younger gentleman.

“I’ve now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered to be quite a possibility for me, though I have unusually rated it at 10:1 against,” he confided in his friend Norman Routledge. To Routledge, Turing foretold, “No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out.”

After his conviction, Turing agreed to undergo chemical castration in order to avoid serving time in prison.

What happened to Turing and the implementation more generally of these anti-gay laws spread fear and distrust within England’s queer community. That was precisely their point. Pressed further into the closet, gay men had no liberty to express desire openly. Instead, in Turing and Strachey’s case, they turned to a computer to express it for them.

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