Look how far we’ve come

We’re living in an exciting, but dangerous, time.

There are things that we take for granted: pretty much everything. The world has progressed with tremendous speed in all parts of life. Our governments are democratic, we have tablets and smartphones and so many advanced things, and the Internet is becoming more mainstream.

But there are approximately 3 billion people who don’t see humans as that at all. The poorest people don’t know what “internet” is, nor do they know of just how lavishly today’s middle class is living. They are limited in their knowledge, but unlimited in their potential for greed. And who can blame them? They are denied even the most basic things: food, water, shelter and clothing.

The world has progressed much more than we think, but an additional concern has also cropped up: income inequality. The graph of the percentage of people in the world versus the percentage of money they hold is more skewed than ever.

There are so many ways in which people live, that we simply cannot comprehend the atrocities or luxuries people have experienced, and continue to experience, in the world, in its entirety.

Instead, we leave that task to non-fiction authors who condense (and sometimes sensationalise) all that complex information into something that the public can read and understand without spending so much time.

We’ve come far in technology, as well as the level of atrocities we commit. Just last week, there three plane crashes, and I don’t remember the last time something like that happened. Human trafficking shows no sign of stopping, and there are many things in the world to feel bad about.

We’d expect the bad things in the world to become better with time, and indeed, they have. But compared to how much better good things have become, bad things seem not to be so much better anymore.

If you’re reading this, then you live in a different world, and are probably in the top 30% of the human population. There are people who are much worse off, and still continue to live. From the perspective of an aspiring poor person, a relatively rich person committing suicide is an irony to them, for if they were in the rich person’s place, they would gladly endure whatever this rich, now dead, person couldn’t.

More important than the will to live is the will to explore. Curiosity is the one human trait that has propelled human civilisation to new heights. The brain’s capacity to ask questions and look around for answers has led to the establishment of a framework — Science — that we can fit new things we learn into. No longer are discoveries isolated. Rather, their relation to previous discoveries is explored, setting the space for newer discoveries.

As far as medicine is concerned, the unimaginable growth in population is testament to the former’s effectiveness. We’re able to cure many diseases now, and the average human life span has jumped by almost 10 years in the past century.

The time we took to become one billion is more than ten times the time we took to overcome the latest billion, i.e., from 6 billion to 7 billion people. But, more devastating than the growth in human population is the increase in consumption. Our energy, food and shelter needs are greater than ever. Rising house and electricity prices, and inflation in food prices, are all natural consequences.

We’ve multiplied like a virus, and now the Earth is having a bad time adjusting to our sheer numbers. If we lived like the poorest Ethopians, the Earth would be able to sustain maybe a hundred billion people, but if everybody lived like the average American, even one billion people would put so much pressure on the environment that we’d soon face severe shortages in essential commodities, and go extinct.

We’re currently at a crossroads. One way leads to human enlightenment, judicial use of resources, and everlasting happiness and peace. Another way leads to ignorance, blatant overuse of resources, and everlasting misery and despair.

And by the looks of it, we’re heading in the second direction…