How The Human Civilization Progresses?
And What Does the Future Holds For Us
Why Are We Asking this Question?
Everyone, at least once in their life have always thought of this question in their own echo chamber. The future. Every human being has been curious about it.
Some people think about it, some build it.
What will be the next thing? How will the future unfold?
What will become important? What will cease to exist?
To under what really will affect the future. One must understand how the history has unfolded.
How the human civilization has made progress?
How it has happened before. Not 5 years ago. Not 10. Not even 50 but we need to understand the horizon of at least last 100 or 200 years.
This understanding will help us basically answer two major things, why and when.
Looking at the bigger picture is extremely important, otherwise you'll end up finding answers that are already available and are of short term horizon.
We're here to find out the why, not the how or what and the answer to 'why' is never a simple.
How the Humans Has Progressed in the Last Centuries
Let's consider the progress Humans have made till date in all kind of ways.
Be it healthcare, communication, transportation and everything else, if you look closely, there is one thing common in all the inventions, optimisations, discoveries.
Can you guess it? It’s a cliche answer. There was a problem that existed and then came solution and that solution is tried by few
The problems were all different across different parts of life.
The biggest common attribute is that all the progress, all the inventions, all the big companies, startups, can come down to one single point, they all make a humans life easier/convenient/more comfortable.
Most of the biggest progress that humans have ever done till date is only to make ones life more comfortable.
Be it a simple pen, be it a fridge, be it a fan, be it piece of software like online shopping, online banking and more.
The other aspect of any new big thing is that it has least 100 years of situational need.
Meaning, people need motor vehicles because there’s no better way of personal transportation on road. Let’s assume, humans manage to make a teleportation device for humans, then a car or even a plane would probably become useless. There would be no automobile industry.
There’s another way to look why the World became what it became as well, which will give you better perception of things.
Life As We Know It
Everything that you see around you, was just a thought is someone’s mind at point.
It is then translated to a paper or computer giving it better structure or a plan to achieve it.
Then tried on a few. They like it and it grows from one region or one specific segment of people to more.
Few years or decades later, everyone is using it.
That’s a startup becoming a fortune 500.
That’s an invention becoming household thing.
What really boggles my mind is that we humans tend to take things for granted.
Electricity is a need. Today, millions of NGOs exist so electricity can be provided to the areas still suffering the outage or maybe absolutely no electricity.
Governments make sure that all it’s citizen must be provided with electricity.
Our human civilization will figuratively freeze and might even go into a state of shock if electricity stops suddenly today in the World.
But once it was just a thought in a person minds.
It was just a bunch of electrochemical signals in some peoples' head. Thanks to Edison, Tesla and many others who contributed to get this invention to the World.
Similarly, the computer, the smartphone, the wifi router, the TV, the landline and more such stuff, that we take for granted, were all once just a thought in a person’s head.
Not just that but, eventually, one by one, when these ideas turned into products or services people could use and then when a millions of people start using it, it becomes part of life. To people born in the 21st century, internet, smartphones, and similar things are quite obvious to them and they take it for granted because it is involved in all aspects of their life. For people born in the 20th century understand that it wasn’t always like this.
This perspective is exactly what gives me hope.
A hope that makes me wanna believe that if you can make people’s lives easier and better in any aspect, one day, millions or potentially billions of people would be using something in their daily life that’ll involve something a small group of people created.
Change: How The Future Unfolds
The human progress or timeline is affected by many thing like if there would have been no war in the World Wars, many inventions, small-to-big wouldn’t have been there.
Not saying world war was a good thing, but rather stating a fact.
Necessity is the mother of all inventions
True, but what it really means that, great inventions need an agent that forces to mould the World better.
Something needs to be poked, to put that dent into the universe.
It could be a common problem that everyone is going through, like most medical-science inventions/discoveries.
Or it could be a person wanting to fix a small problem for few but does that in such excellence, that even those people who didn’t have the problem now can’t live without it.
Facebook or most social media platforms are extremely good examples of this. It wasn’t a need for everyone. People used to connect before as well on text, call, emails or print. Some did needed it but most people just wanted to be part of the trending thing and since many came to the platform, today billions of people use some kind of social media daily and social media has become an important part of everyone’s life.
There’s also one more interesting observation about Facebook.
Facebook could be made possible because the browsers exists, which itself existed because internet existed.
The internet exists because the United States researches (along with UK and French researches) wanted inter-connected computers.
These researches could develop this network, called internet because computers existed in the first place.
Computers existed because of it’s softwares and hardwares.
Software came into existence because people wanted a faster way to work around the hardware.
Hardware for computers existed because there was enough research on Silicon that made silicon chips possible.
You see?
Every existing invention will affect the next one. Every ‘big thing’ from today will make the path for the ‘next big thing’
Facebook is on top of this example but today many facebook pages or small content-based businesses exist because the social media exists.
Zero to One
Going from nothing to something is zero to one. From nothing to prototype. From just an idea to something that actually solves the problem for just one person.
The biggest challenges are faced here. Getting that idea out from your head and turning into reality is when most ideas are filtered out.
The next big challenge that comes is making it’s availability to a larger amount of people. Now, this part is the key.
If the creation is needed, the expansion will happen and if situation allows, it won’t take much time.
Look at facebook, it took 1 year to reach 1 million users and 8years to reach a billion users and today almost 2 billion people are daily active suers of facebook.
Coke sells little over a billion bottles everyday today. Coke originated in 1886. Facebook was founded in 2004.
Conclusion
You want to put a dent into the universe?
Observe the problems of the past.
Observe the solutions of the past.
Foresee the future.
Foresee the problems of the future.
Think. Think. Think about the possible solutions to the problem.
All this doesn’t mean shit if one doesn’t have a plan on the World scale. The thinking part is hard to come by but the execution or the implementation is really difficult but this difficulty is actually good.
It acts like an filter that separates the things that the World doesn’t want.
But, remember the hope. Hope of a solution that you can think about sitting on your couch, that just might be used by billions of people worldwide.
I read a quote yesterday and although I had heard it many times before but it left an impression on me yesterday somehow.
Maybe because I was sitting duck getting anxious about the future.
“When nothing is certain, everything is possible”
I hope you get it too.
