The scale of time that Curt Stager considers in Deep Future, while it remains essentially human, in that he focuses primarily on the time that human-like primates have inhabited the earth, is nevertheless vast in comparison to any individual life. Even allowing that a normal life span is now approaching 100 years, that is nevertheless a relatively brief moment in the history of the planet, or even in the history of human existence. And yet it is all a matter of perspective. Any one of us fortunate enough to survive into our seventh or eighth decade will have experienced a considerable amount of personal history and witnessed a good deal of change. And that is now true even for those inhabiting the less technically advanced parts of the earth. There is no place to hide from change, whether it's climate or cultural.
I have often thought of some of the changes I've witnessed. Every generation has this experience, but it seems to be accelerating with each new cohort. This is interesting, because each new generation also seems to feel that it is the crown of creation, the destiny of progress.We all have a tendency to think that what is now is what must, or at least should, continue to be. As Curt Stager points out, in a similar context, it's like the old parable of the blind men describing an elephant, each imagining a creature based on the particular part he happens to be touching. We each experience our moment of existence as somehow significant and indicative of some profound reality. How can it be otherwise? And yet what could be more delusional?
The most fascinating part of Stager's Deep Future was the way he forced me to think about a longer view of human history, not just a generation or two, or even a few hundred years, but thousands and tens of thousands of years. In that time humans have vastly altered the earth, whether for good or ill is practically irrelevant. Think only of North America. The Indians, Native Americans, Indigenous Peoples, whatever we wish to call them, had already begun to change the continent before the arrival of Europeans, but the alterations brought by the European conquest accelerated the pace of change, bringing industry and machinery followed by urbanization. The burning of fossil fuels was also a big part of that change, exploiting the continent's reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas to make the energy needed to drive progress. Meanwhile similar changes were sweeping across Europe and now Asia. Stager demonstrates through chemistry and mathematical analysis the scale of human intervention in the composition of the earth's atmosphere, but he also shows how the atmosphere has been altered in earlier eras by the activity of bacteria, and plants, and geological events. Earth's climate history is long, much longer than human history.
But this got me thinking again about my own history and some of the changes I've seen. I recall that as recently as my own childhood we relied on an ice box that depended on regular deliveries of large blocks of ice from the iceman to keep our food fresh. The advent of a refrigerator that not only kept the food cold and the milk fresh but also made its own ice was a revelation. The milk also came not only to our door, but to our kitchen, delivered by our regular milkman, just as the ice had been delivered by the iceman. Our first telephone was on a party line, which meant we shared it with several other families who used the same line and could, if they were nosey, listen in on our calls. At first our home entertainment was only from the radio, an enormous piece of furniture that was eventually replaced by our first television, also enormous, but with a rather tiny viewing screen, although eventually twenty-one inches became the standard of excellence.
Soon I learned to expect change, even though I sometimes tended to resist it. Even as a child I worried what would become of the iceman once we got a refrigerator? And I insisted that my mother continue deliveries from our milkman, until I went away to college and she quietly gave him his notice. By that time radio, once the source of drama, comedy, and mystery programs, broadcast only music; for the rest we relied on television. The phone soon gave us a direct private line, and eventually morphed into smaller and smaller devices, eventually to be almost replaced, at first by wireless sets and then by much smaller personal cell phones that have now begun to grow into somewhat larger multi-purpose devices that also serve as networked computers, phonographs, video displays, and cameras that take still and motion pictures. And our cameras have gone from the early Kodak that relied on photographic film, which itself had replaced earlier more cumbersome technologies, to the magical Polaroid that made instant photos, to early digital cameras that gave instant gratification, but lacked clarity, to multi-megapixel cameras that have rendered film nearly obsolete even for those who make movies.
And what are we to think of music. We listened to it on radios, then on phonographs that played wax, then vinyl disks, tape recorders, first reel to reel, then cassette, followed briefly by compact discs, all eventually to be displaced by digital recordings that can be stored (and played) on devices sometimes no larger than a wafer. Entire industries have been altered; some are on the verge of vanishing. And so also with books. Of course, we still write, and print, and buy millions and millions of books. But the change is already underway, along with the digitization of the way we work, and the way we teach and learn. Much of this has come along with the spread of computers which, when I was young and still in school, were enormous machines kept in spotlessly clean and air-conditioned rooms. At first humans interacted with them only by means of paper punched with coded holes, as they had done with automated mechanical devices, but soon we had terminals and cathode ray screens similar to televisions. But even this was only a brief stage on the journey as we replaced our CRTs, both for computers and televisions, with flat screen LCDs, also a step along the way to more advanced video displays. And now even our smart phones are 3D. Advanced and visionary types see a day, soon perhaps, when we will carry only a single device no larger than our smart phones (although these, as I said, seem to be growing again), no longer needing desktop computers, telephones, cameras, record players, books, or even credit cards or other means of identification. But why should we even require devices?
Also in a not too distant time we will find ourselves coping with a different climate and environment, as well as a different diet, modified by the latest beliefs about health and the rather limited availability of much of the food we used to eat. I suspect we will also have learned to live in a more social environment where privacy as I experienced it will have become unknown, not because of the expansion of Big Brother police states, although that is also likely, but because privacy will have become obsolete in a more social and collective environment. Some will perhaps resent this and will profess to miss the good old days, some always do. Even today you can hear folks lamenting the passing of what they recollect as the good old days. But the fact is change is inevitable; most of it has already happened; we're just trying to catch up to it and learn to live with it. And so is it any wonder that we like to think or hope that it will stop with us, that each generation believes it will be the crown of creation, the ultimate stop for the history of progress and human destiny? As Stager points out, the world will be a very different place in 2050 or 2100, but it will be home to those who live there, and for them it will be not the future but the new normal, the latest in a long history of good old days. And our own advanced times? Well, we'll be as quaint as those people in the old black and white photographs, the ones we used to capture with cameras that used photographic film--whatever that was.
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