WHIST it is true that human dominance of the global space can now be taken for granted, it is astonishing how recently that status was attained. Before the ascent of man, for example, the global space was dominated to the exclusion of any other kind of animal group by the dinosaurs for more than 160 million years; until some sixty-five million years ago when that dominance was obliterated by the unfortunate collision of a giant asteroid with the earth, killing all those magnificent beasts in a single horrific day and changing the trajectory of global development permanently. The climate changes which followed the asteroid impact created a new sterile environment which persisted for many million years but allowed the emergence and subsequent development of the inheritors of a radically changed world including the human species which has now replaced the dinosaurs as the rulers of the earth. Man developed from this morass over a very long period of erratic evolution until modern man became fully formed only a few hundred thousand years ago. Man, modern man, that is, is therefore a brand new comer to this environment but within that period of time has changed practically all the features of the earth so profoundly that the earth can never be what she used to be and is no doubt, because of the careless and massive exploitation of the earth’s resources is now a much poorer version of what she used to be. Man has used and abused this planet to such an extent that there are genuine fears for her future and the search for an alternative home planet in the aridity of space has left the realms of science fiction and has become an obsession with some of the world’s richest men who having conquered the earth, are now embarked on the adventures of space travel and eventual colonisation. Having eviscerated the earth, mankind is threatening to abandon her for greener pastures in the same way that in the so called age of discovery, a very significant number of Europeans abandoned their homes in Europe and fanned out across the world to the detriment of those whose lands, bodies and resources they appropriated for their own benefit.
Modern man took her first faltering steps some three hundred thousand years ago and since then has not evolved further in any significant physical manner. Socially however, man has evolved so markedly that he is no longer recognisable from the early man that surveyed his surroundings with great trepidation and a total lack of the resources which we now take for granted. And yet success came very slowly and had to be won one step at a time and sometimes having to start again from a dead end. In those early days of our precarious existence, everything had to be wrung out of the earth in spite of the abundance of nature. What was missing at that time was the relevant knowledge which was required to make things happen in a positive way for the continued existence of man. All the knowledge that was required for human development had to be wrestled from nature and then passed down to succeeding generations which in their turn contributed their own quota to the quantum of the knowledge which was required to govern the earth and exploit its fullness. That there are now close to eight billion human beings on earth is testimony to the success of the human species but this has not always been so, as it has been calculated that there was a time when all the exploitable resources of the earth could not sustain more than one million human beings. It is from the ridiculously low number that mankind has grown to such a large number and is quite capable of growing further. The explosion of knowledge which drove the social evolution of mankind has been truly phenomenal both in scope and volume but so addicted to the search for knowledge have humans become that we have entered an era in which knowledge is now cultivated for its own sake but even then, no knowledge is ever allowed to go to waste.
Up till some ten thousand years ago, mankind everywhere had to derive her subsistence from nature by hunting other animals and gathering edible vegetables from the environment within which they lived. This meant that not only did man had to gather a deal of information about his environment but had to immerse himself in his surroundings and become one with nature. There was a great deal to learn so that it took a lifetime at a time when life expectancy hovered around the thirty year mark, for any individual to acquire the knowledge which could be passed down like a baton in a relay race to the next generation. Longevity was therefore a premium and the leadership of any group was devolved on the oldest member of the group who had been schooled and knew how to direct the gathering of food, to delegate certain responsibilities within the group and in doing so guarantee the immediate future of the group. Many times there was no room for error because there was no second chance to start all over again when a wrong turning was taken. At that point in time leadership was a matter of life and death and it is easy to imagine that destructive leadership tussles could lead to the demise of a whole group of people which fortunately, could not for reasons of survival be large. Still it was a great responsibility for anyone to be the acknowledged leader of any group of human beings who had been brought together to stand shoulder to shoulder in the unending struggle for survival.
A giant step in the social evolution of man occurred some ten thousand years ago when man quite fortuitously discovered simultaneously in three recognisable far flung areas of the world, the science of agriculture. This made it possible, for the first time in the history of mankind for him to settle down in particular areas, till the soil on which they had settled and, produce enough food to remove the need for a nomadic and precarious existence in which all the necessities of life had to be laboriously gathered from nature. It has to be said however that even today there are still people who depend on their perpetual movement from place to place in order to live and pass on their cultural mores to succeeding generations but it is safe, in the light of our current way of life to see such groups of people as leading an exotic life style that is totally at variance with the mainstream.
There is little doubt that the social evolution which has made it possible for mankind to ride the existential storms with which it was confronted initially, was based on cooperation rather than any competition between different groups of people. Today however we talk of the rat race and put our trust in the survival of the fittest so that there are losers in every race and the fittest who survive are no longer fit for anything but plot further exploitation of those who are in their jargon, not as fit as they are. In our determination to exploit and consume rather than conserve nature we are using up earth’s irreplaceable resources at such a rate that there could be nothing left for future generations unless of course We can shift our focus to extraterrestrial regions in which case man would have succeeded in creating a new race of men with the capacity to somehow survive on some distant planet. The earth is still blessed with abundant resources but there is so much competition as to who can consume more than others that the struggle to corner increasingly scarce desources will make nonsense of the cooperative effort which has lifted man to the level of the gods. And it is becoming clear that those that now have control over global resources are not likely to extend the hand of fellowship to those that have not. In the last two years, the Covid-19 pandemic has created a new and frightening world in which the spectre of painful illness and sudden death has taken on the colour of grim reality. Human response was characterised by a race to produce and administer effective vaccines to deal with the destruction associated with the virus. Human ingenuity prevailed over the virus and within a few months those members of the human species living in the developed parts of the globe were vaccinated whilst those in the less developed parts of the world were abandoned to their fate since the man made but iron laws of economics did not allow for anything near an equitable distribution of the life saving vaccines. These laws are a prime example of what has developed from the social evolution of man which in the absence of any traits of physical evolution has created a new world and in the absence of a cooperative spirit has divided the human race into different classes making a mockery of our common racial origin, an origin which has been traced to Africa making Africans of every single one of us on earth. And the points of separation are growing increasingly wider almost by the day to the detriment of what should be our shared future. Perhaps those who are now exploring the possibility of abandoning the earth for life more abundant on Mars will soon be successful in living in some extraterrestrial environment which will kick-start a round of physical evolution leading to the development of another race of men with eyes at the back of their head.