Humanity's Journey through the Epochs

A Summary of the Human Journey and What Could Come Next, and Soon

I just finished my posts on humanity’s first four Epochs, which are:

The first was becoming human;

The second was conquering Earth;

The third was domesticating plants and animals;

Epoch 3.1 was the rise of civilization;

Epoch 3.2 was Europe’s conquest of Earth;

The fourth was industrialization;

Epoch 4.1 was the rise of oil and electricity;

I then divided the period since 1900 into the halves of the 20^th century (1, 2) and the 21^st century so far, but it is all still part of the Fourth Epoch, as it all still primarily rides on the energy of fossil fuels.

Those are the Epochs of the human journey until now, and we are on the brink of the Fifth Epoch today.  The foundations of the first four Epochs were always energy breakthroughs, and mid-Epoch events were also.  Epoch 3.1 was made possible by using low-energy transportation lanes to feed civilization.  Epoch 3.2 was made possible by Europe’s technical feat of turning Earth’s ocean into a low-energy transportation lane.  Oil was a new resource for Epoch 4.1, and electricity was a new way to power technologies (although the energy for it was still mainly fossil fuels and still is). 

Without those energy breakthroughs, the Epochs would not have happened and the human line would still be bipedal apes with brains the size of a chimp’s.  None of the Epochs were foreordained.  Aboriginal Australians stayed in the Second Epoch for 50,000 years, until the invasion of British in their Fourth Epoch.  Human-line australopiths and others that didn’t evolve into Homo erectus all went extinct, and perhaps driven there by those who mastered stone tools and fire.  More than 80% of humanity today does not live in the Fourth Epoch, but are still in the Third Epoch, by and large, although Fourth Epoch practices greatly reduced childhood death in today’s agrarian nations, among other benefits. 

Each new Epoch had an energy surplus greater than the previous Epoch, and that, more than anything else, allowed human societies to become more humane, and violence also declined with each new Epoch.  The daily brutalities of prior Epochs are hard for comfortable industrialized peoples to even imagine.  The World Wars came via upstart industrial powers that arrived at the imperial table later than the original industrial powers.  One paradox is that while we are proportionally less violent, Earth’s species and humanity are at risk as never before, as we make Earth uninhabitable and fight over dwindling fossil fuels, in what has been called “plan war.”  Middle East oil is history’s greatest material prize, and as Bucky Fuller said, if oil was priced at its benefit to humanity, it would cost a million dollars a barrel. 

Unless we tap the Fifth Epoch’s energy source, it may be a fight to the finish, which could be a nuclear finish that takes nearly everybody with it.  The technology to usher in the Fifth Epoch is older than I am.  All efforts to independently develop that and related technologies have been defeated by organized suppression, and sometimes murderously.  My former partner should not have survived his ordeal, after refusing the CIA’s billion-dollar bribe.  When people hear about these situations, they nearly invariably react with denial, indifference, and fear.  For the relative few who get past that, they are almost always trapped by other defects of understanding, which has helped doom all independent efforts to this day.  I spent my life in life-risking and life-ruining trial and error, before I arrived at my current approach.  The approach will work, if the people are found who can help, and I know who they are.  There are not many of them on Earth, but it will not take many, either.