My Epochal Framework of the Human Journey

Why I think that it enhances understanding.

I did not entirely create my Epochal framework of the human journey. What began the Third Epoch is called the Domestication Revolution, and my Fourth Epoch also began with the Industrial Revolution. My First Epoch (becoming human), Second Epoch (conquering Earth), and Fifth Epoch (Epoch of abundance) are my inventions. What distinguished the Epochs are their energy practices. Earl Cook’s work was significant to my growing understanding, and this table is partly his work. Each Epoch was a completely different world for its denizens. Not only could nobody see the next Epoch coming or even imagine it, looking backward to prior Epochs could also engender incomprehension. Industrialized peoples can scarcely imagine a world in which mothers risked their lives just to become mothers, and they would see half of their children die before adulthood, if the mothers even lived that long. The daily brutalities of agrarian societies are hard for comfortable Westerners to imagine. The Second Epoch was far worse in ways, with far more violence, and if a hunter-gather woman gave birth to twins, she got to pick which one to kill, as she could not afford to carry two. Infanticide lasted until the Industrial Revolution, and it was usually girls that were killed.

What I found through long years of study (and witnessed how my own Epoch operates, and it is far different from the propaganda version), is that nearly all people simply assumed the framework of their Epoch, as it became largely invisible to them and out of mind, and their efforts are devoted to surviving in their Epochs. Survival, temporarily sating their addictions, and finding some pleasant moments in the mayhem of their grim lives were about all that most people strived for. Until now, making the next Epoch happen has never been anybody’s intention for the entire human journey, which is partly what makes my task so difficult: almost nobody is interested, and if the subject arises, the standard reactions are denial and fear, as all that nearly all people can see is their world coming to an end, a world that they devoted their lives to surviving in. They rarely understand that something like heaven on Earth may well lie on the other side of the coming transition.

It took developing an Epochal framework for me to finally understand why people reacted to the idea of free energy like they did, and it made me more sympathetic to their stances. All that they could see was their potential personal loss. It was like a slave that was afraid of freedom, not knowing what lied ahead but imagining the worst.

I am going to briefly sketch the salient features of each Epoch (and my identified sub-Epochs), based on my studies.

First Epoch: Becoming Human – Bipedal apes learned to make stone tools over three million years ago (and other kinds of tools that have not survived to be studied), which enhanced their food supply. Their brains began growing around the same time, in what was likely a series of positive feedbacks over the subsequent three million years. Rock-wielding apes began driving species to extinction early on, and when Homo erectus appeared, humans became apex predators. Somewhere along the way, humans learned how to control fire, they invented language, and the nuclear family was invented.

The human line got bigger but weaker, as its tools reduced the need for brawn, and interpersonal violence declined, although that is relative. Homo sapiens arrived on the evolutionary scene about 200,000-to-300,000 years ago, and probably sometime between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, Homo sapiens became behaviorally modern. Innate human intelligence has likely not changed much since then, but our collective intelligence began an ascent that is unmatched in the journey of life on Earth.

The Second Epoch: Conquering Earth – The genetic evidence is that there was one basic migration from Africa, probably between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago. There were previous migrations of Homo sapiens, but that seminal migration was the one that nearly all humans who are not sub-Saharan Africans are descended from. There was some interbreeding with other human species during that global conquest, but they were all soon driven to extinction, as well as most of Earth’s large animals that Homo sapiens could get to. The biggest loser was likely the elephant family, which was the most successful mammal ever before the rise of humans. The human line had been driving them to extinction since Homo erectus, but with the spread of behaviorally modern humans, nothing could stand in the way of our ancestors. The elephant family lived the length and breadth of the Americas before humans arrived, and they quickly went 100% extinct during the short-lived golden age of the hunter-gatherer.

The human population rose by a factor of around a thousand during that conquest, and when the easy meat was gone, humans became fiercely territorial once more. The skeletal evidence is that those men were “hyper-masculine” and about 25% of them died violently. Nomadic hunter-gatherer societies could not be very charitable nor have societal hierarchies. There was not enough energy for it. It was strictly subsistence living, and killing extra infants and even the elderly when food was scarce was common practice. Men’s upper bodies are twice as strong as women’s, and infant care made women less mobile, so there was a division of labor, which was generally that men hunted and women gathered.

In a few places on Earth, mainly along shorelines, such as salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest, some hunter-gatherers became sedentary. Many changes to human societies came with sedentary life, such as amassing possessions, including people. Some men became potentates and had many wives and slaves.

The Third Epoch: Domestication – The warming of this interglacial interval, combined with the population pressures of millions of hunter-gathers (versus only a few thousand before the conquest of Earth), led humans to domesticate plants and animals, to create a local and stable food supply. It took several thousand years for domestication to spread, especially crops, but it eventually replaced the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in nearly every place that was suitable for farming, and the human population exploded once again. Women likely domesticated plants, as an adjunct to their gathering duties, and in many such societies the women’s economic contribution was so great that they became matrilocal, which the human line likely had not seen much of, going back to gorillas. That change broke up gangs of related males, and those were the human journey’s most peaceful preindustrial societies.

There was an early honeymoon of domestication, of intact forests, fertile soils, and few competitors for crops (“pests”), and as with the golden age of the hunter-gatherer, the early days of domestication were largely peaceful. But populations expanded far beyond what a hunter-gatherer economy could support, agriculture resulted in degraded forests and soils, competitors for the crops arrived, and agricultural life became drudgery. Sedentary societies presented new problems, such as accumulated filth and people began getting diseases from their domestic animals. People shrank in stature and became unhealthier, but unless nearly all of them died off, there was no going back to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Population pressures once again led to violence between communities (warfare, which goes back to chimps), as people were compelled by the biological imperatives of survival and reproduction.

Epoch 3.1: Civilization – In several places on Earth, several thousand years of farming led to civilization. There are two main theories for why civilizations formed: elite benefit or benefit for everybody else, and it was likely some combination of the two. Civilization led to two new social roles: elites and professions. Slavery also reached new levels. Professions were possible because intensive agriculture relieved professionals of subsistence duties, and elites and professions rode on the back of the subsistence class. Elites were largely societal parasites who established their rule violently. In ways, not a lot has changed since then, and today’s global elites are far greater parasites than most people can imagine.

All agrarian civilizations were fed by low-energy transportation lanes, generally bodies of water, as water transportation only took about 1% of the energy that overland transportation did. Without those low-energy transportation lanes, civilization was not feasible. While civilization conferred new benefits to humanity, it came with a new set of problems and evils. Benefits included writing, math, science, new technologies such as the wheel and metallurgy, and monumental architecture accompanied all civilizations, which was usually a form of elite display, to overawe the lower classes. The problems and evils included slavery and warfare on new scales, epidemic diseases from the crowding, filth on new levels, and the local environments were devastated by deforestation, erosion, and other scourges. From the earliest civilizations, they conquered each other in prodigious bloodbaths. Where Israel sits today has been fought over by many civilizations during the past several millennia. Civilizations have never been sustainable. mainly because they never had reliable energy supplies. All agrarian civilizations collapsed, deforestation aggravated droughts, and epic crop failures accompanied those collapses.

Epoch 3.2: The Second Conquest of Earth – Northwestern Europe was a backwater for millennia, as Mediterranean, Fertile Crescent, and Asian empires rose and fell. After Rome’s collapse, Greek watermill technology found widespread use in wet Northwestern Europe, Greek teachings were reintroduced to Europe, and the High Middle Ages marked the rise of Europe. Warfare was a near-constant for several centuries. After the scourge of the Black Death, Europeans achieved the technical feat of turning the world’s ocean into a low-energy transportation lane, and Europe easily conquered humanity, which is the greatest demographic catastrophe in the human journey. From the beginning of farming to Europe’s conquest of Earth, it was all primarily powered by crops and wood, so it was all part of the same Epoch.

The Fourth Epoch: Industrialization – In the midst of Earth’s conquest, a deforested England turned to coal like no other society ever did, which led to the Industrial Revolution. Machines replaced human muscles and dexterity, and coal provided the energy to run them. Nothing remotely like it had been seen before. Brute-force labor became obsolete and slavery soon ended. But most importantly, industrialization and its attendant Scientific Revolution led to unprecedented health benefits that ended childhood death, and medical interventions had nothing to do with it. The decline in childhood death was due to improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and hygiene. It led to the demographic transition, to long-lived, literate, relatively free people. Mothers no longer needed to bear several children so that two could survive to reproductive age. It is the biggest event in the human journey so far.

Epoch 4.1: Oil and Electricity – Coal powered the Industrial Revolution for more than a century, and just as coal overtook wind and water power, oil began to be mined. Oil was a highly superior fuel to coal, especially for transportation. Electricity enabled fossil-fuel power to be used in ways previously unimaginable. The telegraph and incandescent lighting were the first two widespread uses of electricity, and electricity soon had myriad applications.

But, like coal, oil was made from the detritus of ancient life processes (as are the iron deposits that humanity mines), so my Fourth Epoch is defined by the use of fossil fuels. Our modern world runs on fossil fuels, but we are burning them up a million times as fast as they were created, and they will be largely depleted in this century. Will we wipe ourselves out, fighting over the last fossil fuels, accompanied by the havoc wreaked by Global Warming, in what I have called a “race of the catastrophes” scenario?

The Fifth Epoch: Abundance – This is really where I come in. If you had told me, when I was 16 and had my first energy dreams, what was ahead of me, I would not have believed any of it. By the time I was 30, I was a partner in a company that promoted the world’s best heating system and two of the world’s best heat engines, one of which was considered the best engine for powering a car. We were pursuing what we came to call free electricity, by marrying that heating system with those heat engines. The global elite approached us several times, and their “final offer” was a billion dollars to fold our operation, before they stopped playing nicely. I had my moment of truth on the witness stand, and my life was never the same. It was only years later that I learned that what we pursued was a reality. The energy technology to usher in an Epoch of abundance is older than I am, but it is kept from public awareness and use by history’s greatest cover-up. The use of those technologies (including antigravity) will end the world as we know it, and nobody will miss it.

But how to get there? That is what my life’s work is really all about, and my Substack presence is my latest experiment in building what I have called the choir. All that I seek these days is to initiate a high-level, comprehensive discussion. If an effort like mine can amass the people needed to support the effort, with only their sentience and voice, the rest will be easy. Today, I seek disillusioned idealists, as they generally have the qualities that I think are needed.