Some Welcome Changes that Come with the Fifth Epoch
The world will end as we know it, but nobody will miss it
The video of this post is here.
I recently read an excellent recent article on the state of the science for why Homo sapiens is the only member of our genus that exists today: our ancestors drove all of the others to extinction. It was likely not a gentle process. That article mentioned one possibility for that triumph: the invention of the bow and arrow. I thought that the evidence marshalled in this book competently made that case. Australian aborigines lived in a kind of “lab” that preserved hunter-gatherer societies until very recently, and the earliest accounts by Europeans of aboriginal life showed it to be highly warlike. A third of the women’s skulls and a quarter of the men’s skulls unearthed in Australia had healed fractures from interpersonal violence.
Today, aboriginal Australian skulls are twice as thick as those of all other humans, which was very likely to survive violence. It is just one of many indicators of how prodigiously violent the ancient human past is, even though it has declined greatly from our progenitors. Chimp societies today are hundreds of times more aggressive and violent than the most violent human societies. Add in the fact that half of all children died until the Industrial Revolution, and it is easy to imagine how grim pre-industrial life must have been. Slavery was just a sign of the times that did not end until industrialization.
Over the Epochs of the human journey, human societies have become progressively more humane and less violent. I can hardly imagine the violence that my father endured while growing up, and his mother marveled that all six of her children lived to adulthood. Many years later I understood why: theirs was about the first generation in which childhood death had been conquered to the degree that all six could survive.
No peoples could imagine the next Epoch until it arrived. It will be that way for nearly all humans today, if we ride free-energy and related technologies to the Fifth Epoch, and those technologies are older than I am. If and when the Fifth Epoch arrives, the world will end as we know it, and nobody will miss it. I made a post last year on some features of the Fifth Epoch, and this post will cover some welcome changes that will arrive with the Fifth Epoch.
In last year’s post, I mentioned how all poverty, warfare, and environmental damage will end, as will nations and races. There will be one language and one ethnicity. Humanity will be one family.
But in this post I want to discuss changes in humans. We will be less capable in some areas, compared to past humans, but we will develop new abilities. For instance, records of ancient Greece show that they were stronger and more physically capable of hard work than today’s humans are. It makes sense. We no longer rely on our muscles like we used to. Any adult male chimp can easily kill any adult male human in hand-to-hand fighting, as they are at least three times as strong. They have far more short muscle fibers (AKA “fast twitch”), which is also partly why they cannot swim (they do not float).
Our memories are likely not as good as those of preliterate people. They relied on their memories more, as they passed down oral histories through the generations. Long-distance vision is also worse today for scanning the horizon than it used to be. Use it or lose it.
Today’s young Americans are losing the ability to read a clock with hands or read and write cursively. Almost nobody on Earth today knows how to make a stone tool. Those skills are lost or are waning quickly. So? We no longer need them in our lives.
I am already hearing how people who rely on artificial intelligence are losing mental faculties. Some will be lost, but others will be gained. Children will no longer be raised in adversity, which causes lifelong brain effects that are called damaging, in which “thinking” declines and people operate more from their emotions. An evolutionist might observe that it is just evolution, as that “damage” is really an adaptation to a threatening environment, as the fear response becomes predominant. Not only will conflict become obsolete, but so will competition, which will become meaningless. Cooperation in all things will become the norm.
I consider it quite likely that reading and writing will give way to better ways to communicate and learn. Humanity may become post-literate, but it won’t be dumber, and new horizons of the human potential will come into view.
As I have written, if all humans ate whole food, we would all live to be 100 and be healthy the entire way in the Fifth Epoch, with virtually no medical interventions. Humans won’t have workdays like they do today. Work will be more like play and the highlight of everybody’s day, when they get to contribute to their world. It might last a few hours. I have seen it called “joy time.”
When abundance and love reign in a global human society, rather than scarcity and fear, virtually nothing will be the same. If I can find the people for this Epochal task, the Fifth Epoch could still arrive in my lifetime.