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While our understanding of mankind's long 2.5-million-year history is subject to many varying interpretation, it is generally acknowledged that mankind emerged from the last Ice Age some 10-12,000 years ago with a minuscule world population of 1-10 million people. This tiny population was the end product of 2.5 million years of development, or was it really? I would rather measure mankind in different terms, because life is an intelligent process, and the human being is the most intelligent form of life in our world. It appears that the horrendous challenges that mankind may have encountered during its journey across 20-25 Ice Ages has forced us to change ourselves in response to meeting the physical challenges. Some people like to see this as a form of evolution, but evolution doesn't happen that quickly nor does it happen consistently in an advancing fashion. There is more evidence in our history to suggest that mankind, as we are today, is the end product of a chain of self-directed intelligent progression. We came out of the Ice Age, and almost as soon as the climate warmed up, within a few thousand years, we started large-scale agriculture, and this in many places with the application of irrigation. We are therefore not higher apes or advanced animals. We have created ourselves into something unique, a unique melody in the song of life, a melody that has never been heard before. No other species in the entire history of the planet has achieved what we have achieved. No ape has ever created its own food resources with agriculture powered by irrigation. Nor has any species of live in the entire history of the planet developed the technological resources to carry itself unhindered through the recurring Ice Ages with a large population-base, as we have the capacity to do this toady. We are truly the most extraordinary species of life on the Earth, perhaps even in the universe, as far as we can tell. We represent a profound phase shift in the song of life.
Unfortunately we tend to downplay our enormous potential, or even trash it as we have done during the numerous imperial periods that have resulted in such Dark-Age inanities that civilization became nearly extinct. These periods too, are elements of our history, and so are the brighter periods that became periods of renaissance in which we discovered and developed the enormous, and often latent, potential of our humanity as human being. Sometimes these bright periods were short, but in the overall scheme they are getting longer and more profound as we discover more and more advanced universal principles to achieve what has never been achieved before.
Sometimes even those minor periods that tend to be forgotten in the flow of things, teach us great lesson. In their revival we found the means to create many periods of renaissance that slowed down the periods of war and atrocities or interrupted them completely, as between 1866 and 1914.
Occasionally events also create great hurtles or boundaries of their own in the way people and nations relate to each other. The resulting division and isolation affects the nations' culture, their spirit, and their humanity.
In the course of this history of the flow of grand achievements of cultural progress, horrendous cultural failures have also been encountered, especially in the way humanity regards itself and relates to one another. Still, we appear to have come out richer. These failures have cost the life of millions of people in the twentieth century, alone, but we have also created the sciences and technologies that enable us to leave the Earth, explore the moon and other planets, and return enriched. Humanity has experienced enormously great periods of cultural and also spiritual renewal in which remarkable scientific development has taken place. And the horizon appears to be getting brighter. We are coming to light as an infinite species that lives no longer by its own muscle power, but powers the processes for its living with ever greater resources of physical power. We have grown up from wood power, to coal power, to oil power, to nuclear fission power with nuclear fusion power on the horizon. We've discovered energy resources at our grasp that are greater than what we can possible want, and which will last us longer than the planet itself. Likewise, the planet is rich with material resources that can be used up in the entire future of its existence.
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