by Guy Murchie
After another 990,000 years - which would bring us to 8000 B.C. - the species man with his newly evolved brain had multiplied to an estimated three million people, the majority of them hunters but now many also skilled herdsmen and quite a few beginning to learn to sow and reap. Village life had begun in certain fertile valleys, though most people were still nomads and a few of the more adventurous tribes had even wandered from Siberia across the Bering isthmus into the Americas. It was also the period when some unprecedented but measurable spurts of population occurred, which anthropologists attribute first to the discovery of herding, something not only easier than hunting but a means of enabling each square mile to support perhaps a dozen people, and second to the spread of agriculture, which immediately increased the number to several dozen and eventually to hundreds per square mile.
In succeeding millenniums man's population kept on increasing and, significantly, accelerating, no doubt stimulated by such developments as his marvelous discovery that he could persuade cattle, horses and buffalo to plow, the wind to sail a ship or a river to grind grain. By the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt (2270 B.C.), his number was approaching 100 million and in Roman times about 300 million, reaching 500 million only in the seventeenth century. Then his invention of the steam engine, with its massive, cheap power that launched the industrial revolution, surged man's population again, pushing it to a billion by the mid-nineteenth century. From where it accelerated to two billion in the 1920s, three billion about 1960 and four billion in 1976.
The fact of doubling Earth's human population in a mere half century (possibly in a shorter time in future) is so new and so phenomenal that it is understandable that almost no public leader today seems able fully to grasp its meaning. Yet it is increasingly apparent (to me at least) that this explosion is prime evidence of the germination of the planet in our time, like the germination of any seed in fertile soil.
Specifically, the explosion of man's population in the twentieth century amounts to an increase of a thousand times in its growth rate, from less than .002 percent a year before the advent of farming to 2 percent today. This is the direct result of an unprecedented rise in the efficiency of man's production, something made possible by his learning to pool knowledge, thus to accelerate invention and industry on a world scale, particularly the development of modern medicine, which has drastically lowered his death rate. In a lesser degree, the population explosion may be due to modern man's abandonment of the population controls his anthropoid ancestors had through their territorial systems and the more recent stone age taboos and tribal laws promoting everything from head-hunting to infanticide.
Population surges of course have been known among many animals, from rabbits in Australia to locusts in Africa, lemmings in Scandinavia, starlings in Maryland, millipedes in Belgium, army ants in Peru and starfish in the Pacific Ocean. What starts and stops these outbursts remains largely mysterious to biologists, though the food supply, fertility and predation rates are obvious factors. One thing sure about man's current population explosion is that, while it is by far the greatest his species has experienced, it must end like the others within a very few generations - say, a century - even though there is no way of foretelling now just what combination of eugenics, famine, disease, war, pollution or other trials will force the change. Actually the tide has already begun to turn, as the accompanying graph suggests. Human response through contraception (particularly in the more developed countries) has significantly reduced man's birthrate - and this is beginning to damp the threat despite a 70-year lag caused by deaths being (temporarily) only half as frequent as births because they are experienced mainly by the old people who right now are only half as numerous as the young.
Pollution was brought to world attention about 1970, although it is far from a new feature in nature, being known throughout evolution to all the kingdoms. But it has taken a globally alarming turn this century in growing even faster than the human population it includes. Indeed, from man's view, pollution's present faces could well be called the three Bs (for babies, bombs and blight), which seem to be uniquely germinal in reacting upon each other in strange resonances. While man's population has grown about 50 percent in the past quarter century, for example, his blighting of land, sea and air (according to ecologist Barry Commoner) has increased 2000 percent. This presumably is due to such factors as energy-consuming equipment of all kinds radiating about 6 percent more heat each year, much of it "poisonous." Automobiles are multiplying three times faster than the people who make and drive them, and five times faster than the roads they run on. And we have a growing list of new technologies, such as aluminum, plastics, detergents, food additives, drugs, chemicals, synthetic fibers and excessive packaging that have not yet been integrated into the recycling of nature. In the terminology of physics, there is a "critical mass" factor in pollution that often compounds its accumulation with explosive acceleration, once certain limits are exceeded, which can easily happen when early warnings are not understood or heeded in time. There is no danger, however, that pollution will be permanently ignored, I'm glad to say. For it is not shy. And its voice is rising.
2. MAN'S WINNING OF THE TOURNAMENT OF EVOLUTION
For the first time man has assumed clear dominance over all other creatures of Earth. In the nineteenth century he still had to be protected from the beasts in Africa, Asia, western America and other untamed areas, but today it is obviously the beasts who need protection from man. Already scores of species have been made extinct by the competition of man in the last few millenniums: notably a dozen kinds of mammoth and mastodon and the woolly rhinoceros, followed in our time by the quagga, the aurochs and such birds as the dodo, the moa, the passenger pigeon, the heath hen and the great auk.
Before that, more than 99.9 percent of all the species who ever lived on Earth had already disappeared (presumably naturally) with only the meagerest fossilized trace left to prove it. It is only human, I suppose, to think of a species as something established like a fixed star, but, in the long view, both species and stars turn out to be moving, changing, growing, perhaps ultimately blowing up or fading away. So we might more accurately think of life as a flowing, eddying, bubbling tide or even a mysterious, self-weaving tapestry. Fact is: out of billions of species estimated to have foliated Earth in her five billion years of evolution to date, only a couple of million exist at any one time, because each lasts hardly a fleeting million years before it finally branches, withers or in some way loses its identity. Nor are we running out of them since we continue to discover several new ones every day (page 12) while losing only a handful per year through extinction, the rate of gain in awareness of species exceeding the loss by a good two hundred times!
Despite this, about one percent of Earth's modern warm-blooded species of animals have become extinct in these last four centuries with another 2.5 percent headed that way, both trends largely attributable to man's take-over. And it is increasingly obvious that evolution can no longer be a laissez-faire tournament between the freely competing millions of species, because, for better or worse, man is already running the show. It is no secret of course that he has been sneaking into small areas of evolution for quite a while, usurping the breeding of dogs and other domesticated animals and not a few vegetables for several millenniums, but in this twentieth century, the century of global germination, he has finally gotten into a position that virtually forces him to take over the main burden of evolution including very soon even the breeding of himself!
Already all the larger animals are under some measure of control, either confined to zoos, sanctuaries, national parks, regulated by game laws or (in the case of whales, certain fish, etc.) international treaties. Special conservation projects have been and are helping a few, such as the ibex, oryx, bison, pronghorn antelope, orangutan, giant panda, Asiatic lion, sea otter, dugong, blue whale, whooping crane, trumpeter swan, ivory-billed woodpecker and condor, to survive. And at least one species, the aurochs, has "miraculously" been broug
ht back by man after extinction, by judiciously combining similar breeds of wild cattle that happened to have aurochs' well-documented physical and temperamental traits. Even insects and microbes are coming more and more under human control, paving the way for man's unprecedented but probably inevitable shifting of evolutionary gears as he inaugurates global eugenics on freshly germinated Earth.
3. MAN'S COMPLETION OF EXPLORATION OF HIS PLANET
Man has virtually completed the exploration and mapping of Earth in this century. Only 500 years ago the world's map makers not only did not know about the Americas nor how far Africa extended south of the Mediterranean Sea, but many presumed the tropics were made of fire and the earth flat like a plate, so ships risked falling off its edge if they ventured out of sight of shore. The Dutch did not discover Australia until the seventeenth century, and the ocean depths and polar regions remained largely unknown even up to the beginning of the twentieth. In astronomy, equivalently, until this century, the Milky Way was considered the Universe.
But look at what our modern explorers have done in the brief time since then - for they have reached both poles, climbed to the top of the highest mountain, dived to the bottom of the deepest sea and charted not only every detail of every land and ocean deep, not missing the inner heart of the atom, but flown through the whole atmosphere and into space beyond it, including in person to Earth's satellite, the moon - with cameras to the neighboring planets, and hundreds of sophisticated new telescopes, spectroscopes and other instruments to the very horizon of the fresh-conceived Universe.
4. MAN'S THOUSANDFOLD INCREASE IN SPEED OF TRAVEL
Man's speed of travel likewise has multiplied by a thousand in about a hundred years. The first dramatic hint of it came on September 27, 1825, when one of George Stephenson's locomotives in England pulled 22 wagons full of passengers and 12 wagons of coal at 12 miles an hour. Then, after many millenniums during which the fastest a human could go was at the gallop of a horse, in 1839 a steam locomotive broke the oats barrier by beating a horse and in this century suddenly man in a single lifetime has literally lifted off to other worlds.
To cite a case, on January 25, 1907, the day I was born, a man named Frank Marriott set a sensational new world speed record by driving his Stanley Steamer at 150 miles an hour on Ormond Beach, Florida. It was the first and only time an automobile ever held the record. And it stood for more than a decade, being broken only by an airplane. But although I never got so much as a glimpse of one of these semimythical, winged machines everyone was talking about until I was twelve, the airplane carried man faster than anything else for more than forty years, until April 12, 1961, when the even more fantastic man-carrying rocket dethroned it, with astronaut Yuri Gagarin whooshing into orbit, literally in ten minutes boosting the world record from 2905 mph (by Robert White in the X-15) to 17,560 mph or nearly 5 miles a second. And less than eight years later, in 1968, Frank Borman upped it again by flying his Apollo 8 crew to the moon at 7 miles a second.
Which happens to be a velocity about high enough to convey man anywhere in our solar system of neighboring planets - therefore one unlikely to be exceeded to any dramatic extent until some far future century when a very dedicated crew may actually zoom off on a multigenerational voyage to the stars.
5. HIS TEN-MILLIONFOLD SPEED-UP AND OUTREACH IN COMMUNICATION
Man's speed of communication, in case you didn't notice, has increased even faster than his speed of travel, multiplying itself ten million times in a single step upward in 1844, from the speed of the railway mail pouch to that of the telegram flashing along a wire at 186,282 miles a second. This engineering miracle has been firmly consolidated by successive development of the telephone, radio and television during the ensuing germinal century and, although these later inventions haven't increased the transmission velocity (speed of light), they have suddenly for the first time made Earth capable of communicating with outside worlds, particularly since powerful radio and television waves began to be broadcast regularly from America and Europe, resulting in the planet's radiating out a continuously expanding bubble of radiation with current radius of sixty light-years that already reaches beyond many thousand of the nearer stars and their planetary systems, a few of which are presumed to possess advanced civilizations, which may well be responding about now.
Because of the distance, Earth cannot be assured of receiving any replies before next century. And it seems appropriately dignified for her to wait because, in a sense, conversation between worlds is the culminating criterion of germination. Moreover, as any answering worlds must have germinated and probably long since had lengthy exchanges with other worlds, they should speak with cosmic confidence. Indeed, for all we know, they might even open mental and spiritual doors to levels of transcendence we have not yet even suspected.
6.THE EXPLOSION OF KNOWLEDGE
Whatever its rate of future transcendence, however, Earth's tree of knowledge, after slowly developing for millions of years, has finally burst into bloom in this century - and our planet will never again be the same.
To realize what has happened, let's try to imagine what it was like on Earth a million years ago, waking up in a dewy jungle to the sound of insects and growing trees, the murmur of metabolizing ferns, of worms chewing. There is no hurry in this predawn eon of thought. You notice, among other things, a faint, pungent stink of dung. It is not unpleasant. It may even whet your appetite for breakfast: perhaps a handful of sweet maggots on yam. Somewhere you notice the chuckling of a stream, the flight of a tinamou, a tree frog trilling, sprouts fingering their way between the grains of dirt, weaving upward through the floor of matted fronds and duff, patiently searching for that strange, new sense called understanding, that comes so gently, so little at a time.
One reason understanding and the accumulation of knowledge have evolved so slowly, I suppose, is that Earth's thought pioneers neither knew nor cared about discovering how to discover. Reasoning indeed is far from the easiest of activities, nor is imagination the most natural. For, as Lucretius wrote in the days of Rome, "no fact is so simple that it is not harder to believe than to doubt at the first presentation."
Man's mind, one might surmise, has become the fovea of Earth's consciousness. And his understanding is, for the first time, the agent enabling our planet to sense and begin to comprehend itself. Yet still, powered by the slow grinding of the mills of God, it has naturally taken millions of years for knowledge to double itself, thousands more for it to redouble itself, the acceleration increasing gradually as accumulation built toward its critical mass, as new degrees of reflective feedback were irregularly fermenting, fomenting, germinating.
An example of the human mind's struggle to overcome inertia might be the puzzlement experienced by pygmies in Africa on emerging from their dense forest for the first time. Seeing a boat half a mile away on a lake, a typical pygmy (described by Cohn Turnbull) could not believe it was really a boat, it was so tiny, and he insisted it must be a chip of wood floating on a puddle. His jungle environment and culture had provided him no experience of seeing anything farther away than about fifty feet. Four buffalo grazing on a distant slope he mistook for
bugs. And even when Turnbull drove him in a jeep right to the animals, he rationalized their sudden increase in size as due to a special white man's magic for turning bugs into buffalo.
Two-dimensional drawings depicting three-dimensional objects have likewise proved incomprehensible to inexperienced people, who not only misjudge perspective but expect a picture of a four-legged animal to show four legs, even if the view is from above which would normally make the legs invisible. And some such culturally deprived people inspect a printed map very closely on the assumption that it is a real world in miniature containing microscopic houses, rivers flowing, smoke drifting and people walking about.
A different and no less significant mental struggle goes on at other levels, even in Earth's highest institutions of learning, the classic example being Hipparchus' discovery
of the precession of the equinoxes in the second century B.C. Although this was duly published by Ptolemy, it was later forgotten, and then confused by Theon of Alexandria who attributed the phenomenon to "trepidation," his flimsy theory uncritically accepted by astronomers for more than a thousand years, even by the great Copernicus. Indeed the error was never conclusively corrected until Newton's Principia came out in 1687.
By that time a distinguished scientific committee had long since been set up in Europe to decide whether to invest a large sum of money in Johann Gutenberg's printing press. After lengthy deliberation, however, they turned it down because, although movable type was a "clever idea," they had become convinced that there could never be any big demand for books - for the "irrefutable" reason that only one percent of the population knew how to read.
As late as 1875, when earthly germination was well advanced and scores of vehicles from bicycles to battleships were in an accelerating state of development, a prominent director of the U.S. Patent Office resigned on the remarkable ground that "there is nothing left to invent." Even as late as the first decade of the twentieth century Albert A. Michelson, discoverer of the speed of light, wrote: "The most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these laws are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is extremely remote ... " A few weeks later a prophetic editorial appeared in the prestigious New York Times, saying: "The flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanics in from one to ten million years." The date was 1903, the very year in which two unknown bicycle mechanics named Wilbur and Orville Wright completed a seemingly hare-brained experiment at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, news of which the New York Times did not deem fit to print.