The roots of our technology
Part 2: Technological progress and the history of mankind
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality
Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see
Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody begins with these famous words. Well, when I open my eyes and look at the sky, all I see are gray clouds. That’s the reality of living in the Netherlands… Of course, we can’t change the weather. Or can’t we?
I recently came across the following article from NewScientist:
There is growing interest in alleviating the severe impacts of global warming by using various geoengineering techniques. These include marine cloud brightening (MCB), which aims to reflect more sunlight away from Earth’s surface by seeding the lower atmosphere with sea salt particles to form brighter marine stratocumulus clouds.
After modeling these techniques, it turns out that by generating clouds it can cool the western U.S. and at the same time make the clouds disappear in Europe. No clouds may at first mostly have a sunny side, but the downside is that it likely leads to more heat waves. So a novel tool can have negative consequences, and can even be used intentionally to change the weather in other countries. This makes geoengineering a geopolitical tool that can lead to war.
That is the nature of technology. It can extend humans and humankind, but it can also be used for good or bad. This has always been the case. A knife can help us cut our food, but it can also kill. In this series, I’d like to explore how technology has shaped our world and our destiny. For better or worse, it remains one of the key factors, perhaps the key factor, that drives human progress.
Our planet
The Industrial Revolution brought great advances in productivity. The new technologies, such as steam engines and other factory innovations, also had many negative effects. In the short term, it meant long days of dirty, monotonous work, including child labor. Although this has largely been resolved, we are still dealing with the long-term consequences.
So it is no surprise that we are exploring geoengineering as we look for ways to combat climate change. In the Paris Agreement, the world’s nations agreed to a long-term temperature goal of keeping the increase in global surface temperature below 2°C above the pre-industrial level.
Despite the fact that the current climate change is man-made, and that our countermeasures such as renewable energy are not yet having the desired effect, it’s remarkable that the Paris Agreement exists. That people can come together and set goals on a global scale.
This seems normal to us in the 21st century, but was unthinkable when, for example, dinosaurs ruled our world. They reigned between 245 and 66 million years ago. Nearly 200 million years of reign is extremely long, but in the end the non-bird dinosaurs became extinct. This is what the Museum of Natural History says:
The exact nature of this catastrophic event is still open to scientific debate. Evidence suggests an asteroid impact was the main culprit. Volcanic eruptions that caused large-scale climate change may also have been involved, together with more gradual changes to Earth’s climate that happened over millions of years. (https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/dinosaur-extinction.html)
Whatever the reason, the dinosaurs couldn’t cope with the changes, so they were left to natural selection. One type of animal that emerged from the shadow of the dinosaurs were mammals. Although mammals had been on Earth for about 100 million years by then, most were no larger than a mouse.
“Species like rodents and primates did not share the Earth with nonavian dinosaurs, but arose from a common ancestor — a small, insect-eating, scampering animal — shortly after the dinosaurs’ demise“, said researcher Maureen O’Leary at Stony Brook University in New York. (https://www.livescience.com/26929-mama-first-ancestor-placental-mammals.html)
This first mammal evolved into the more than 5000 mammals we know today, such as dogs, sheep, lions, and hominids. Hominids are the group that includes all modern and extinct great apes. That is, modern humans and their ancestors, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, and all their immediate ancestors.
Our planet II
Before this diverse group of hominids appeared, our planet was the planet of the apes. The first apes evolved about 25 million years ago and were a very diverse group by 20 million years ago. At least 100 ape species roamed the world before the first archaic humans appeared. About 10 million years ago, however, many ape species became extinct as the Earth’s climate cooled and dried and their forested environments gave way to woodland and grasslands.
Like the dinosaurs, climate change left the great apes at the mercy of natural selection. Because of the cooling climate, the rainforests retreated to the equator. The rest of the world became more open, not a good place for an ape to live. As a result, the hominid apes diverged about 5.7–11 million years ago to form the genus Pan (which includes chimpanzees and bonobos) and Homo (from the Latin homō, “human”).
Homo evolved from the genus Australopithecus and includes the extant species Homo sapiens (modern humans) and a number of extinct species collectively known as archaic humans. One of its characteristics was the ability to walk upright.
Walking upright is not a technological step, but an evolutionary. Still it lead to a number of advantages such as:
- Energy Efficiency: Walking on two legs is more energy-efficient over long distances.
- Enhanced Field of Vision: Walking upright elevated the head, providing a higher vantage point.
- Heat Regulation: Bipedalism reduces the amount of body surface area exposed to the sun and increases exposure to wind, which aids in cooling.
- Improved Foraging: Standing on two legs allows for easier access to fruits and other foods found in trees and tall bushes.
- Freeing the Hands: Freed the hands, later allowing early humans to carry tools, food, and infants.
Walking upright paved the way to the Stone Age. The oldest known stone tools are thought to be 3.3 million years old and were discovered at a site called Lomekwi 3 in Kenya. This is actually 1 million years before the appearance of the genus Homo. So tools were used even before the first humans, and it’s no surprise, as it has been observed by scientists that apes can use tools too:
The use of tools is thus not something that makes humans unique, but rather a key component of our ability to shape the world. What is unique, however, is that humans don’t use tools that are naturally available, but that they are modified. Literally handmade. In the next chapter we will see that tools, like humans, have their own evolutionary process.
