The New Age

It's not a new concept that we live in the New Age. But do we ever stop to think about what that actually means? Do we pause at times and wonder how much the world changes with the passing day?

It is an amazing thought, for example, to realize that everything we see around us today--from shacks to skyscrapers, from skateboards to airbuses, from pencils to computers--comes from nature. Every atom we see transformed into giants of technology existed once as a molecule in the ground, the water, or the air. We are, quite literally, a remixed version of history.

While humans are the lords of evolution, do we realize that we have caused the evolution of our species to stop? We have stopped before we can reach the pinnacle. Will we start to evolve again in the face of a new stress? Will we adapt to, say, global warming? What would have happened if we never started food-production and never created medicine? What if only the fittest survived? Would I be here today then? Would you?

The society that is now ruled by institutions--by laws and documents, by science and invention, by education and jobs--is the descendant of a society of hunters and gatherers. I wonder, were they happier then us? Did they have, in the true sense, innocent's bliss? Once our goal was survival, what is our goal now?

Anyway, what started off my pondering on the subject was this amazing Youtube video someone shared on Facebook. Researched by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Brenman, The Progression of Information Technology (2008):