Sapiens Book Club Part 4: The Scientific Revolution
After illustrating the power of what he calls three “universal orders” — empires, money, and religion — in part three of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari brings us in part four to what may well be humanity’s final chapter, even as we strive ironically toward immortality.
The Gilgamesh Project
The final chapter of Sapiens begins with what Harari calls The Gilgamesh Project — our incessant and, he says, soon-to-be-realized quest for eternal life and the leading effort of the Scientific Revolution.
Science has already given us cures to illnesses and injuries that in the not too distant past were fatal and now spares us from a host of less sever ailments. Life expectancy has jumped from 25 to 80 years in just two centuries, and thanks to current research in genomics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology, that number is being pushed ever upward. Harari tells us that the most privelaged among Sapiens may become a-mortal, immune to the aging process, by the year 2050. How did we get here?
A New Way of Thinking
The admission that they knew not what lay beyond their borders and the desire to discover those things drove 15th and 16th century imperialists and scientists alike, intertwining the conquest of knowledge with the conquest of territory. This psychological breakthrough is exemplified by the world maps that Europeans began to draw during this time — maps with copious regions of blank space beyond the borders of the cartographers’ known world that seemed to say we don’t know what’s here, but we’ll find out soon enough.
In illustrating this shift toward a mindset of discovery, Harari points to Columbus, a medieval man who had utter faith in his understanding of the world and the complete maps that had been drawn for him. Upon arriving in North America, Columbus, who believed himself to be in what was then known as the East Indies (Indonesia), called the natives “Indians.”
Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, by contrast, was what Harari calls “a modern man,” who arrived in North America a few years after Columbus (1499-1504). Vespucci sent word back to the motherland that Columbus’ claims were wrong and that the new land was in fact something yet unknown to the Europeans, a novel concept at the time.
Vespucci’s texts were widely circulated, and in 1507, a well-respected mapmaker published the first maps showing the continent upon which Europe’s westward-sailing fleets had landed. Believing that the new land was discovered by Vespucci, the maker of these widely circulated maps named that land after him — America.
The discovery of America was one of the lessons that taught Europeans to operate from a stance of not-knowing, and soon enough all of the maps were drawn with empty space representing that which lay beyond the known world. Here be dragons.
Europeans learned well from this and even entered into their imperial conquests with this same curiosity, moreso, says Harari, than other cultures:
“When the Muslims conquered India, they did not bring along archaeologists to systematically study Indian history, anthropologists to study Indian cultures, geologists to study Indian soils, or zoologists to study Indian fauna. When the British conquered India, they did all of these things.” page 332
The Industrial Revolution
The discovery at various moments around the world that heat energy could be converted into motion or kinetic energy was the breakthrough that literally propelled the Industrial Revolution.
Gunpowder was invented in China in the 9th century and used for firebombs for hundreds of years before it was used to fire the first projectiles. Similarly, 18th century British coal mines revealed the power of steam long before it was harnessed to a piston.
Steam was used to power mineshaft water pumps before being brought above ground to power looms and gins in textile production. In 1825, the first steam-powered train was invented, leading in 1830 to the first commercial railway, which connected Liverpool to Manchester. Each successive development in the use of steam power — from mineshaft pump to textile mill to vehicular motion — reflected a psychological opening onto the possibilities.
In discussiong the productivity boom brought on by the industrial revolution, Harari draws a line from the invention of simple machines to the mechanization of the modern farm (and the animals therein) and the release of legions of former farmers into the labor force. There, per the demands of the market, they found new work producing and consuming a cornucopia of goods that we never before needed.
“Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, damned rivers, flooded plains, laid down tens of thousands of kilometers of railroad tracks, and built sky-scraping metropolises.” page 392
Perhaps the most pervasive of modern religions, consumerism has become the driving force behind our days and our lives.
What Comes Next?
Now 7 billion strong, Sapiens has taken over the planet. In a startling arithmetic exercise, Harari contrasts the combined weight of all of the humans in the world (300 million tons) plus all of our domesticated farmyard animals (700 million tons combined) with that of all surviving large wild animals (less than 100 million tons).
Environmentalists cry that we are destroying nature, but nature will not be destroyed — only changed. An asteroid decimated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, opening the way for mammals. We may make the planet inhabitable for for humans, but the rats and cockroaches are going to get along just fine.
As Sapiens winds to a close, Harari reflects on the 70,000 years since the Cognitive Reovlution and wonders what we accomplished during that time.
“Was the late Neil Armstrong, whose footprint remains intact on the windless moon, happier than the nomadic hunter-gatherer who 30,000 years ago left her handprint on a wall in Chaucer Cave? If not, what was the point of developing agriculture, cities, writing, coinage, empires, science and industry?” Page 421
And what comes next?
Sapiens has for the past 10,000 years leap-frogging natural selection with the help of technological artifices of our own design. With the likes of biological engineering, prosthetic advancements, neural enhancements, and other technologies capable of altering our very nature, the curtain may soon be falling on our species.
It’s hard to imagine, steeped as we are in our hubris, that humans are not the pinnacle of our own evolution, but just another stop along the way, and that someday, some superior species we can’t yet imagine will look back at what we did during our brief reign on the planet and shake their psychokinetic, cyborgian heads. And laugh.
Previous installments:
Sapiens Book Club: Part One, The Cognitive Revolution