Due to an unforeseen exposure to toxins. a group of sexually reproducing organisms in a Petri dish suffered a population collapse down to five or six thousand individuals. These survivors formed a few hundred separate clumps. This population grew and slowly recovered over roughly the next twenty-three hundred (plus) generations. At that point this population had already increased to about four million individuals. Then, despite an occasional cooling trend, an upward trend in ambient temperature coincided with an increase in rates of reproduction. Over roughly the next four hundred generations reproduction accelerated and the population rose from four million to approximately a two hundred fifty million. After that marked increase, in a mere twenty generations, this explosively thriving population increased thirty-two fold to eight billion, covering the entire Petri dish. The Petri dish is the Carl Sagan’s small blue marble, the organism is homo sapiens. In the last twenty generations we have adapted to every environmental niche on earth, taken over the planet and made our first tentative steps toward getting off this rock and making the universe our petri dish.
increases to 8,000,000,000 in three phases:
Feral Phase ~ 2300 generations 71,500 BC- 3000 BC
Civilization ~ 200 generations 3000 BC -1500 AD
The Age of the West ~ 20 generations 1500 – Present
This remnant of feral human beings gradually prospered and they helped usher into extinction vulnerable megafauna everywhere they went, including other species of homo such as the Denisovians and Neanderthal. Most importantly, they developed symbolism which extended the transfer of information and allowed for cooperation on a massive and unprecedented scale. This accelerated their evolution by causing evolution itself to evolve, moving from “hardware” to “software”, enabling us to uniquely become the only animals that domesticate themselves. The second phase began about 3,000 BC with the emergence of the great river valley civilizations, which is greatly advantageous for human flourishing. This is literally obvious, look at the graph. As Breugel said, “Ecce”. The third phase, the rise of the West to global dominance in the last 500 years was the greatest achievement in history, and the greatest boon to our species ever gave itself, with no serious competitor. In roughly twenty generations, the globalization of peoples and languages and flora and fauna and ideas and techniques and communications and commerce and war and invention and pioneering path creation during the age of Western expansion made the single greatest contribution to human flourishing ever. Over 99% of the people alive today owe their very existence to it. Nothing has been more prima facie beneficial to our species than the era of the Western hegemony over the last five centuries. Our dazzling success as a species has allowed us to make the whole earth our home and to occupy every room. How did this happen?
This is world history.
Extend Graph Back to 70,000BC
Prologue On the Earth- Where Are We? Maps, Mercator Illusion, Creative Disorientation
The condition of not knowing where you are is called being lost. Our maps of the world, the ideas within which we live our lives, are defective. The vast majority of the world’s literate people, when asked what this image is:
Mercator Map
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections
GET ALL THE RELEVANT MAPS HERE (SEE BELOW)
Will answer “the world”. Regrettably, ceci ne pas une pipe, it is a map, not the world, and like any map it necessarily contains built in omissions and distortions. It was drawn up by Gerardus Mercator in 1579. It was useful to contemporary European mariners for purposes of navigation and thus became a standard image. The particular distortions of his map are greatest as it moves across latitudes from the equator to the poles. The more northerly or southerly areas near the poles are drastically expanded compared to the equator and tropics. However few mariners intended to go to the polar regions, so the distortions didn’t matter much to them. The sailor’s pragmatism was local, but Mercator’s problem with distortion was universal. It is an unfortunate mathematical fact that there is no perfect way to represent the surface of a sphere without distortion on a two-dimensional surface like a page. Nor is there any perfect way to represent the human condition.
One unintended consequence is that those of us who have the advantage of education have sometimes imagined that their mental maps are not distorted. This hybris is dangerous to you and the people around you. The smarter you are, the more you need to remind yourself that every insight is partial blindness. Look at the map above. Areas far from the equator are distorted in terms of their distances and are shown much larger than they actually are. This is one of the major issues with a projection of a sphere onto a cylinder. In fact, Greenland is nowhere near the size of Africa, despite appearances; Alaska is smaller than Mexico, despite appearing to be triple the size; China is quadruple the size of Greenland, not roughly equal. In the Mercator projection, Canada, the US, Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, and Russia are inflated, as are Antarctica, New Zealand, Australia, plus the areas around Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. Europe is inflated as well. The tropics, particularly Africa and South Asia are relatively larger than they appear in the Mercator projection. It is worth wondering if the regimes and policies that emerged in the US and Russia been exacerbated by the fact that their world map makes both of their territories look so much bigger than they really are.
Mercator is not alone. The world might also be mapped like this:
Dymaxion Projection
And a different set of distortions would be implied.
Other accurate, differently distorted maps look like this:
Polar Projection
https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-images-world-map-polar-projection-image13080214
and this:
Behrman Projection
And this:
Healpix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEALPix
And this Upside Down N/S map
https://www.mapsinternational.com/upside-down-political-world-wall-map.html
And this world map centered on Chicago:
https://manywaystoseetheworld.org/products/custom-city-centered-world-map-prepared-for-you
which could as easily be centered on Shanghai or Johannesburg or Buenos Aires or some coral flyspeck in Polynesia, all with dramatically different results.
As long as the principles used in making a map and the relevant unavoidable defects are acknowledged, they are all true, but they are of varying kinds of utility, depending on what purpose the map is to serve. There are different ways of mapping the same world, apparently vastly different, because of markedly different choices among misrepresentations. No map of the world is undistorted, yet they are indispensable, because without a map there is no way to know where you are and where you wish to be. You can’t even properly get lost until you know where you are. Get used to the fuzziness of maps. It is the price of clarity. Get over the distortions in maps, they are unavoidable. They make accuracy possible. Imperfection is inevitable but improvement is possible. As Borges cleverly pointed out, maps must necessarily omit some things so that other things can be presented. Everyone is inclined to put the thing that concerns them the most in the center of their maps, thus the Chinese “Middle Kingdom” and the Roman capital city in the center of the “Mediterranean Sea”. Epic poetry or epic history also begins in the middle of things, temporally rather than spatially.
The shape of time is inevitably that of human life. Our stories and our lives have plots. They are dynamic artifacts of memory integrating space and time and matter into us. Right on the cutting edge of temporality where now happens we exercise will: transforming potentiality into actuality. Yet our understanding of space and time is flawed. We know they are infinite. Some impressive science says so. Yet we can have no clue what “infinite” space or time means in any human sense. We know space as local, bounded like us. Time is similarly constrained. Nobody has ever experienced “infinite time” in any way that can be communicated. Our time is a journey from a beginning to an end and literature reflects this. Comedy is about revocable mistakes and first half of life, which ends in marriage. Tragedy is about irrevocable errors and the second half of human life, which ends in death. Epic is our collective, common story through history. Joyce saw that our story is about a finite past and an infinite future swinging like a hinge on the immediately experienced present.
One of the earliest known maps of the world
PHOTOS:
Anaximander’s world map
,
1565 English world map
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old-world-map.jpg
satellite photo 4.0 of planet
Like photographs, the value of maps is practical; their worth depends on what you are trying to do with them. A satellite photo may fail to show your dwelling, even at the highest resolution, but it may show the location of a hurricane. Whether the photograph is a good photo or not depends on whether you are selling real estate or forecasting weather.
No human representation, whether of space or time is perfect, is lacking in distortion but there is more than what we get wrong. The best art tells us lies that reveal the truth about who we are and where we are and what our future could be. Maps are never as accurate in representing space as we might wish. It is the same with journeys through time, the collected sagas of our species are fractured reflections of who we were, who we are, and who we might become. History on a global scale in the twenty-first century is the convergence of hundreds of centuries of stories lived by billions of people in vastly different circumstances which might be mapped in an infinite number of different ways, for different purposes, without any one map necessarily being either perfect or useless. This Big History is one of those stories composed of other of stories intended to remind the reader that the Delphic Injunctions are both good as ends in themselves and as a means in addressing the Great Task: the reconciliation of love and reason. As is traditional, we begin, not at the beginning, but in medias res, with human beings of our age symbolically mapping the historical world around them, pursuant to knowing themselves and their circumstances.