Human Technical Civilization

Stages

Sagan et al discriminated various stages of advanced civilizations in their writings about the search for extraterrestrial life. On their accounting, H. sapiens has reached the bottom rung of a ladder: control of a planet. The next step is control of multiple planets, leading to control of a solar system. Then the next big step is control of a local nebula or star cluster, and then a galaxy. After that comes expansion into other galaxies. The idea behind this classification of technical civilizations is the amount of energy a civilization controls on an exponential scale. If controlling a solar system is to have effective control of the power of one sun (call it stage 0, since 10⁰ = 1), then controlling a galaxy similar to our Milky Way consisting of 100 billion (10¹¹) stars is stage 11 (power scales as the exponent of 10). On that scale, the power of controlling the resources of one planet is probably somewhere between 10^-1 and 10^-12 (one-tenth to one-trillionth) of one sun, varying with time and depending on circumstances such as the configuration of its solar system (number and position of planets, where inhabited, etc).

Even I, a space buff, find it hard to imagine what it means to control a galaxy, the power of 100 billion suns! Such a feat is especially impressive in view of the probable truth that our species is at the low end of that scale, controlling only a miniscule portion of the energy of our sun, Sol. Thus, an advanced galactic civilization might control energies more than 100 billion billion (> power 20) times our own. To be a member of a galactic civilization would be as if each human being were given the entire power of planet Earth for one's sole use. That is more power than all the greediest human megalomaniacs taken together ever dreamed. We humans have a long way to go before becoming such god-like creatures as members of galactic civilizations.

On the other hand, the power difference between H. sapiens and the other Earthly creatures, possibly excepting our near primate relatives, is something like the difference between us and a galactic creature. Can a rat, a bird or a snake imagine what it is like to be a human being? Would even the mighty T. rex come close? This huge difference in lifestyle and capabilities suggests why we are not regularly visited by ETs: dinosaurs are provocative museum pieces, but our interest in the real, live creatures is probably limited to "Jurassic Park." If we are being visited by ETs, the aliens are probably scientists who make themselves as inconspicuous as possible. (But, consider the ennui of galactic creatures who know everything and have everything: perhaps they toy with us.)

So, we find ourselves at the beginning of a fairy-tale adventure, one that might last a million years or more. But knowing that does not dull my excitement; rather, I am eager to get on with it. Let the adventure begin! The story is in the living and telling and re-telling of it, not merely knowing the book is on the shelf.

Timing

Even if we apprentices do not know what the story is about, or how it will end, perhaps we can discover how and when it began. Such a finding might give us clues about what we are doing and where we are going. Did we hear "get set, ready?" Did anyone fire a starting shot?  When did we pass the starting line? Just what race are we running?

When technical civilization began is sometimes an argument between uniformitarian and saltatorial theorists about how things change. Both the strength and difficulty of the uniformitarian view is its inability to set dividing lines, because, on that view, everything proceeds by small, indiscernible changes. Thus, all the ancestors of present-day humans were precursors of human technical civilization. For uniformitarians, the proper study of a technical civilization is its evolution; i.e., if there are any stages (rapid developments followed by periods of stasis), they are merely definitional, not actual. But, even if historic stages are merely labels provided as a convenience to students and investigators, they are important if, in fact, they are associated with an evolutionary development that underlies what follows. For example, when drawing a cladogram (evolutionary tree), each branching point assumes a significant divergence; otherwise, the picture of evolution would simply be a space filled with dots, one dot per creature. Cladograms and other representations of evolution may be arbitrary, but they are not prohibited even if dots distributed in empty space are all that is "real." The practical question comes to whether thinking about things in stages, or as branching points in a diagram, or as a collection of points, is useful for us, the thinkers, in understanding history.

Despite the uniformitarian criticism that we cannot identify the point of departure in continuous space-time, it is still possible to ask whether technical civilization is a least an interesting cluster; i.e., a pattern. In this sense, the identification of an historical period is like our reaction to Rorschach tests: we read into ink blots something of ourselves. That is as it should be, because who but ourselves and those like us would know a technical civilization when they see one? The ancients did not introduce the idea of a technical civilization. The concept was only invented a few decades ago by those having a new, broad knowledge of cosmology and evolution. That criterion involves knowledge of how the planet works; i.e., technical civilizations are in some sense conscious of their situation. The fact that we assign a meaning to the term for the first time reveals something about ourselves; viz., we are self-conscious participants in a technical civilization. For me, this last argument is the clincher: 'birds of a feather flock together.' At last, we know what kind of birds we are, or who the descendants of our forefathers have become.

Because, as a matter of definition, technical civilizations control their environments in varying degrees based on conscious knowledge and purposeful tools such as machines, no Earthly creatures other than H. sapiens qualify as technological beings. Competing species, such as the social insects,  apparently do not act out of conscious purpose, or do not sufficiently control the environment. In other words, it is not enough to be intelligent; one must be purposeful (self-consciously make decisions) in order to attain the mastery of science and technology required for planetary dominance. While I believe there is little or no evidence in favor of any Earthly species except H. sapiens having reached the technical civilization stage, it is possible we have overlooked or not discovered other such species. For example, our close relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, might follow an evolutionary path similar to ours, speeded up by human contact. If we are not the only technical civilization on Earth, that fact is very likely to become apparent fairly soon because, otherwise, the current trend of human dominance will prevent that evolutionary alternative. (We have a long history of wiping out our competitors.)

Was there some time that separates the technological present from our non-technological past (the technical civilization watershed)? Perhaps this question invites an arbitrary answer. Still, I am pretty sure our Cro-Magnon ancestors were not technically inclined in the sense we now mean it. Our predecessors had tools aplenty, but they did not and could not control planet Earth. In fact, until the last 400-500 years, no person or group had the potential or the power to control Earth. Because the requisite knowledge, tools and population for planetary control (not just dominance) were developed within the last 5 centuries, a possible dividing line (my initial guess) can be drawn around 1500 CE. The Renaissance - the discovery and rebirth of ancient European cultures - was in reality a second pregnancy ending in the birth of modernity sometime after 1600 CE. Even if we cannot set the day and hour of our transformation into technological creatures, I believe it is beyond doubt that the Enlightenment demonstrated we were on the threshold of that status. (But, the change of status does not entail awareness of the passage, or that technical civilization is an irreversible condition.)

There is a problem with such an easy answer: when technical civilization began depends on how one defines "technical civilization." If using hand axes is the sine qua non of technical civilization, then the starting point was more than 30 millennia ago. In such a case, everything that happened since the time of the first Cro-Magnon people is a development, not a revolution. Yet, we usually think of the invention of agriculture as a revolution. We also think of machines powered by inanimate fuels (e.g., steam, oil) as hallmarks of the Industrial Revolution. Hand axes and similar criteria cannot be the crucial markers, if their importance is later equaled or superceded by other inventions seen as revolutionary. Since technical civilizations have the means and will to control a planet, suitable markers include tools, methods and other artifacts which would allow of the result. The ancient civilizations of China, Europe and India were the first which we can imagine achieving planetary control; in fact, none of them obtained it. Having the wheel, the arch, the plow and the well-supplied huge armies of antiquity was not enough. Later on, the Chinese invented money, the printing press, gunpowder and ocean-going sailing ships, but did not go on to conquer the planet. Europeans invented the rifle and cannon, as well as ocean going ships which enabled the discovery of the Americas and trade with the Far East. The first signs in History of potential technical civilizations were the Spanish, French, Dutch and British Empires, because they were global in nature. The Europeans ruled over millions of people - a large fraction of all living human beings - and extracted such resources as they needed wherever they were found. Even so, none of their Empires were technical civilizations in control of the planet prior to 1700. It was not until the machines of the Industrial Revolution were invented and applied that planetary control was possible. Before the mid-19^th century, there was a will to dominate the planet in several European capitals, but there was no way to implement and maintain it. All that changed in just a few generations, when mastery of machinery allowed national frustrations to be expressed first in colonial adventures and then in World Wars.

Becoming a human technical civilization is closely associated with the Industrial Revolution which started 200-250 years ago. The critical factor sustaining the modern world is use of inanimate power. Electricity and liquid or gaseous fuels power our machines, which are programmed to carry out their purposes with little or no human intervention. Modern machines are a specialized class of tools designed according to theoretical knowledge. For example, making an electric motor requires understanding of the relationship between electricity and magnetism, as well as knowledge of electrical conduction and the mechanics of spinning rotors, bearings, etc. Unlike the swords, spears, or adzes used for millennia, initially electric motors and most other modern machines are not the result of trial and error or gradual improvements. Computers are an excellent example of modern machinery, as they were initially developed in a very short time - less than a decade - based on a theory of computing. Earlier (19^th Century) attempts to build computers failed because appropriate theories were lacking. Thus, Charles Babbage's mechanical computer was based on a mechanical model of counting, a sort of complex abacus.¹ The current idea of a computer did not crystallize until Alan Turing presented his theories (in 1936) and built working machines during World War II. Based on Turing's work, John von Neumann showed how to implement the Turing machine as a stored program machine. Since World War II, nearly all computers are variants of the von Neumann design. In the seventy years since Alan Turing's theoretical conception of the computer, more and more of our tools and conveniences  - the artifacts of a technical civilization - originate in scientific research. New technologies are brought to market full blown after a relatively short incubation period following conception. Thus we have modern "miracles," such as the Internet, television, wonder drugs, "test tube" babies, etc.

So, a defining characteristic of technical civilization is development arising out of theory, as distinguished from development by accident or trial and error. This mode of development is clearly recent, since ancient thinkers were not interested in applying their ideas about physics, chemistry, etc as we do. While there are some precocious examples of development based on theory prior to 1600, this mode only became firmly established with the widespread acceptance of the work of Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, etc.² If we count the cultural shift which is the foundation of modernity, technical civilization started about 400 (possibly 500) years ago. If, however, we count only the actual achievement of planetary control, technical civilization began as late as the 20^th Century. Since I prefer to include cultural and intellectual foundations, I put the start of technical civilization at the earlier date. I concede that assignment can only be made in retrospect; i.e., once we have decided that a technical civilization exists. That planetary control is achieved based on self-conscious knowledge and purposes is the more fundamental criterion.

Based on the foregoing considerations, it is clear that the arrival of H. sapiens at the technical civilization stage is a very recent event: it happened well within the last 0.5 millennium. In the previous 200-250 millennia of its existence, H. sapiens did not have the qualifications to be so classified. No other Earthly species has evolved into a technical civilization.

Lifestyle

The reason for struggling over the definition and advent of technical civilization is that it marks a radical departure from the past. The significance of technical civilization is the lives we lead. The way people used to live is not the way they live today. We are not our fathers and mothers: often enough, we can barely make out who they were. This time, it really is different, and there is probably no going back.

Members of technical civilizations have many advantages. They live longer, healthier lives. The time and effort required to meet subsistence needs is dramatically reduced. Political economy is radically restructured to emphasize intellectual work and self-fulfillment instead of manual labor and basic survival. Technical civilizations can afford industries devoted to education and entertainment. They have time for experimentation, change and having fun. Those benefits result from worldly knowledge and purposeful applications; i.e., technical civilizations are characterized by their cultures, not their physical makeup or environment.

Lifestyles began to change markedly in Europe, North America and Japan during the Victorian period. These changes were motivated by European desires and powered by the wealth of the Americas and, to a lesser extant, by the resources stripped from India and Africa. British and continental European colonial dominance ended with World War I, thereafter passing  to those European descendants occupying the United States. The American Empire is made up of former empires - Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, English, and Japanese - held together by common economic interests. In the last few decades, China and India have been developing rapidly and coming to terms with the global colossus surrounding them. Because of their huge populations and strategic locations, it is likely that China and India will remain independent powers and civilizations, but both are likely to become closely integrated with Japan and the West. Even the recalcitrant Russians are gradually finding their way to Europe, a process that started with Tsar Peter the Great and was only interrupted by the Leninist-Stalinist Soviet state. For better or worse, the globalized civilization which already exists in Honolulu and Hong Kong, has reached Bollywood, and will, eventually, penetrate the heart of darkest Africa.

Why? Because people everywhere like clean bodies, nice clothes, good coffee and exciting entertainment. Coffee, chocolate and spices have been seductive global goods for centuries. American football, cricket and soccer get audiences of millions, as do movies made in Tokyo and Beijing. People are willing to work hard to obtain those benefits, so they submit themselves to the direction of their corporate masters. Victorian Luddites reacted to jobs lost to machines, just as many American populists oppose outsourcing made possible by globalization, although, in the end, mechanization and globalization are probably too strong to defeat. That strength is not founded on armies or secret police; rather, it comes from the people themselves. Even the most ardent Union activists enjoy the cultural products of our global civilization and do not wish to be deprived of them. (After a cup of your favorite at Starbucks, ersatz tastes awful.) While some people are Luddites, I do not know of any who have volunteered to live life as it was, say, ca. 1776. While some of San Francisco's original Hippies still live on the remote "Lost Coast," others have not followed their example since the 1960s. In fact (personal observation), many of the Hippies' children have moved back to the cities, and the surviving, aged founders have had to seek help from the Welfare State. The lifestyles made possible by technical civilization are so enticing and addictive that very few are willing to give it up for long, especially when the cost of forbearance is painful disability and death. During the Great Depression, for example, movies became entrenched in American culture because they made possible in virtual life what society was temporarily unable to support beyond the ticket booth. The same phenomenon has spread to every major urban center on this planet, with the result that Hollywood and the NFL have many competitors. What people like is evidenced in what they do, and that is what makes technical civilization unbeatable.

Globalization is one aspect of the coming of technical civilization. Symbolically, the world's peoples are now one, if only as producers and consumers of globalized trade goods and commodities. An unfortunate, but quite real, side effect of globalization is the rapid loss of thousands of minority languages, cultures and histories, if not the lives of their former bearers. As matters stand, more than half of the human population resident in the Americas, Europe, East and South Asia, and Australia has achieved a First World standard of living. There are pockets of deep poverty in Asia, the Middle East, and South America. Africans, by and large, live lives shortened by desperate circumstances. Nonetheless, there are many reasons to be optimistic about the eventual outcome, provided the overpopulation problem is solved. The concept of humanity as one people is growing stronger every day, which reinforces demands for fairness in sharing wealth and income. In the end, the benefits of technical civilization will be extended to everyone who wants them. The nearly universal desire for the life offered by technical civilization is a driving force transforming human cultures, so that eventually there will only be local flavors of a universal culture. The same processes will not only lead human cultures to become very similar to each other, but also to the cultures of any extant galactic civilizations.

Many people reject or resent the argument I just made, but I would have you think on it a little more. Consider, for example, that many of the most common products are available as a result of Columbus' voyage in 1492 and the ensuing globalization. Potato chips, hot dogs and pizza were invented in the United States, but owe their global consumption to global commerce. Potatoes traveled from the Andes to Europe and beyond. Familiarity with the potato made possible the unhealthy love of fat laden, salty potato chips and their recent improvement, low salt, baked chips. Hot dogs owe their existence to the melting pot of northern Europeans (Germans, Poles, Czechs, etc) who had immigrated to New York City, and an association with the popular beach at Coney Island. From Coney Island, the hot dog moved along the elevated rail route to Brooklyn and Manhattan and then the Bronx, where it became established in lunch carts and baseball parks. Pizza owes its existence to theft of the tomato from Aztecs by Spaniards, and the adoption of stolen goods by poor Italians who eventually moved to New York City. Of course, pizza also owes its existence to those Greek and Italian shepherds who lived on wine, bread and cheese while tending their herds and flocks in the hills. But, all of those traditional shepherd foods were products of villages and cities which mixed and matched the various agricultural foodstuffs available to them. Thus, pizza started in Naples as the bread topped with tomato paste which we now call focaccia. Somehow, it wasn't until New York City a century ago that Neapolitan émigrés put it all together as pizza pie. Who wants to give up any of these tasty delights which, together with lager beer and flavored soda water, now dominate the aisles of every American grocery store?  McDonalds and Coca Cola have conquered places as far away as Moscow, Beijing, Pretoria, New Delhi and Sydney. Many local entrepreneurs have gone to great lengths to copy irresistible global products. The same sort of process has made opium, cocaine, hashish and other narcotics global products. All that being so, I think it very unlikely people will give up what they perceive as benefits and luxuries, even when global markets also provide them with harmful products.

So, as I have argued elsewhere with regard to political processes, globalization associated with the development of technical civilization is due to people themselves. When Deng Xiaoping announced his political slogan, "Get Rich!," he only said what the Chinese people wanted to do anyway. Since they want what technical civilization brings, it is unstoppable.

Chain Reactions

If technical civilization is an established fact, whether it was established recently or a long time ago, the question remains how it got started. Looking at its timing and its effects (lifestyle or culture) narrows down the factors we need to consider in answering the question. What happened in ancient Mesopotamia is probably not relevant to the current war in Iraq, as we need only look at recent History to find the causes of that conflict. On this accounting, whatever brought about our technical civilization happened since the European Renaissance, not elsewhere or before. This is not to claim that it could not have been otherwise, or that they were not correlated events. It is just that, as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel shows, the accidents of geography and biological evolution endowed Europeans with an opportunity not available to others.

Despite behavioral differences due to location and history, human beings are otherwise much the same everywhere, so non-Europeans learned the methods of their foreign contacts quickly. It took just one forceful contact with the American Admiral Perry in 1856 to engender the Japanese Meiji Restoration. Within forty years, Japan transformed itself into a modern, global power, as evidenced by its military defeats of China (1895) and Russia (1905) and occupation of Taiwan, Korea and portions of Manchuria and China proper. Within a century, the Japanese created an Empire which was only subdued by the United States in World War II on account of the United States' greater population and industrial base. Despite the devastation of 20^th century's World Wars, all of the States which adopted modern science and technology survived those wars to become today's dominant powers. History shows that the dominance of one human group over another established society is transitory and getting ever more fleeting. China, for example, nearly ruined and dismembered by foreign intrusions, has transformed the lives of one-quarter of its people (over 300 million people) in just one generation and is now a major global power. Within a decade, the Chinese economy is likely to surpass that of Japan and, possibly, that of the United States as well. The people not only want the lifestyle available to members of technical civilizations, the elite classes thirst for the recognition bestowed by power. So, the trend toward globalization and development of technical civilization is, as I have already written, irresistible once begun.

The simplest general model of what is happening in modern History is the hyperbolic growth (logistic) curve commonly applied on biological processes. The explosive growth of that curve is exemplified by the increase of human population during the last 300 years. For a long time, the human population  grew very slowly, starting from about 10 million people 10 millennia ago. Around 1700, the world's population reached about 1 billion, representing a net average growth rate of less than 0.3% per year.³ The old patrilineal system of inheriting farm land by division among surviving sons seemed to work because of that slow growth rate. For most of our ancestors, very little social or environmental change would have taken place during a lifetime. That growth rate is so low (an average annual excess of 10 people in a village of 3,000) that it probably went unnoticed by our ancestors until the population grew to the point that traditional cultures were unable to cope. Ironically, this fact was only noticed by Rev. Thomas Malthus after the modern population explosion began. Malthusian and other population theories are entirely modern notions, not something people thought about prior to modern times. Malthus hypothesized that the excess population would suffer increased disease and death due to malnourishment, leading to population reduction. Conversely, a lack of sufficient population would encourage births and population growth. Malthus assumed those negative and positive feedbacks would maintain the population in  a steady state. Of course, he was wrong about modern times, because the rate of population growth had increased in the century before he wrote, leading to a rapidly increasing population.⁴ But we should not ignore Malthus: demographics is still a very hard subject because of its many, interacting variables. Even our best software cannot make exact predictions about future population  sizes. The growth curve is an easy generalization of available facts, since it represents figures available by census sampling and statistical analysis, but entails nothing about causes or trends.

Even if the historical facts are represented by a hyperbolic curve, we don't know where we are on that curve. This mystery is due to self-similarity independent of scale: the method of gathering the data and plotting the points actually fits a family of curves related by transformations such as mirror-imaging, enlargement and shrinking. By analogy, the Moon looks larger or smaller depending on the type and adjustment of telescope used, so we cannot estimate its true size in the absence of a reference (such as the image of a meter stick seen from a known distance). Unfortunately, History does not offer us such references, so we must always guess our futures based on incomplete and erroneous data about the past. Nonetheless, based on commonly available data, it appears the population "took off" about 300 years ago just when the Industrial Revolution was beginning. It is impossible to say whether one thing caused the other, but they are correlated. That correlation is not merely statistical, since the development of modern non-farm industries, such as chemicals, steel and rail transport, enabled higher agricultural productivity on larger farms in more remote areas. The increased supply of foodstuffs and other resources allowed more population growth which, in turn, promoted urbanization and efficient industrial growth. Industry, agriculture and population have been involved in push-push growth; i.e., a system with positive feedback. If the correlated factors of systemic growth are normalized (say, as the rate or acceleration of change or curvature of the growth curve), the relationships between the factors will be seen as relatively constant; i.e., it is only the scale of events that changes.⁵ For those "inside" such a growing system, it will be impossible to determine what "causes" the growth: it would seem to come from everywhere. This is also the sort of experience we have in observing our Universe, which expands in every direction, thus making it impossible to determine where the Big Bang started or where we are going. Things just happen in every direction, everywhere.

This growth behavior is characteristic of chain reactions, as in atomic bombs and nuclear reactors, which only stop when critical factors are exhausted. Since chain reactions require energy input to continue, systems undergoing them do not return to a previous state after the reaction runs its course. The system necessarily collapses to a lower energy state after enough fuel is consumed (because using fuel dissipates energy). Since every physical system in our Universe has finite resources, including the system of the whole Universe, chain reactions - even supernovae and black hole growth - eventually stop. This limitation implies the growth leading to a technical civilization must always find new fuel or the civilization will collapse. The fear of running out of resources and suffering social collapse urges on technical civilization to ever greater heights beyond the home planet. In other words, it is "grow or die."

It is important to recognize that the mechanism underlying a chain reaction does not itself change because of the reaction. For example, what is important in nuclear fission is the neutron capture cross section (measured in barns) of a particular atom. If enough neutrons hit the atomic barn at the correct velocity, the atom blows up. When the atom splits, it releases neutrons which are then available to target other atoms. If enough neutrons find fissionable nuclei, the process will continue; i.e., if atoms are arranged so as to increase the probability of being hit by neutrons, more atoms will fission. There is a critical density of atoms at which the process becomes self-sustaining, and above which it becomes explosive. When a similar process occurs in other things, such as population growth, the critical density is commonly called a Tipping Point, because that is where the direction of things is separated into "before" and "after." Based on demographic considerations, the Tipping Point (launch) of technical civilization was about 300 years ago, because it takes a technical civilization to support a large, rapidly growing population. While there may be other socio-economic arrangements that could have the same effect, I do not know of any examples in History. In fact, prior to the modern population explosion, it appears Malthus' reasoning was correct. Pre-modern civilizations cycled between expansion and contraction, Golden Ages and Dark Ages, for specific reasons still being researched by various scientists.  While we cannot know whether our civilization will suffer the same fate as the previous ones, it is clear that modern societies have grown beyond limits set in  antiquity. We are undergoing a chain reaction which we can measure in several different ways, even if the underlying mechanism it is not understood.

Connections

So what happened a few centuries ago that led our ancestors into the technical civilization we have become?

First, a word about "causes," a word I avoid using. Whatever happened in History, there is always serious doubt about its events and how one event is connected to other events. We may prefer to believe that Hitler's ordering the German armed forces to invade Poland started World War II, but there were many events prior to September,1939 indicating a state of war already existed. Despite controversies about the Chamberlain-Hitler Munich Agreement, German objectives had been clearly stated by Adolph Hitler many times prior to Munich. Britain and France belatedly agreed to defend Poland when their leaders were finally shocked into listening to what Hitler said by the brutal Nazi dismemberment and occupation of Czechoslovakia. The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact made clear the cynical dishonesty of the Nazi and Soviet regimes, unfortunately too late to save France and the rest of Europe. So, when did World War II really start? Was it "inevitable" after Hitler assumed office in January, 1933? Was the repatriation of the Ruhr - a major violation of Versailles - where it began? Or, did it start with Kristallnacht, or the Anschluss? Retrospectively, all those provocative events are certainly part of the story we call World War II, just as are the Japanese aggressions and atrocities against the Chinese and other Asian peoples. We can certainly talk about causes and effects in terms of human actions and reactions to the macabre events of the 1930s. But were human emotions the cause of World War II? Just what does "cause" add to the raw description of the time-ordered sequence of events?

While it is not clear to me what "caused" World War II, I believe we fell into it for thousands, if not millions, of reasons. In the same way, somehow we fell into being a technical civilization. In both cases, there was some tipping point or combination of tipping points that made the following events highly probable. Just as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle makes position and momentum variables in a hyperbolic equation connected by Planck's constant, so knowing what happened in History and where that led are conflicting pieces of information limited by the rate at which information disintegrates (perhaps the speed of light?). If we have a theory that such and such happened, therefore another thing happened, we have more than a linking of such and such to the other thing, we have also assumed a theory about causation or necessity or reality - all Metaphysical concepts. If that sort of linking has no empirical foundation (which I think is the case), then it will be very difficult to determine the tipping point. What we can say is that the tipping point is somewhere inside or outside the arbitrary patch of space-time we specify. If we can delimit that patch in a regular manner, as they do in mathematical proofs, then the tipping point may be considered as a limit, but this does not prove that such a tipping point actually exists in our experience. (It only proves the tipping point is a limit of available data presented in a certain way.) All that we know is that things go into the patch of interest one way and come out another. Based on evidence, we can say that things changed there with a probability determined by the estimated certainty of the evidence; i.e., the connection between "before" and "after" cannot be greater than the combined probability of those events. So, the "causes" of technical civilization are always statistical in nature. The tipping point is offered as an explanation of what happened because the statistics suggest it, in the same way Euclid asked us to consider relations on triangles abstracted from crude drawings.

There have been a lot of books written during the last two or three decades about our evolution and History. I think there is a sense in academia, if not elsewhere, that there is something different about living human beings and our situation as opposed to those ancestors who lived a century or more ago. While this sense might be attributed to the young, who always feel their new lives are different and more interesting than those of their parents, there are lots of older folks who share that feeling. Perhaps living in the midst of the computer revolution and Information Age has something to do with those feelings. Until the late19^th century, scarcely anything changed during most human lifetimes. Since then, people have experienced multiple shocks: cars, airplanes, skyscrapers, indoor plumbing (showers and toilets), packaged food and clothing, radio, television, computers and the Internet, atomic bombs, world wars, multiple genocides, factory jobs, office work, cures for cancer, genetic engineering and much, much more. Today's world looks nothing like what existed in my childhood, not because I was once a child and now I am an old man, but because I can remember and compare what was to what is. For example, I was afflicted with diphtheria when I was 8. I owe my life to 92 shots of liquid penicillin, injected from a big syringe into my butt without mercy every 4 hours. At the time, penicillin was costly and hard to get, just like today's chemotherapy drugs. Now diphtheria is a rare disease and multiple versions of antibiotics are available at very low costs (less than 1% of the price 60 years ago). People used to die of diphtheria, but such a fate would be unbelievable almost everywhere today. As material conditions changed, so did our expectations. Consequently, our outlook and understanding of ourselves is radically - qualitatively - different from that of our parents and grand-parents.

More than half of the people who ever lived are alive today. A large proportion of the population is very young or uneducated in History, so not aware that anything ever was different from current conditions. For those who do know History, the changes are startling, even shocking. But, does knowing History make any difference in the process? I believe that those who do not know the facts of History are its pawns because they are unable to influence it. The fish in the ocean do not think about their motions; they just play their part. Whatever the ignorant do is, in sum, a random influence, not a directed influence. This is just to say that the only way one self-consciously influences History is (a) to correctly apprehend its events, (b) to make events into facts by placing them in a sufficiently accurate context [= theory] and (c) acting in a manner at selected times and places so as to bring about the desired confluence of events at a future space-time. If any of those components (a)-(c) are missing, whatever is done will influence the sequence of events in an unpredictable manner just as if one were ignorant. In fact, almost everything we do has unpredictable or unintended consequences, including most of what we plan, because natural processes are chaotic. No one can have a perfect understanding of how History works.

So, is the rise of technical civilization just an accident of History? Certainly, it is at least that, because a confluence of factors must have occurred to bring it about, even if those factors were random occurrences. Technical civilization requires intelligent beings as its agents, who self-consciously manipulate Nature and themselves. The very existence of a self-directing technical civilization transforms its History into a deliberate project, even if it originated in chaos. This apparent contradiction between the chaotic and the ordered is one of the hardest things to understand about biological evolution. Most likely, life started as an accidental mixture of the "right stuff," but once that stuff was put together long enough the rules changed (as in chain reactions). All living things are active, not passive, participants in their environments; i.e., they use energy to decrease local entropy. Unlike the chemical soup from whence they came, biological creatures have to eat, digest and eliminate to maintain their form. They have to reproduce to prevent their eventual dissolution. Any organisms unable to do those things faster than Nature destroyed them are not here to tell the story. While, initially, organisms might have survived on the chemicals in which they were born, as do anaerobes in oceanic trenches, eventually some of them would have eaten others due to a shortage of critical molecules or because eating is a lower energy path to self-maintenance.⁶ Once an obstacle was found in the path of a living thing, it either got around it or overcame it or died. Only those still living after confronting obstacles reproduced, and only those offspring surviving further confrontations with obstacles continued the line. Darwinian evolution proceeds because of the successes of some organisms and their offspring, and the failure of others. Yet all of this started from a mixture of chemicals which happened to consist of the "right stuff." In the same way, technical civilization sprang to life out of an unlikely background; but, once started, it is very hard to stop. Our modern History demonstrates the self-promoting nature of technical civilization. One thing leads to another.

Therefore, we should expect that technical civilization, like life itself, arose out of favorable circumstances. It did not have to happen; i.e., there was no cause, not even a Rube Goldberg chain of events, that brought it about. We only know that it happened, because we are here to ask how. We cannot ask why (a question involved in causation), but like expert food and wine tasters, we can enjoy eating and drinking while guessing what went into the stuff found on our plates and in our glasses.

Ingredients

We know about when technical civilization got started and that it was the luck of the draw that started it. But what were the original ingredients of that "right stuff" which engendered it? This is always a disastrous question because no one knows the answer, nor will anyone ever know exactly what happened. Nonetheless, I am just as drawn to it as all the others who attempted to pull King Arthur's sword out of a stone. Unfortunately, I am not assisted by Merlin or guided by the Lady of the Lake, so what follows is just my guesswork, nothing more. I am fortunate, however, to be a bit closer to the onset of technical civilization during the last millennium than the origin of life 3.8 billion years ago. Moreover, our human ancestors left us records of their lives and times - our History - whereas early life forms left us nothing but putative scraps of themselves buried in very old rocks. Hopefully, we can pull a few things out of the still unburied human scrap heap.

I think that conscious intelligence is a prerequisite of technical civilization, but that is not enough to make it go. After all, our ancient ancestors were self-consciously intelligent just as we are, but they narrowly missed becoming a technical civilization probably because they weren't interested in it. Even today, there are lots of people who oppose what we have become: they would prefer going back to an imagined "Golden Age" of a prior day. Yet, what stops most counter-revolutionary opponents of modernity is their unwillingness to give up the creature comforts and pleasures technical civilization provides. Despite common fantasies about life in Utopia, actual Utopian societies almost always lack enough self-sufficient recruits shortly after their founding. Hippies and others hoping for Utopia have escaped into the pre-industrial countryside, but their colonies die out in a generation or two because they cannot maintain themselves without outside assistance.⁷ There is an asymmetry in human evolution, a ratcheting up. As has happened many times before in human evolution, the dominant successor somehow grabs the best land and resources, and pushes all other competitors into the ground. (Have you seen any Neanderthals lately?) Thus, I must suppose the ancients only escaped from technical civilization by never starting it. We did, so we are stuck with it until it fails of itself or destroys us.

If, once it gets going, technical civilization is an addictive honey pot for its members, where does the honey come from?⁸ This is more easily answered than most people care to admit, as we have had honey created within living memory.

Consider the computer industry. When I was first involved with computers 4 decades ago, most people did not know what they were and did not want them. My more prescient computer-illiterate acquaintances of the 1960s rightly feared losing their jobs to automation. The vast majority of adults could not imagine anything a computer could do for or to them. Yet, something happened to bunches of young teenage males in the 1970s when they became enthralled with computers, turned into "nerds" and later evolved into "geeks." When I used to visit the "personal computer" store in Berkeley, California in the middle and late 1970s, what was on display were dreams and very little reality. For those, including myself, caught up in the computer craze, those machines clearly evoked the possibility of wielding incredible power, of really becoming a Master of the Universe. That exhilarating dream was fuelled by "Star Trek" re-runs (I saw every episode at least 10 times) and later by the "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" movies. Basically, something about the computer turned ordinary young men (and a few young women) into fanatics. Society at large and its corporate masters had no idea of what was happening, as illustrated by IBM's mismanagement of its PC project. IBM corporate executives thought the PC would placate a small audience of a few thousand trouble makers who were taking their business to then-new mini-computer vendors. IBM's managers felt threatened by mini-computer manufacturers, such as the now-defunct Digital Equipment Corporation (eventually absorbed into Hewlett-Packard), but, like most people, could not imagine a cheap, tiny box meeting the needs of millions of consumers and businesses. Thus, when PC sales immediately exploded, corporate hierarchies were stunned and never caught up to all that followed. Because the Establishment could not comprehend a changed world, the few people who did, like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Jr., ended up controlling the computer industry.

One of the things that starts a revolution such as technical civilization is enough people want it enough. We are in the midst of an Information Age brought on by cheap computing power because a few crazed young people hyped comic book dreams. The same thing happened during the Enlightenment, when people became fascinated with machines. Most of the musical instruments found in the classical symphony orchestra were invented and improved just 200-300 years ago. Thomas Jefferson was enthralled with the machine concept which he and James Madison made the heart of the United States Constitution. The American Founding Fathers believed they had invented a form of government which was a perpetual, self-correcting machine. (Entropy and the impossibility of perpetual motion were 100 years in  their future.)  The same fascination with machines brought about the steam engine and, later on, steam ships and railroads. Once the machine concept was embodied in something, all sorts of improvements and other applications were made in short order. What started and continued all that were people who felt empowered or ennobled by their discoveries and inventions. Sir Isaac Newton never imagined the consequences of his work, but others did. They wanted to be  freed of the boredom, drudgery and restrictions of the past, and they wanted it badly. The American Founding Fathers said of themselves that they risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to get it.

But what was "it?" It was an idea, a dream, not any physical reality. Everything that brought about the Enlightenment and the recent Computer Revolution was in people's Minds, not anywhere else. That is, our technical civilization began with an intellectual and emotional upheaval, a cultural revolution. People can imagine what they want, whether it is power, sex, money or just freedom, and become single minded about getting it. Adam Smith considered those drives in Wealth of Nations, and set forth a philosophy aimed at taming them. What Smith and other innovators of the Scottish Enlightenment did not foresee is that unleashing laissez-faire Capitalism and the liberal State would create a different kind of society than those of their experience or imagination. Probably a common feeling or belief among revolutionaries is that they are improving things relative to present conditions. If only I were in charge ... Oddly enough, what happens is usually different from expectations because no one controls the process once it starts. History is filled with unintended consequences, but we almost always forget that fact, especially in the heat of fulfilling repressed desires. Not even the self-appointed Masters of the Universe determine outcomes, possibly because the vortex of events sucks in too many obscure, unaccounted variables as it develops. Two generations ago, who would have suspected that people would line up in the middle of the night to get the latest computer or cell phone? Because "it" is contagious, it overwhelms people and transforms their social relations.

The hardest thing anyone can do is have a new idea. Once had, there's no stopping it: its mere existence shatters worlds. Perhaps  J. Robert Oppenheimer realized that when he quoted from the Bhagavad-Gita ("I am become destroyer of worlds") as he watched the first atomic explosion. Human mastery of nuclear physics, exemplified by nuclear weapons, nuclear power and nuclear medicine, probably represents a point of no return in our evolution. What is irreversible is not whether we can dispense with nuclear physics and machines, but that we have the ability to recreate them at will. Because modern knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology allows us nearly total control of our environment, and substantial control over our bodily functions and dysfunctions, modern societies are part of a global technical civilization. In so far as we implement this level of control, we separate ourselves from all other living creatures because we can choose our circumstances and our destiny.

To support the idea that the rise of technical civilization was driven by relatively few innovators is not also to approve the notion that Heroes drive History. Instead, heroes are limited by circumstance, only playing their role at critical times. They are deemed to be heroes because of their exemplary roles; i.e., the hero does what anyone similarly equipped in the same circumstances would do. In other words,  people like Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein arrive at the right time and place. Had they been born just a few years earlier or later, we would have known little or nothing of them. Einstein's contributions, for example, depended heavily on James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electro-magnetism (ca. 1873)⁹; particularly the idea of describing natural phenomena in terms of a field theory and the premise of the constant speed of light. A century earlier, someone like Einstein would never have made it out of the Patent Office because Relativity would have been incomprehensible to scientists of that day. On the other hand, by mid-20^th century, Relativity was the assumed background of physical science excepting Quantum Mechanics. Most other Great Leaps Forward are of the same character: they assume a certain context. Napoleon could not have conquered Europe without the French Revolution. Hitler could not have grabbed power without the Treaty of Versailles. History shows that people having particular skills come to the fore when the opportunity to use those skills presents itself, but not always and not otherwise. This is just another application of Evolutionary Theory: the early bird gets the worm while others get little or nothing. If that early bird's offspring happen to be as timely and as skilled or lucky, soon enough their race becomes a species, while the others either go elsewhere or die. What we see, retrospectively, are busy early birds going about their work, not all the others whose skill and timing were wanting. Our observations tempt us to crown the founding early bird with laurels, calling it 'Hero,' not least out of respect and love for our elders, because we observers must have descended from ancestors similar to that bird.

To further diminish the role of the hero, while still lauding those who become heroes, I note that history does not create them; rather, we choose them. The flux of events always presents opportunities for different outcomes. Each point of Einstein's continuous space-time is crossed by an infinity of world-lines or, looked at differently, is the origin of an infinity of world-lines passing through every other point (event) in the Universe. That is, everything is (causally) connected to everything else. The Quantum Mechanical picture of this connectedness of everything is more complicated because space-time is discrete, not continuous, and not everything necessarily connects with everything else. In the quantized Universe, the Relativistic notion of simultaneity breaks down, so we cannot know everything sooner or later. Nonetheless, those very different models of our Universe place constraints on what is likely to happen. Just as "one cannot make a purse of a sow's ear," so the invention of automobiles (gas, electric or steam driven) was very unlikely before the Industrial Revolution. The tools, materials, knowledge and workmanship required to make a car simply were not available until recently. At best, an ancient like Heron might have made a crude toy car. Despite his intriguing drawings, Leonardo da Vinci never built a working car or helicopter. So, it is not a matter of genius or hard work which brings about invention nor is it "there to be discovered." The late Victorian inventors of the automobile used ideas and materials only recently available, such as Thermodynamic theory, the Carnot cycle, the steam engine, the electric motor, oil, gasoline, steel, vulcanized rubber, precision lathes, ball bearings, etc. Entrepreneurs, such as Gottlieb Daimler, Ransom Olds, Armand Peugeot and Henry Ford, are justly famous for bringing everything together in their affordable automobiles which utterly changed most societies. The same is true of all those who pioneered radio, television, telephones, railroads, assembly lines and the other things which make our modern world what it is. Nonetheless, all of their innovations rest on what was there to be had. Further, there was almost always more than one pioneer who explored those new territories, not just some Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett. There is a tension in History between heroes and accidents.

Besides conscious intelligence and the ability to manipulate symbols and languages as well as things, technical civilization requires methods of storage and promulgation of accumulated experience and knowledge. Traditionally, these functions were performed by leisure classes such as shamans, priesthoods, bureaucracies and universities who were not assigned productive duties.¹⁰ Cultural inheritance sets up innovation in so far as it is full of "holes." If we assume people are adverse to work, even if they are not outright lazy, it is likely their societies operate on a minimal set of ideas and practices. Minimalism makes possible many different social arrangements, depending on which aspects or parts of a larger set are acted out and which left out. For example, although England was settled by Germanic Anglo-Saxon immigrants who displaced earlier Roman and Celtic populations, English culture and language is neither Roman nor Celtic nor German although they contain elements of all those predecessors. While the Vikings, and later the Frenchified Vikings from Normandy, had a profound influence on the English History, there are many cultural patterns which were not adopted. The English language, for example, adopted thousands of words from other languages, but ignored complex Latin declensions and German grammatical structure. English evolved like modern Pidgin English as a lowest common denominator that discourages complex structures, classifications and shades of meaning. That strategy made possible an Imperial language which suited the British and their successor Americans: colonials are assumed to be able to learn and understand the language of simplified, stereotypical transactions used by their governors. The particular choice of parameters leaves many other possibilities available for development. Cultures develop analogously, as the notions implicit in cultural practices are not so rigid as to exclude variations. Thus, in ancient Rome, worship of the virgin and motherhood were eventually incorporated into Christian religion. In the process of assimilation, new terms were made to fit into existing structures, often by analogy or metaphor. A modus vivendi was found in terms most people could approve, while avoiding divisive interpretations. The same thing happens in political processes leading up to elections.

There is more than one way to apply cultural and linguistic components, just as we do not have to build our houses on rectangular floor plans. Commonly applied building codes and methods do not exclude Buckminster Fuller structures made of triangular pieces. While strong and durable structures can be built using Fuller's ideas, that fact is not immediately obvious when looking around neighborhoods or studying carpentry and architecture. We come to assume that houses are designed with straight lines and right angles. Innovators, for a variety of reasons, see that what is customary is not all that is possible; e.g., it is possible to use triangular or circular components in building houses. In order to have that insight, society must have advanced sufficiently to make those different arrangements possible. For instance, the common bridge or roof truss is composed of a network of triangles, which might suggest the idea of triangular panels. Those living in societies which had not yet developed the truss would probably find it more difficult to come up with Fuller's design concept. This point may not seem obvious, but it is illustrated by the fact that the keystone arch was not developed until Roman times, and then forgotten by Europeans for about 1,000 years. The concept of the keystone arch was there all along. Examples of its use were certainly visible to many colonial survivors of Roman occupation and their descendants. It was probably lost as a building technique because it was not needed or economical in the smaller, simpler structures built after the Fall of Rome. Moreover, due to the general decline of construction and other trades, formal vocational training disappeared from Europe until the formation of Guilds and Universities during the Medieval period. Apprentices only learned the skills required to meet local needs and conditions, so the arts and sciences of the ancient Empire were lost.¹¹

Technical civilization can only arise if the originating culture is not overly rigid and determinative. However it comes about, there has to be room for various interpretations and different performances of cultural themes. If there is no variation in  thought or behavior - if people behave as automatons - I think it unlikely technical civilization would ever arise. It is exactly the inconsistencies and overlooked possibilities that are opportunities for innovators. Further, such opportunities are worthless when societies make it impossible to experiment publicly, as happened in Papist Italy following Galileo's abjuration of his Two New Sciences and his permanent house arrest. That might have been the end of modern European physical science, had not most of Galileo's ideas already escaped to Protestant Europe. Even so, the foundations of modern science had a very tough go of it until the late Enlightenment about 200 years ago. Those in charge try to keep scientists and other intellectuals confined to monasteries, Universities or (Soviet) sharashkas because "knowledge is power" (Plato). Even satirists such as Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels, a story about politics and corruption) were seen as dangerous, so suppressed as far as possible. Thus, the applications of modern science and technology were not grossly apparent until the Victorian age and the 20^th century.

A 20^th century irony is that technical knowledge, once sufficiently established, perpetuates itself. Adolph Hitler denounced Einstein's Relativity as "Jewish Science." On taking power, the Nazis were quick to rid the Universities of Jews, fellow travelers and all the others who had overthrown the 19^th century classical sciences in which Germans had excelled. In consequence, even though German scientists were first in discovering nuclear fission, they failed to develop nuclear weapons because they miscalculated the energy available from fission (in that formula promulgated by the International Jewish Conspiracy, E=mc²). The story has been told and retold how European refugees from Nazi terrorism designed and supervised building The Bomb, just as their predecessors invented modern science after being freed from the Inquisition about 300 years ago. Oddly enough, following World War II, the American and Soviet governments virtually or actually imprisoned large numbers of scientific workers and sealed off certain industries, in the hope of locking away the genie in the bottle. Despite that, interested teenagers can decipher how to build the Bomb and other weapons of mass destruction from texts commonly available worldwide. So it is that leaders of the world's major powers have learned nothing from History.

Wanting, Having

In summary, what are the ingredients that start a technical civilization? Here is my short list:

1. Technical civilizations are founded by intelligent social species capable of self-conscious choice.

2. The precursor society must have institutional provisions for learning and preservation of knowledge.

3. The precursor culture cannot be completely determinative of thought and behavior.

4. Innovators find loopholes in the pre-existing culture and need wiggle room to apply their discoveries.

5. Enough people have to want the innovation enough to overcome repression and inertia.

Innovators and entrepreneurs are strongly motivated by unpredictable personal reasons to achieve their goals. Their desires are not fulfilled unless there is some implementation which appeals to common human needs and wishes. Television, for instance, was a fairly instant hit because nothing is more interesting to people than themselves; i.e., television is a kind of mirror. The ideas and techniques underlying television were developed in the half-century following Maxwell's theories and Marconi's radio experiments, and within the century following Morse's telegraph system. Television was possible, but not excluded, by pre-20^th century science. There was a rapid series of developments of electro-magnetic technologies, probably because government and business recognized their utility, and because innovators cum entrepreneurs grabbed opportunities to become rich and famous. (In comparison, Medieval Guilds and many modern trade unions suppressed change in favor of advancement by seniority after apprenticeship.)

Based on this analysis, social animals such as bees and ants are not likely to evolve technical civilizations, if only because their individual and social behavior is largely determined. (There appears to have been little change in those social insects during the last 100 million years.) The lack of "social looseness" is visible today in those human societies which have resisted change for centuries, even millennia. Those societies have become backwaters simply because modern European and Asian societies had the desire, the opportunity and the will to change themselves.

Becoming a technical civilization results from an interaction between individuals and society which is often stressful. Because the process creates opportunities for self-aggrandizement, it often engenders conflict on various scales in several dimensions. There is, for example, the non-violent struggle to win a Nobel Prize or otherwise gain recognition and, at another pole, the use of nuclear weapons to destroy enemies. Societies unable to channel stress into useful applications probably do not become technical civilizations or self-destruct in the process. It is not a foregone conclusion that a society will become a full-fledged technical civilization once the process starts. Our global civilization, for example, has been teeter-tottering on the edge of catastrophe, risking  oblivion, during the last century. It is not clear what will be the outcome.

The most important point in this discussion is that technical civilization is a matter of choice. You have to want it. We do not have to choose it. We can drift through time and space, evolving however Nature would have it. Would the outcome be the same, whether or not we make choices? This is to ask whether our having power over ourselves and the environment, whether being a technical civilization, makes any difference. I do not know the final answer, but I believe wanting it makes a crucial difference. Nature would not of itself let us have it. Our chosen work is the price of fulfilling our desires.

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1. The Babbage machine may be considered a predecessor of the microcode in recent instruction processors in so far as it was designed - programmed - to perform a single mathematical function.

2. Newton delayed publishing his Principia Mathematica for 20+ years, as he feared public rejection and punishment of his heresies. Lucky for him, attitudes changed rapidly during the transitional period in which he lived.

3. Population growth is easily calculated as powers of 2, since 2¹⁰ = 1024 and 2³⁰ ~ 1 billion. If the population reaches 1 billion in  10,000 years, the doubling time is just (10,000/30) ~ 300 years, or about 10-15 human generations. Thus, the annual growth rate is something like 0.3%. This simple calculation ignores events such as Dark Ages, die-offs, etc, as well as periods of rapid, excess growth and other non-linear factors. Therefore, an initial worldwide annual excess of 30,000 births eventually grows the population to a billion or more because the doubling time is a few centuries.

4. Lindsay N. Childs, personal communication: "[from Wikipedia, World Population]