We live in miraculous times and each of us should feel lucky to be alive.Think about it. Our solar system in 4.6 billion years old. That number is so big that our species that is lucky to see 100 years can scarcely fathom the magnitude. At a constant rate of today’s human generational length of 25 years it means you’d need to got back from your mother’s mother’s mother almost another 200,000,000 generations to get to the real Adam and Eve.
Of course that is oversimplifying the situation.
Every person alive is literally 1 in a million. We all hit the lottery. We are long shots. We are miracles.
Think of all the conveniences we have today that would seem like magic to our ancestors going back only ten generations. These people lived in a time of enlightenment and set the stage for the greatest series of revolutions in science, politics, farming, transportation, etc. the world has ever known. In a short 200 years we have gone from dark shelters to living in well-lit, climate-controlled palaces. Even the poorest of cultures have amenities that would have stunned our ancient forebears.
Go back fifty generations to the Dark Ages and you’ll find most of the world living in huts, most people lacking understanding in a basic understanding of the world in which they lived. In a geological sense, fifty generations is a blink of an eye yet it is long enough for the 8 billion people living on the world today to be interlinked 150,000 times (250 /8,000,000,000). Despite our differences, everyone alive today is family, the only difference being how long you need to go back.
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| Modern Human Migration |
According to the best current scientific theory, 200,000 years ago a woman scientist’s nickname ‘Eve’ existed in Africa whose DNA is present in every person living today. No more than 80,000 years ago our forefathers began their last great migration out of Africa. After a stop in the Middle East, homo sapiens moved north into Europe and east into Asia, crossing the Bering Straight into the Americas around 15,000 years ago and covered both continents in less than a thousand years. We had the advantage of speech with the ability to learn patterns and to adapt to our surroundings. Over 10,000 years ago tribes in the Middle East developed a systematic form of agriculture. About 5,200 years ago their descendants learned how to mark symbols on clay tablets to retain knowledge. Most tribes on earth either copied these learning's if they came in contact with the Middle East or discovered farming and writing on their own.
In a geologic sense, it only took a blink of an eye to the world changed forever.
Humans have made great advances in taming the world since that time. Better housing for shelter, better plumbing for water and sanitation, and better medicines for health. Every aspect of our lives have been impacted by our ability to learn and pass to our children the knowledge of previous generations. This has swelled the human population from estimated 10,000 homo sapiens alive just before we left Africa to the 7 billion alive today. We have forced the world to adhere to our wishes. We can mold landscapes if they don’t suit our needs. At our core we are builders but we can also destroy.
It’s amazing when you consider the grand timeline of our planet. The Big Bang happened about 14 billion years ago and our Solar System formed about 4.6 billion years ago. Organic life began about 3.8 billion years ago.
The formation of coal - About 300 million years ago, vast forests surrounded low lying seas created huge peat bogs and as it sunk into the ground, the resultant pressure created almost all of today’s coal. Ancient humans used coal when they could find it but as most of it is buried deep in the ground we couldn’t get to it without the better mining technics developed as demand increased due to the invention of the steam engine and better heating fixtures. Ignoring controversial topics like global warming and acid rain, coal has been a huge boon to society as it allowed us to grow much faster than it could have done otherwise. The world currently uses around 8 billion tons of coal per year and current estimates say we have approximately 147 years worth of coal reserves at our current usage rate.
The formation of Oil - The earth’s oil was also formed over 300 million years ago. Oil forms when zooplankton and algae settle into warm sea beds in such quantity that the ocean cannot decompose it fast enough and allows it to form into a waxy material known as kerogen. Lack of oxygen is the key to preventing the rotting process and as the kerogen is covered by the earth’s activity, thermal heat transforms it over millions of years. The ideal depth for oil is three kilometers to give the proper amount of geothermal heat. Above that line you will normally find a different state of kerogen known as shale oil. If kerogen goes too deep it heats too much which transforms petroleum into natural gas. The current world estimate states we have 1.4 trillion barrels of oil reserves with a current usage of around 85 million barrels per day. Assuming these numbers are correct (and they change frequently), that give us 45 years at our current usage rates until we completely run out of oil. 
The world was a much different place when our fossil fuels formed over 300 million years ago. All the world’s land was in the process of forming a supercontinent called Pangaea. Human beings didn’t exist. Dinosaurs didn’t exist. It was about that time that the first vertebrates emerged from the sea to live exclusively on land. An atmosphere rich in oxygen caused a massive explosion in the diversity of life on Pangaea. Dinosaurs arrived about 230 million years ago and were the dominate life form for the next 135 million years. The first mammal evolved to distinguish itself from lizards about 160 million years ago. Around the time the first mammal appeared, rift valleys had formed into massive cracks in the supercontinent of Pangaea as the Americas started to separate from Europe and Africa. By the time an asteroid finished off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, Pangaea had separated in to the 7 continents we can recognize.Humans have used the carbon stored in wood for heat every since we learned how to make fire. The Romans, Indus, and Chinese created mighty empires long before the Industrial Age yet it took the ability to retrieve the energy rich fossil fuels of oil and coal to give us the advances of the last 200 years. The intense heat given off by coal was vital to the formation of the iron and steel industries which rebuilt the world. The discovery of how to process and use oil took us even further as it is the foundation of modern industries like plastics, transportation, aeronautics, computers, chemicals, and explosives among others. Even today’s advanced farming techniques depend on oil.
Modern society wouldn’t exist without fossil fuels yet no one can argue that we will run out of them eventually. Even the most optimistic estimates show that sometime in the next century demand will outstrip supply which will cause world wide crisis unless we find an alternative source of energy.
One way to look at it is it took the Earth 300 million years to create its fossil fuels and we will have essentially used all of them in less than 300 years of human consumption.
This has brought riches beyond anything known before our time. It isn’t uncommon for someone in the United States to eat a meal of beef grown in Montana, potatoes from Idaho, and beans from California. Dessert might be be made from fresh fruit from Chile and nuts from Georgia, spiced with herbs grown in the Caribbean, and all washed down with tea from China. Water is pumped to millions of homes which has ended cholera epidemics in all but the poorest nations. Air conditioning has made living in deserts and rain forests not only bearable but preferable for some. Instead of being stuck to local knowledge spread by word of mouth, our world is connected as news spreads at the speed of light. None of this is possible without cheap fossil fuel.
The universe is a cold, dark place and fossil fuels have made human existence bright for a speck of time on the geological clock. Every person alive today should feel lucky as they couldn’t have chosen an easier time to be born. Humans dominant the planet much like the dinosaurs did when fossil fuels were first forming.
I know it’s pointless but I can help to think how much life has changed for the current generation as compared to our ancestors ten generations in the past. These people broke the first bonds of autocracy just as science had started to enlighten the world. What will life be like for our descendants in ten generations?
- What will life be like when we run out of fossil fuel?
- Can scientists develop a viable alternative and ensure the same quality of life?
- How many people can Earth support without oil?
- Will democracy survive the chaos of the transition?
- Will our ancestors look on our accomplishments with pride or disgust?
I hope so.
Either way there is no doubt that we live in a miraculous time and each of us should feel lucky to be alive.
