We Just Got Here!

Five Milliseconds Before Midnight

 

This is just a fun article to put us in perspective regarding our time on this planet.

The Earth is 4.54 billion years old. Compress that history into a single day, midnight to midnight, and each second on the clock stands for about 52,500 years.

On that clock, our species appears 5.7 seconds before midnight.

Writing appears about a tenth of a second before midnight. The steam engine, the factory, and the rest of what we call the industrial world arrive with 4.76 milliseconds left. The years since the Second World War take up the last 1.5 milliseconds.

I was born in July of 1941. My life so far, eighty-five years of it, occupies 1.62 milliseconds of that day. An ordinary camera shutter stays open longer.

The whole of recorded history, every war we have an account of, every cathedral and constitution, fits inside that last tenth of a second. It all happened after the clock had, for any practical purpose, struck twelve.

Twain’s coat of paint

Mark Twain got to this in 1903, in an essay he never published.

He imagined the Eiffel Tower standing for the age of the world and wrote that the skin of paint on the knob at its very top would represent man’s share of that age, “and anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for.”

Twain thought humans had been around for 32,000 years. He was off by a factor of ten. The joke holds.

The current figure is about 300,000 years. Fossils from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, redated in 2017, moved the origin of Homo sapiens from roughly 195,000 years ago to roughly 315,000. Against 4.54 billion, that is 0.0066 percent of the Earth’s history. Seven thousandths of one percent.

I had assumed that for most of those 300,000 years we were doing very little, and I was wrong about that.

The oldest stone tools yet found, at Lomekwi in Kenya, are 3.3 million years old, which makes tools eleven times older than our species. Fire was in habitual use by about 400,000 years ago. The shell beads and engraved ochre from Blombos Cave in South Africa are 75,000 years old. People were capable long before anything we would recognize as history began.

So why did nearly everything we can count arrive in the last tenth of a second?

The ratchet

For most of our history, knowledge could travel only as far as a human memory could carry it. A hunter who learned something about the movement of elk could teach it to his sons, if he lived and if they listened. It might pass down a line of families for centuries. It might also vanish in a single bad winter, when the people who held it died before they had taught it. Oral cultures kept a great deal of knowledge this way, and lost a great deal, and nobody kept a ledger of the losses.

Lincoln, in a lecture he delivered in Jacksonville, Illinois, in February of 1859, called writing “the great invention of the world,” because once writing existed, “any important observation, likely to lead to a discovery, had at least a chance of being written down, and consequently, a better chance of never being forgotten.” Writing was the first tooth on the ratchet, about 5,300 years ago in Mesopotamia and at very nearly the same time in Egypt. Once something was written, it could be lost, but it no longer had to be.

Printing was the second tooth. Francis Bacon, in 1620, named printing, gunpowder, and the magnet as the three inventions that had “changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.” After Gutenberg, a copy of an idea cost less than the paper it was printed on, and an idea could be in a thousand hands before its author was dead.

The economist Michael Kremer put numbers to what follows, in a 1993 paper that runs from a million years ago to the present. His starting point is that an idea, unlike a loaf of bread, is not used up when someone uses it. If every person has some small chance of discovering something useful, then a larger population discovers more, and what it discovers lets it feed more people. From a million years ago to 300,000 years ago, by Kremer’s figures, the human population was growing so slowly that it doubled about every 230,000 years. By 1960 the rate of growth was roughly 6,800 times faster. Kremer’s is a model, and it leaves out schools, trade, patents, and the freedom to publish, among other things. It still captures the main event. More people, keeping more of what they learned, learned faster.

The takeoff

Thomas Malthus, in 1798, wrote that population “increases in a geometrical ratio” while subsistence “increases only in an arithmetical ratio,” and that a slight acquaintance with numbers would show the immensity of the first power over the second. He was writing just as his rule was about to fail. Coal was the fuel that broke it, and the science, the capital, and the institutions that knew what to do with coal were already in place.

Henry Adams, grandson of one president and great-grandson of another, wrote in a chapter he headed “A Law of Acceleration” that the coal output of the world had doubled every ten years between 1840 and 1900, and that a ton of coal yielded three or four times as much power at the end of that period as at the beginning.

When I was born there were about 2.3 billion people on Earth. There are 8.3 billion now. On the most widely used long-run series, world economic output is more than a hundred times what it was in 1820. Energy use is about thirty times what it was in 1800. Life expectancy at birth was about twenty-eight in 1800; it is about seventy-three today. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that 117 billion human beings have ever been born, and that nearly seven percent of them are alive at this moment.

I saw a piece of this from inside a steel hull. The Navy commissioned its first submarine, John Holland’s boat, in 1900. Forty years later the fleet boats of the Pacific war ran on diesel and batteries and had to come up to charge. Nine years after that war, Nautilus went to sea on a reactor and never had to come up to charge again. By the time I reported aboard the USS Ray, a Sturgeon-class fast attack nuclear submarine, Nautilus was a dozen years old and five classes of submarine had followed her. The chiefs who trained me had learned their trade on diesel boats. One of them put the difference to me this way. On this boat, he said, we might roll a bit on the surface, but when we submerge you don’t feel a thing. A diesel is a surface boat that can submerge. You ride the waves and you smell the fuel. Seasick? You bet. You’re lucky. That was the distance between his Navy and mine, and it had taken about fifteen years.

Alvin Toffler, in 1970, passed along a calculation that divides the last 50,000 years into lifetimes of sixty-two years each. That comes to about 800 lifetimes. Six hundred and fifty of them were spent in caves. Writing covers only the last seventy. The printed word reached ordinary people in the last six; the electric motor arrived in the last two. Most of what we handle in a day, Toffler wrote, was invented in the 800th lifetime, the present one. I have lived most of that lifetime. The transistor was demonstrated six years after I was born. I was eighteen when the first laser fired, twenty-eight when the first message crossed ARPANET, fifty-one when the World Wide Web went into the public domain, and eighty-one when the first widely used artificial intelligence wrote a passable paragraph on request.

What the curve does not say

The numbers tempt a person to draw the curve straight up and off the page. They do not support it.

World population is still growing, but its growth rate peaked in 1963 at 2.3 percent a year and has since fallen by nearly two thirds. The United Nations expects the total to top out around 10.3 billion in the 2080s and then decline.

Discovery is getting more expensive: by one careful estimate, keeping Moore’s Law on schedule now takes eighteen times as many researchers as it did in the early 1970s. Robert Gordon has argued that the truly transformative century in American life ran from 1870 to 1970, and that the decades since have given us faster gadgets on a slower foundation.

I think he is more right than wrong.

Several things accelerated enormously, particularly after 1800 and again after 1945, and each ran on the accumulated knowledge of the ones before it. Our native intelligence did not change in that time. We learned to keep what we learn, and then to keep it faster, and that is the whole story of the last tenth of a second.

Franklin’s regret

In February of 1780, Benjamin Franklin wrote from Passy, outside Paris, to his friend Joseph Priestley, the chemist. The rapid progress of science, he said, made him regret sometimes that he had been born so soon. It was impossible to imagine “the Height to which may be carried in a 1000 Years the Power of Man over Matter.” He guessed at freight lifted free of gravity, at agriculture doubling its yield, at old age itself being cured. Then he wrote: “O that moral Science were in as fair a Way of Improvement, that Men would cease to be Wolves to one another.”

A hundred and forty-two years later the sociologist William Ogburn gave that worry a name. He called it cultural lag. The tools change fast. The laws, the habits, and the institutions that are supposed to govern the tools change slowly, and the trouble collects in the gap. Ogburn wrote that in 1922, before the bomb and before the computer.

Jefferson had described the remedy in 1816. Laws and institutions, he wrote, “must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind,” and requiring a civilized society to live by the rules of its ancestors was like requiring a man “to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy.”

We have been on this planet for 5.7 seconds. In the sliver since we learned to write, we multiplied several hundredfold, lit the night, split the atom, and left it.

Franklin’s first wish came true faster than he dared imagine. His second wish has been open for 246 years.

We just got here.

The clock says we have done a great deal in almost no time, and it says nothing at all about whether we have grown up.

That part is still ours to settle, and there is no reason to think we have much of the day left to settle it in.

* * * * *

Sources

Age of the Earth: U.S. Geological Survey, Geologic Time: Age of the Earth. Jebel Irhoud: Hublin et al., Nature 546: 289–292, and Richter et al., Nature 546: 293–296 (2017). Lomekwi: Harmand et al., Nature 521 (2015). Habitual fire: Roebroeks & Villa, PNAS 2011. Blombos: Henshilwood et al., Science 2002 and 2004. Origin of writing: Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (Uruk IV, c. 3350–3200 BC); Kahl, Archéo-Nil 2004 (Abydos tomb U-j, c. 3320 BC). Twain, “Was the World Made for Man?” (1903), in What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings (Univ. of California Press, 1973), p. 106. Lincoln, Second Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions (Feb. 1859), Collected Works, vol. 3, pp. 360–362. Bacon, Novum Organum I.129, Spedding translation, Works vol. IV (1858), p. 114. Kremer, “Population Growth and Technological Change,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 108 (1993), pp. 681–683 and Table I. Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), p. 14. Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918), ch. XXXIV, p. 490. Population: UN World Population Prospects 2024; Our World in Data (Gapminder) for 1941; Population Reference Bureau, “How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?” Output, energy, life expectancy: Our World in Data long-run series (GDP in 2021 international dollars; energy after Smil/Energy Institute; life expectancy after Riley 2005 and UN). Submarines: Naval History and Heritage Command, Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, entries for Holland, Nautilus (SSN-571), Seawolf, Skate, Skipjack, Tullibee, Thresher, Sturgeon (SSN-637), and Ray (SSN-653). Invention dates: Computer History Museum (transistor, ARPANET); American Physical Society (laser); CERN (World Wide Web); OpenAI (ChatGPT). Toffler, Future Shock (1970), ch. 1. Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen & Webb, “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, American Economic Review 110 (2020), p. 1104. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016). Franklin to Priestley, 8 Feb. 1780 (Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 31), and Jefferson to Kercheval, 12 July 1816 (Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 10), both at Founders Online. Ogburn, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature (1922), pp. 200–203.

Charles Cranston Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served aboard nuclear submarines during the Cold War. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. In his writing he uses AI tools for research, editing, and occasional image creation; the arguments, the voice, and the final judgment are his. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live at Water Tower Residences, where they co-host the Chicago Salons.