Читать книгу Notes on a Nervous Planet - Matt Haig - Страница 26

Life moves pretty fast

OF COURSE, IN the cosmic perspective, the whole of human history has been fast.

We haven’t been here long. The planet is around 4.6 billion years old. Our specific and wonderful and problematic species – Homo sapiens – has only been here for 200,000 years. And it was only in the last 50,000 years that things picked up a gear. When we started wearing clothes from animal skins. When we began burying our dead as a matter of practice. When our hunting methods became more advanced.

The oldest known cave art is probably Indonesian and over 40,000 years old. In world terms that was a blink of an eye ago. But art is older than agriculture. Agriculture arrived basically yesterday.

We’ve only had farms for 10,000 years. And writing has only been around, as far as we know, for a minuscule 5,000 years.

Civilisation, which began in Mesopotamia (roughly Iraq and Syria on today’s map), is under 4,000 years old. And once civilisation began, things really began to speed up. It was time to fasten our collective seat belts. Money. The first alphabet. The first musical notation system. The pyramids. Buddhism and Hinduism and Christianity and Islam and Sikhism. Socratic philosophy. The concept of democracy. Glass. Swords. Warships. Canals. Roads. Bridges. Schools. Toilet paper. Clocks. Compasses. Bombs. Eyeglasses. Mines. Guns. Better guns. Newspapers. Telescopes. The first piano. Sewing machines. Morphine. Refrigerators. Transatlantic telegraph cables. Rechargeable batteries. Telephones. Cars. Aeroplanes. Ballpoint pens. Jazz. Quiz shows. Coca-Cola. Polyester. Thermonuclear weapons. Rockets to the moon. Personal computers. Video games. Bloody email. The world wide web. Nanotechnology.

Whoosh.

But this change – even within the last four millennia – is not a smooth, straight upward line. It is the kind of steepening curve that would intimidate a professional skateboarder. Change may be a constant, but the rate of change is not.