On Violence and the Future

Violence used to be a tool. Now it’s mostly just a drug.

Our minds still feel the withdrawal of stepping from the animal kingdom into something else. We are the culmination of nearly four billion years worth of development as animals plus a mere couple hundred thousand as humans that make fires and paint stories.

If the history of life on Earth was compressed into a year, something happened in our genetic progress during the last 30 minutes that rewrote all the rules. That shift has only just started. Our minds and bodies are stretching between these two colossal paradigms.
If given time, care and favorable conditions, the current trajectory of life on Earth will advance indefinitely (sizable ifs). We are headed toward something that will span entire galaxies and possess tools as powerful as stars. We might even be able to manipulate the fabric of reality. A single cell birthed a lineage leading to the precursors of demigods.

Yet here we are, still only 30 minutes into humanity after a year of simple, violent survival. A switch has been flipped to ON and the machine is still booting up. We are, right now, shaping the outcome of truly galactic consequences while that old, primal drug lurks behind every corner.