The Earth's Learning Curve.Imagine a chart that begins when man first appeared on the planet and tra
cks the
economfro,ic growth of societies from then foward. It would be a long, fiatline until the late 16th
or early
17th century, when it would start trending upward. Before then the fruits of productive labor were l
imited
to a few elites! princes,merchants and priests. For most of humankind life was as the English philos
opher
Thomas Hobbes famously described it in 1651! "solitary,poor, nasty,brutish, and short." But as Hobbe
s was
writing those words,the world around him was changing. Put simply,human beings were getting smarter.
People have
always sought knowledge, of course, but in Western Europe at that time, men like Galileo, Newton and
Descartes
began to search systematically for ways to understand and control their environment. The scientific
revolution
,followed by the Enlightenment,marked a fundamental shift. Humans were no longer searching for ways
simply to
fit into a natural or divine order;they were seeking to change it. Once people found ways to harness
energy !
using steam engines! they were able to build machines that harnessed fat more power than any human o
r horse could
ever do.And people could work without ever getting tired.