7 Seconds to Midnight
Apologies for the lack of posts recently. Between work and travel I haven’t had a chance to complete some articles so I figured I would share an older post. This one is particularly timely for me as I’ve been thinking quite a bit about AI, and how it might ultimately affect human kind. Hopefully I’m back online soon.
Originally published April 20,2022
One of the things that I find very interesting and that consumes a lot of my thoughts is how much we, as humans, have tried to separate ourselves from the very nature to which we belong. As I observe other animals and consider their lives, it strikes me how ridiculous and lost we have become.
I believe that this intentional effort to put ourselves above, or separate from, nature we have evolved with is the ultimate reason for many of the health maladies we experience today particularly in the westernized, modern world.
For the last ten thousand or so years, humans have increasingly relied on more, and more advanced, technology to try to shape the world around us to provide for our perceived needs and wants. This technology has allowed modern humans to proliferate like no other species to which we are even remotely related.
One could argue that in many ways we have put ourselves at the top of the food chain and hold dominion over all of nature with our ability to temporarily circumvent or harness nature for our own use. But like Pandora’s box, have we also unleased some of the unnecessary pain and suffering we experience, and perhaps the very making of our own demise?
Let’s step back in time to understand our origins a little better. Ten thousand years seems like a long time, but it’s really a blink of an eye when compared to our actual evolutionary path so we need to go back a little further to paint a more accurate picture, at least as it’s generally understood today.
According to the current interpretation of fossil records, the Homo genus to which we Homo sapiens belong, emerged approximately 2 million years ago most likely as a descendant of Australopithecus which is now extinct. It wasn’t until about 300,000 years ago that anatomically modern Homo sapiens arrived on the scene.
For almost all of Homo’s existence, we were hunter-gatherers using crude stone tools eating what we could catch or forage. As you can imagine, food scarcity would be one our ancestors’ greatest concerns. Hunter-gatherers were often on the move in search of food to survive and reproduce.
Unlike today where we can sit on our asses most of the day with perhaps a little exercise tossed in a few days a week while having every meal delivered to our doors, early humans got their exercise trying to feed themselves so they could make it to the next day. Living in a harsh, wild world limited the lifespan and population. Disease prior to the industrial revolution was often a result of a weakened immune system because they didn’t have enough to eat.
As Homo evolved, the use of tools and other technology evolved as well. Archaeological finds are showing that relatively advanced societies have existed longer than was previously thought, but sometime between 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, humans began to domesticate agriculture.
The obvious benefit to the domestication of agriculture is a more stable food supply. Early on, this domestication gave humans some insurance that if the hunting or foraging for food was not successful that they would have something available to eat. This insurance also decreased mobility by keeping people closer to a more reliable food source which also allowed for increased reproduction.
Grains became domesticated partly because under the right conditions, they store well for longer periods of time than most other foods. How long does that meat, lettuce, or broccoli in your refrigerator last?
7 Seconds To Midnight
But just because we can do something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for us. Even though some cultures have grown to depend heavily on grains for a large portion of their caloric consumption, grains have mostly been a supplement to other higher quality foods. Also, grains are traditionally used to supplement the feed for livestock even though some animals (cows for example) don’t really do well on a heavy grain diet.
While humans have probably consumed wild grains to some extent through the 2 million years, they were not reliant on them and all of their hybridized, and now genetically modified, versions as we are today. And even though humans have been planting and harvesting grains for the last ten thousand years, it’s really been within the last 150 or so years have seen an explosion in the production and consumption of sugar, grains, and the lab created grain derivatives such as high fructose corn syrup we consume in ever growing quantities today.
To put this into greater context, let’s look at the Homo genus’ 2 million years of evolution as a 24 hour time line assuming 2 million years ago was the start of the clock and the present being midnight. Looking back on this clock, ten thousand years ago when domestication of agriculture was taking hold, the hands of our theoretical clock would sit at about 11:53 P.M. At 150 years ago, the hands of the clock would read 11:59:53 P.M., a miniscule 7 seconds ago from our present time.
Initially, humans would have begun to cultivate foods that already existed in an area working the land to protect, and hopefully, increase production. As technology advanced over the thousands of years, so did humans’ ability to grow foods where it was previously unlikely or unthinkable and in greater quantities.
Current industrial agricultural practices that rely heavily on synthetic, petrochemical based fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and wasteful irrigation because we want to plant row crops, often in locales that are not suited for growing them, is not a sustainable practice. Stuffing grain into cows, chickens, and pigs raised in over-crowded conditions that results in disease that needs to be controlled by administering huge amounts of antibiotics, which also cause animals (and us) to gain weight faster, does not lead to a healthy food supply, but certainly does contribute to growing antibiotic resistant bacteria and tainted waterways.
On top of that, much of what we consume today has not existed for 99.99% of our existence on this planet. A lot of what we eat is not even what I would consider food given that it is so highly processed and is created in labs often from chemicals that were never intended for consumption. Are we really supposed to believe that artificial sweeteners derived from petroleum products are okay to consume?
Even the fruits and vegetables we eat today do not resemble their ancestors. Fruit hybrids in particular are now selected for their high sugar content and appearance with no consideration for nutritional value.
Historically, animal products were valued for their high energy and nutritional content which were critical to survival and reproduction. Organ meats, marrow, and fat were the most most prized and almost every part of the animal was used for food or clothes, tools, etc. Now we just eat the muscle which happens to be the least nutritious part of the animal.
Irony
Prior to last 100 or so years, malnutrition was typically associated with an insufficient caloric intake, but ironically, even with our overabundance of calories we are still suffering from malnutrition! Strip away the fat and most Americans and many western Europeans would look malnourished.
It appears that even though nature can provide for every other form of life on this planet, we are the exception and we must create our own “foods.” These foods must now be fortified with synthetic vitamins which are poorly absorbed by the body just to give consumers the appearance that they aren’t complete garbage instead of eating things that naturally contain vitamins, minerals, and the thousands of other beneficial compounds we can’t begin to understand.
Somehow, meat and animal products have become the worst foods in existence. Never mind that humans need to consume meat because it’s the only source of vitamin B12 that is bioavailable for humans, and also happens to be the best source of many nutrients like choline, zinc, and essential amino acids. Instead, we have lab created vitamins for that now, and thank “The Science” that we have created Franken foods like Beyond Burgers that contain who knows what to make them look and taste like meat. Completely makes sense.
And instead of just using butter, or cold pressed olive and coconut oils, we will plant massive acreages of crops to produce canola, cotton, corn, and soy that will be crushed and soaked in hexane to separate the oil to produce cheap “vegetable” oils and margarines high in pro-inflammatory Omega-6 fatty acids that are amazingly unhealthy for us in the amounts consumed by the average person. But fear not, supposedly the hexane is completely removed from the finished product, so there’s that.
I’m not suggesting that our food choices are the only factor impacting our health, and I’m obviously not saying that everything that occurs in nature is good for us. But what we decide to eat is one of the greatest determinants in our health outcomes, and is also the easiest one to take control over and modify to our benefit or detriment.
This is not about going on a diet because if you eat anything at all you are already on a diet. You might change your diet but you can’t go on a diet. This is about our lifestyle choices which includes our diets and how we get and produce our food.
Malthus May Have Been Right
Thomas Malthus laid out some thoughts about technological advances allowing the human population to grow exponentially up to a point, and then experience a die off due to growth limitations in natural resources. The elites at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and other organizations like the Club of Rome subscribe to this view, and based on their actions are trying to usher in an era of population reduction.
To be very clear, I do not align with the sociopaths at the WEF who want to guide this process that will ensure that they control all of the resources while the remainder of the population receives what they decide to hand out.
However, I can’t help but see a potential future that Malthus laid out. In other animals, you see an explosion in population where food sources are abundant only to witness an increase in disease and a crash in population as resources are consumed and fall below a level necessary to sustain the bigger population. This is a natural cycle that maintains balance, and does not require intervention of humans.
I firmly believe that our current methods of food production, which have led to our explosive population growth, are unsustainable. We are also witnessing in real time the very real downsides to a system that relies on intricate, yet incredibly fragile, supply chains to provide food and other resources to an ever growing global population.
Technology can only advance so much before you hit the point of diminishing returns. We may very well be at the beginning of a significant reduction in the human population. As I pointed out in my Fake Money posts, we are seeing this in terms of slowing economic growth as well. You can only steal so much from the future before you have to pay the piper.
The fact that it has been man’s own doing thanks to a pandemic, or more accurately, the response to a supposed pandemic that has severely broken these supply chains does not dismiss the fact that we are not as smart and invulnerable as we like to think. We’ve been living on borrowed time, and it could have been almost anything that would interrupt this system and cause the growing chaos we are witnessing today.
I wouldn’t try to predict how this will work out. We may come up with a way out of our current, unfolding mess and life will return to whatever constitutes normal. But sometimes there is no solution except to experience the pain that’s due. As the saying goes, “Man plans while God laughs.”
Either way, we need to understand where we fit within the natural world, and work with it instead of against it if we want to survive in the long run. I don’t want to go back to living in caves, foraging for food and hopefully bringing home a kill so we don’t starve to death. But we have to understand the tradeoffs we’ve made in terms of our health and our very lives in pursuit of a life of ease and convenience.