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How Ignorance Made Us the Most Powerful Species on the Planet
The Scientific Revolution made us rulers of the world, for good or for ill.
Shawn B. Swinger
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Published in
Dialogue & Discourse
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7 min read
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2 days ago
Photo by James Adams on Unsplash
When we thought we knew everything, nothing changed.
The moment we admitted that we knew nothing, the world was never the same again.
This knowledge is powerful.
So powerful that we can bend nature to our will.
So powerful that we may end up burning down the very civilization that was made possible by it.
Before Science, We Knew Everything
Prior to the Scientific Revolution (1543–1687), human societies didn’t really change that much. The life of someone raising pigs in ancient Sumeria didn’t differ much from a peasant raising pigs in medieval England thousands of years later.
The same cannot be said comparing someone from the 15th century to our lives today. If that person were to be transported to our time, they would probably collapse into hysteria and refuse to believe what they were seeing.
Even within our own lifetimes, if you are in your late 30's like me, you remember a time with corded phones and internet connections that sounded like digital nails on chalkboard. Kids today (wow I feel old saying that) are born into a world with not only smartphones but rapidly advancing AI that can write their essays for them. Someday soon we may even get complex gene editing programs to design our own ideal “human.”
The speed of progress is at a breakneck force and has been now for over 500 years. Compared with today, in 1500:
- Only a few cities had around 100,000 people. Contrast that with modern Tokyo at almost 14 million.
- Any modern bank has more money in it than all the kingdoms at the time put together.
- No human had escaped the Earth’s surface into space.
- We knew nothing about microorganisms (bacteria, viruses, etc.)
- Humans were incapable of annihilating the planet, which we now unfortunately do possess with nuclear armaments.1
