GabyJeffrey Charles Hardy, founder of the nonprofit organization Care for Peace, says humanity moves through three phases of evolution and right now is caught in the second — a kind of limbo. Hardy, a futurist who calls his framework the “human timeline,” argues that human evolution stalled after 1945. The invention of the atomic bomb, he says, marked humanity’s dominance over nature and the end of the first stage. To enter the second stage, Hardy says, we must reverse the environmental damage from that first phase and embrace “sustainable coexistence between the planet and its inhabitants.” In this suspended state, we need to reassess the past and “move away from the unsustainable practices of unchecked growth and wastefulness that we inherited from the first phase of human evolution.” In other words, society has to learn from its history if it wants to progress, the Daily Mail reported.
For millions of years humans tried to dominate nature, and that push intensified during industrialization, when people began acting as if the world belonged to them and could be controlled. Over time they built cities, laid down infrastructure, and their population grew. They extracted natural resources, relied on fossil fuels, and used irrigation, crop rotation, and selective breeding to boost food production.
In 1949 Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud argued that progress required “launch[ing] an offensive against nature, forcing it to submit to human will under the guidance of science.” Hardy believes we’ve been suspended since the development of nuclear weapons capable of destroying the world — the atomic bomb was the decisive moment that ended the first stage. The World Nuclear Association has warned that “the nuclear industry has yet to solve the waste problem.” Hardy warns that humanity will remain in this suspended phase until it recognizes the need to reduce the waste generated during the first stage of evolution.
“What I call the suspended phase of human evolution is akin to floundering like fish on a deck, or like in that Indiana Jones movie, being on a bridge over an abyss — if we fall, we die,” Hardy said. He said people won’t be able to move into the second stage unless they create a plan to eliminate the waste and the unsustainable growth that arose in the first stage. “We will need to engage in discussions about this with the rest of the world if we are to move from the first phase of human evolution to the second,” he added. “The first human evolution has ended, and we need to learn from our mistakes, learn from the past, learn from our history, learn from each other, and start talking and discussing what this second stage of humanity should look like.”
