Theoretical Framework: The Life Cycle of Evolution
The opening of a Space Age can be best understood as a historic shift in social evolution. This is illustrated by the graph shown in Figure 1 below. I have struggled with this problem for years, and the result is this trendline showing what I call the “Life Cycle of Evolution (LCE).” Similar graphs have been sketched in general terms, but this is the first to plot the long-term evolutionary trend using real scales and real data (Halal, 2004). The logarithmic time scale is needed to encompass the billions of years at the start of life, as well as mere decades today. Without a log scale, the shape of the LCE would not be recognizable; the trendline would run flat and make a sharp 90 degree turn straight up.
Above the fray, there is a rather precise direction and logic to this evolutionary process. Four million years of nomadic human development were needed to found Agrarian Civilizations. Eight thousand years to invent Industrial Society. Two hundred years for the Post-Industrial Economy. Five decades to a Knowledge Age. And roughly 20 years to an Age of Consciousness that is starting today about 2020. The completion of this mature phase in the LCE could then lead to the serious start of a Space Age about 2050.
Beneath this tectonic shift in consciousness is the driving force of artificial intelligence (AI), the most powerful agent of change today. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, said “AI is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on … more profound than fire or electricity.” The advance of AI is automating knowledge work, threatening to eliminate roughly half of all jobs and posing one of the most perplexing questions of our time: What lies beyond knowledge?
It follows logically that everything beyond knowledge is consciousness. Civilization is at the cusp of transformation from a society based on knowledge to one guided by consciousness. The great Jesuit anthropologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, has long fascinated us with his vision that the world would evolve into a “noosphere,” a great web of consciousness enveloping the Earth (de Chardin, 1955).
Not too long ago, we relied on telephones and newspapers to communicate. We now use two billion personal computers, 14 billion cell phones and laptops, and two billion TVs. The information flows through 30 million Internet servers, 3,000 space satellites and almost one million miles of undersea cables. Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, thinks the Internet is subsuming the knowledge of all humans into a “global central nervous system.” He observed, “There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large machine.” (Kelly, 2016). This planetary layer of digital connections knits eight billion people into a living overlay of thought – the noosphere is here.
This historic transition also poses enormous threats that seem almost impossible. Climate change and the entire constellation of end-of-the-world challenges comprise what I call the “Global MegaCrisis,” or the “Crisis of Global Maturity.” A survey I conducted estimates that roughly 70 percent of the public thinks the present world trajectory will lead to disaster. Ask anyone off the street and you will probably get the same answer. People have deep fears over today’s failures in governance, and they attribute it to a lack of leadership, vision and cooperation. The late Stephen Hawking worried about “widening inequality, climate change, food, decimation of species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans. This is the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity, and our species must work together.” (Hawking, 2016)
Today’s Age of Consciousness faces the enormous challenge of creating a unified world able to resolve the MegaCrisis that limits our abilities today. We would then be able to harness its collective material and intellectual resources for the exodus of life into the universe.
The demands of deep space exploration outside our solar system are so beyond current scientific knowledge that a Space Age is inconceivable with today’s technologies. The nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is four light years away from Earth. Travelling at 10 percent the speed of light (a generous assumption) would take 40 years. And that’s the nearest star system.
Any serious travel in the larger universe would require fundamental breakthroughs in physics. The forecasts here suggest this will require solar sails, warp drives, anti-matter propulsion, artificial ecosystems to support astronauts, hibernation technologies, radiation shielding and other unknown intellectual breakthroughs that only a unified world can provide. Astronaut Edgar Mitchell thinks it can only be accomplished by a “combined global effort“ (Fowler, 1985).