I may have boxed myself into a corner. The “Case against humanity” will just have to wait. I promised it for this week and loyal readers have said they are waiting with bated breath, but I’m just not ready. There’s a few more positive things to say about humanity first. Last week I tried to stress how little time Homo sapiens have been in existence compared to what we know about the Universe, and even Earth, and certainly within the timeframe of Life itself. No time at all. A snap of the fingers. Unless, of course, you are in the camp of Earth being 6,000 years old, as some say the Good Book reveals; then, well, you are probably not reading this column anyway.

During the retreat of the last glacier, humans began growing food as a supplement to their hunting and gathering. Evidence suggests fig trees were cultivated in Jordan 11,300 years ago. Cereals were common in Syria 9,000 years ago. China was building rice paddies about this same time. Oddly, simultaneously, agriculture developed in the Western Hemisphere. Squash has been grown and harvested in Mexico for more than 10,000 years. The oldest discovered corn cob has survived 5,500 revolutions around the sun. It took time for humans to selectively breed maize into something worthy of the time to grow it. But it happened.

Fast forward: Eli Whitney designed and built the cotton gin (short for engine) in 1793. The gin separated cotton seeds from the cotton, but it also separated the world of agriculture from the purely manual to the mechanized. Look at the date. There’s only 250 years separating us from the birth of the Industrial Age. The first steam engines and spinning wheels and the mechanization of production changed everything. My grandfather was born in 1888. That means he had a direct connection during his life to people who rode on the first steam engine driven train. So that’s -- the people he knew, himself, my mother, me. That’s nothing. That’s like yesterday. We can almost remember it all personally. But not quite.

Change is right in front of us. It is astounding. I hold a machine in my pocket that contains more volumes and knowledge than the Great Library of Alexandria. From inside the tooth, the dentist drilled out the root of my pain. I took a pill of zinc for my Covid. The antibiotics I am on may save me from the worst effects of my Lyme disease. I can get in my truck and buy fresh meat for burgers for the Super Bowl. Taylor Swift is with us this year. (The uproar is so funny.) But the forthright immediate connectedness of humanity is like a flame, like the burning telegraph wire during the Carrington Event.

Historians have so little to do they have deemed it necessary to catalogue recent history into FOUR Industrial Revolutions. Ok. If you insist. Of course, the Egyptians did brain surgery and the Romans built roads and aqueducts with engineering that still marvel the curious. And yes, some of humanity’s accomplishments have come with us through history and many have been lost. But here we are like the phosphorous on an Ohio Blue Tip match. Strike on box. It’s as if we believe we can do anything: end slavery, feed the world, control gratuitous aggression, light up the great box of fusion with unlimited energy, live in space, leave the Solar System. And maybe we can.

At night when I lie in bed under the skylights and plate glass peak of the gable end of the loft, where there used to be the beautiful crown of a sugar maple, now I have a greater viewshed of the sky and burning over the lights of Orion and the Moon, my lullaby is a string of bright satellites and Sky Lab and Sky Link and other manmade night intrusions, none of which existed when I first installed the glass, and all of which have been created since the first Super Bowl. God help us. It’s OK to say that. It’s not a crime. Even for an atheist. It’s not a sin. This conspiracy of human nature with technology makes it feel like humanity is at the beginning of an Epoch Unimaginable.

Next week: The case against humanity.

Last week: The case for humanity.