Living in the Great Explosion
We are living in times of unprecedented change. Never before in the history of the world has there been a time like the one we are living in, when environmental, social and technological change is occurring not only at a dizzying speed, but accelerating exponentially. Aspects of our social and physical environment that have remained stable for centuries or even millennia are now starting to warp and buckle before our eyes. Democratic institutions that have weathered two and a half centuries are tottering. Ice shelfs and glaciers that are more ancient than humanity itself are melting away. Thousands of species that evolved over millions of years are vanishing. And at the same time smart phones, AI and social media are transforming every aspect of our lives at such a rate that we have become almost inured to change, caught somewhere between greed for the latest innovation, and helpless dread at what we have unleashed.
In physics, change is quantifiable, and has a name: energy. Although we tend to think of energy as a kind of ethereal substance, in fact it is nothing but a measure of change in physical systems. When a physical system undergoes a chain reaction in which change feeds on itself, liberating more and more energy in a self-reinforcing cycle, we call this an explosion. That, on a planetary level, is what we are living through: an explosion that in truth began millennia ago when the…
