💡 My Take

This book inspired me to start this blog. It provides a fascinating perspective on human history and challenged my thinking multiple times.

Harari describes how humans evolved through the cognitive, agricultural, scientific, and industrial revolutions. He explains how certain traits of Sapiens, such as our ability to imagine things (e.g., gods and nations), helped us work together at scale and dominate over all other animals. Harari finally discusses how Sapiens will inevitably evolve into an altogether different being as intelligent design replaces natural selection.

The book is dense with information and full of interesting facts. Give it a read. 😊

1-Page Summary

• Humans evolved from a genus of 🦧 apes called Australopithecus. Three revolutions shaped the course of history:
  • 💭 cognitive revolution (70,000 years ago)
  • 🧑‍🌾 agricultural revolution (12,000 years ago)
  • 🧑‍🔬 scientific revolution (500 years ago)
• We believe that by 🎲 pure change, genetic mutations allowed Sapiens to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate with a new type of language. This allowed Sapiens to talk about 🐉 fictions which constituted the Cognitive Revolution.
• For most of their history, Sapiens lived as foragers. It seems foragers enjoyed a more comfortable 🏖 lifestyle than most of their descendants. They had to work less, had a varied diet and suffered less from infectious diseases.
• The agricultural revolution allowed for an 📈 exponential population growth. This resulted in keeping more people alive but under worse conditions. Compared to the average forager, the average farmer had a worse diet, less food security and was dependent on the land they possessed.
• The Agricultural Revolution made the 🔮 future far more important than ever before. The surpluses produced, allowed for empires to be created. However, the transition from small bands into kingdoms was too fast for mass cooperation instincts to evolve. Therefore, people invented imagined orders, like gods and nations, to provide the needed social links. Imagined orders where neither ⚖️ neutral nor fair. Unfortunately, complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination.
• In the brain, all data is freely associated. However, with writing, humans had to change how they think and view the world. Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.
• Overall, history is moving towards unity. Three universal orders led to this unification: economic, political and religious.
• Religions gave 🦸‍♂️ superhuman legitimacy to social orders placing some fundamental laws beyond challenge and thus ensuring social stability.
• To acknowledge that history is not deterministic is to acknowledge that it is just a 🎲 coincidence that most people today believe in nationalism, capitalism and human rights. There is no proof that the most successful cultures in history (e.g. nationalism, capitalism and human rights) are necessarily the best ones for Homo sapiens.
• Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know was already known from Gods and wise people. Modern science admits 🤔 ignorance. The Scientific Revolution brought the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest in research, things can improve.
• The Europeans were used to thinking and behaving in a scientific and capitalist way even before they enjoyed any significant technological advantages. The products of this way of thinking compounded and suddenly became obvious around 1850 when the global centre of power shifted to Europe.
• The Industrial Revolution increased productivity and released human resources from fieldwork. For the first time in human history, supply began to outstrip demand. This imbalance led to 🛍 consumerism.
• The most important unplanned change of the industrial revolution was the collapse of the 👪 family and the local community. Functions like 🚑 healthcare, 🏫 education, insurance and 🛡️ protection, that were previously offered by the family or the local community, were now offered by the state and the market.
• Happiness does not depend on objective conditions of wealth, health or community. It depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations. Today, our high expectations may make us 🙁 less happy than our ancestors.
• Darwinian evolution explains how natural selection governed the evolution of the world in the past. However, in the future, 🧬 intelligent design might replace natural selection. The real potential of future technologies is to change Homo sapiens itself. This includes our physique and our cognitive and emotional world. Since these projects are unlikely to stop, it is inevitable that Homo sapiens will be upgraded into a different kind of being.

Chapter by Chapter Summary

Part 1 - The Cognitive Revolution

Chapter 1: An Animal of No Significance

Humans evolved in East Africa from a genus of apes called Australopithecus about 2.5 million years ago.

There was nothing special about humans. They had the same impact on the planet as any other animal. From East Africa, they travelled to North Africa and Eurasia, where they evolved into different species.

The species Homo (man) sapiens (wise) evolved in East Africa and belongs to the family of Great Apes. About 6 million years ago, a female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

All human species share two important characteristics:

• 🧠 massive brain

  The large brain required a big consumption of energy without many survival benefits for more than 2 million years. We don't know what drove that evolution.

• 🚶‍♀️ upright walking position

  This freed humans' hands for other purposes and gave them a lofty vision. Women developed narrower hips, narrowing the birth canal, which favoured premature births. This led humans to develop social abilities as they had to cooperate to cater for their offspring. It also meant that the underdeveloped offspring could be educated and socialised far more than any other animal.

Despite these characteristics, humans remained in the middle of the food chain for 2 million years. Only in the last 100,000 years, Homo sapiens jumped to the top of the food chain. That change was too fast for the ecosystem to develop checks and preserve balances.

A significant step on the way to the top was the domestication of fire. 🔥 Fire both provided humans with a deadly weapon against other animals and allowed them to cook. Cooking enabled humans to eat more kinds of food.

About 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens started to form elaborate structures called cultures, which later formed what we now call history. Three revolutions shaped the course of history:

• 💭 cognitive revolution (70,000 years ago)
• 🧑‍🌾 agricultural revolution (12,000 years ago)
• 🧑‍🔬 scientific revolution (500 years ago)

Interesting Facts

6 million years ago, a female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all 🦧 chimpanzees, the other is our own 👵 grandmother.

Homo erectus (Upright Man, Eastern Asia), survived close to 2 million years, making it the most durable human species ever.

It's wrong to envision human species as arranged in a straight line of descent. From about 2 million years ago until 10,000 years ago, the world was home to several human species at the same time. The earth was once walked by at least six human species.

Homo sapiens' brain accounts for 2-3% of total body weight, but it consumes 25% of the body's energy when at rest. Brains of other apes require 8% of the rest-time energy.

Great Apes developed for millions of years to support a creature on all fours. Adjusting to an upright position gave today's humans backaches and stiff necks.

Based on a study conducted in 2010, modern humans in the Middle East and Europe have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA. Similarly, modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians have Denisovan DNA. That suggests, that Sapiens at some point could have sex with different species and produce children.

Chapter 2: The Tree of Knowledge

It is believed that, by 🎲 pure chance, genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens. That enabled them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using a completely new type of language. This constituted the Cognitive Revolution (70,000-30,000 years ago).

Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks, above all, to its unique language. Three attributes made it unique:

• suppleness. A limited number of sounds and signs produce an infinite number of sentences. That allowed the transmission of larger quantities of information about the surrounding world.

• evolved to 🗣️ gossip. Gossip developed trust and enabled more sophisticated types of cooperation in larger bands (up to 150 individuals).

• ability to speak about 🐉 fictions. Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution.

  Fiction has enabled us to imagine things collectively and cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. Any large-scale human cooperation (e.g. nation) is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination.

Significant changes in social behaviour cannot occur, in general, without genetic mutations. In contrast, Sapiens has been able to revise its behaviour rapidly by changing the myths (e.g. laws, religion). That enabled Sapiens to pass on new behaviours to future generations without any need of genetic or environmental change. This was key to Sapiens' success.

Interesting Facts

In the first recorded encounter between Sapiens and Neanderthals, the Neanderthals won.

Chimapanzee alpha males usually win their position not because they are physically stronger, but because they lead a large and stable coalition, which they form with intimate daily contact and mutual favours. Just as human politicians go around shaking hands and kissing babies.

Sociological research has shown that the maximum "natural" size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals.

Even today there are a number of human cultures in which collective fatherhood is practised, such as among the Bari Indians.

Chapter 3: A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve

For nearly the entire history of our species, Sapiens lived as foragers. Gathering was Sapiens' main activity.

According to evolutionary psychology, many of our present-day social and psychological characteristics were shaped during this long pre-agricultural era.

A widely accepted example is our instinct to gorge on high-calorie food. Our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah. A more controversial theory suggests that ancient foraging bands were not composed of nuclear families centred on monogamous couples and that explains infidelity in modern marriages.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn't been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices.

Ancient foragers had very few artefacts in their possession. The vast majority of people lived in small bands where all individuals were human. That is in contrast to agricultural and industrial societies where most members are domesticated animals. The 🐕 dog was the only exception and was domesticated at least 15,000 years ago.

The average forager had a wider and deeper knowledge of their surroundings compared to today's humans who only know a lot about a tiny field of expertise. On the other hand, the human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. When agriculture and industry came along, people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival.

On the whole, foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of their descendants:

• They had to 🏖️ work less than today's affluent societies
• They were less likely to suffer from starvation or malnutrition due to their 🥗 varied diet.
• They suffered less from 🦠 infectious diseases. Most infectious diseases originated in domesticated animals but ancient foragers only domesticated dogs.

Ancient foragers had a life expectancy of 30-40 years, but this was due largely to the high incidence of child mortality.

We know very little about the religions of ancient foragers. We assume that they were animists. Animists believe that there is no barrier between humans and other local beings (e.g. a deer, a rock). They can all communicate directly through speech, song, dance and ceremony. For animists the world does not revolve around humans or any other group of beings.

Interesting Facts

It is a misconception that pre-agricultural humans lived in an age of 🪨 stone. Most of the tools used by ancient hunter-gatherers were made on 🪵 wood.

The dog was the first animal domesticated by Homo Sapiens.

During pre-industrial warfare more than 90% of war dead were killed by starvation, cold and disease rather than by weapons.

Today, 1.5% of deaths are the result of human violence (war and crime). During the twentieth century, 5% of deaths resulted from human violence.

Chapter 4: The Flood

Before the Cognitive Revolution, humans of all species lived exclusively on the Afro-Asian landmass.

The sea barrier prevented humans, animals and plants from reaching the "Outer World". This allowed organisms of distant lands to take shapes very different from those developed in the Afro-Asian region.

The first time any human had managed to leave the Afro-Asian ecological system was 45,000 years ago, when Sapiens colonised Australia.

Sapiens did not adapt. Humans transformed the Australian ecosystem beyond recognition by breaking the existing food chains. 90% of Australia's megafauna disappeared driving it to extinction.

Similar mass extinctions occurred again and again wherever people settled. Three explanations try to answer how Homo sapiens succeeded as an ecological serial killer:

• Large animals breed slowly. Killing one every few months, for a few thousand years, would finally result in deaths outnumbering births. Moreover, animals outside Africa and Asia had not encountered humans and did not evolve quickly enough to fear them.
• Sapiens completely changed the ecology of large parts of Australia within a few millennia. They burned vast areas of impassable thickets to create open grasslands. This attracted more easily hunted game.
• The climate changes that beset Australia about 45,000 years ago destabilised the ecosystem and made it particularly vulnerable. The combination of climate change and human hunting made it particularly devastating for large animals.

Homo sapiens was the first and only human species to reach the western hemisphere landmass, arriving about 16,000 years ago.

The first Americans arrived on foot as sea levels were low enough between north-eastern Siberia and north-western Alaska. Around 14,000 years ago global warming melted the ice and unblocked the way from Alaska to the rest of America. Within 2,000 years of the Sapiens' arrival, most of the existing species were gone.

Sapiens is the deadliest species ever. If things continue at the present pace, the remaining large animals will be driven to oblivion. All the animals but the ones we exploit.

Interesting Facts

During the last million years, there has been an ice age on average every 100,000 years. The last one ran from about 75,000 to 15,000 years ago.

Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. Our ancestors did not live in harmony with nature.

Part 2 - The Agricultural Revolution

Chapter 5: History's Biggest Fraud

The agricultural revolution sprang up independently in various places around the 🌍 world about 12,000 years ago. At that time, Sapiens started devoting almost all their time to manipulating the lives of a few animals and plant species.

Farming spread gradually over centuries. About 18,000 years ago, the last ice age was followed by a period of global warming. That helped wheat and other cereals to spread. Consequently, humans started eating wheat and helped spread it further.

In areas with abundant wheat, humans started making permanent camps, which along with increased food supply resulted in exponential population growth. That in turn wiped out food surpluses and sent child mortality soaring.

People were unable to understand the full consequences of their decisions. The average farmer had to work harder than the average forager and relied heavily on a very small variety of domesticated plants. That resulted in a worse diet, less food security and made farmers dependent on the land they possessed.

The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, similar to a young 🎓 graduate today working in a demanding job in a high-powered firm. The essence of the Agricultural Revolution was the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

Another explanation on how the Agricultural Revolution began puts cultural reasons as the causation. Foragers started cooperating at scale and for a long period of time to support cultural purposes (e.g. building Stonehenge). Those cooperations required large quantities of food for the people involved. This forced foragers to build settlements and start cultivating.

In most farming societies people focused on cultivation. Raising animals was a secondary activity. Humans started selective hunting, defending their herds and selective breeding. From a narrow evolutionary perspective this benefited chickens, cattle, pigs and sheep as they multiplied their DNA copies. However, these animals are the most miserable creatures ever lived.

This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.

Interesting Facts

No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2000 years. 90% of the calories that feed us today come from animals and plants domesticated by our ancestors between 9500 and 3500 BC.

Humans, like many mammals, have hormonal and genetic mechanisms that help control procreation. In good times females reach puberty earlier, and their chances of getting pregnant are a bit higher. In bad times puberty is late and fertility decreases.

In most agricultural societies, at least one out of three children died before reaching 20.

Following Homo sapiens, 🐄 domesticated cattle, 🐖 pigs and 🐑 sheep are the 2nd, 3rd and 4th most widespread large mammals in the world.

Chapter 6: Building Pyramids

The Agricultural Revolution is one of the most ☯️ controversial events in history. One view is that it led to prosperity and progress. The other view is that it led to perdition, as Sapiens stopped their symbiosis with nature.

The Agricultural Revolution made the 🔮 future far more important than it had ever been before. Foragers discounted the future as there was no sense in worrying about things that they could not control. However, for farmers, the agricultural economy was based on seasonal cycles. And farmers could act proactively based on those cycles. Having the future in mind made farmers worry.

The food surpluses produced by peasants along with transportation technology enabled more people to come together and form villages and later kingdoms and commercial networks.

Humans evolved for millions of years in small bands. The millennia between the Agricultural Revolution and the appearance of empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve. Therefore people invented stories about gods, motherlands, joint stock companies and equality, to provide the needed social links.

These principles have no objective validity but they help build 🤝 cooperation networks, such as Christianity, democracy and capitalism. These cooperation networks are imagined orders based on stories. We believe in them because that enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.

People struggle to realise that the order organising their lives is imagined because the imagined order:

• is embedded in the material world

  Ideas such as individualism are reflected in the architecture of our homes where each houseroom is an individual's private space promoting autonomy.

• shapes our desires

  The elite of ancient Egypt dedicated their lives to building pyramids. Today we build our own "pyramids" that now take the form of penthouses and spend money on travel.

• is inter-subjective

  Imagined orders exist in the subjective consciousness of many individuals. In order to change their consciousness, a complex organisation has to be formed (e.g. an ideological movement or a political party). But for that to be formed, new stories have to be created and multiple people need to believe in them. In order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.

Interesting Facts

Until the late modern era, more than 90% of humans were peasants.

Biological research has failed to come up with a clear definition of happiness or a way to measure it objectively. Most biological studies acknowledge only the existence of pleasure, which is more easily defined and measured.

Voltaire said about God that "There is no God, but don't tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night".

Chapter 7: Memory Overload

Societies found in some species, like bees, are stable because most of the information needed to sustain them is encoded in their genome. However, for Sapiens the social order is imagined and the human brain cannot store large quantities of information. Between 3500 BC and 3000 BC Sumerians invented ✍️writing, a system for storing and processing information outside their brains.

Just the invention of writing is not enough to guarantee efficient and accurate data processing. Archiving, cataloguing and retrieving written records are also required. That is what set Sumer and Egypt apart from other cultures that had independently developed their own writing systems.

In the brain, all data is freely associated. However with catalogued data in scripts, humans had to gradually change how they think and view the world. Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.

Numbers with the form of 0 to 9 were invented sometime before the ninth century AD. Numbers is the world's dominant language. Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talk, feel and dream. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers.

Interesting Facts

The first texts of history were economic documents.

A honeybee larva can grow up to be either a queen or a worker, depending on what food it is fed.

In ancient times there were memory professionals who could store in their heads the topographies of whole provinces and the law codes of entire states.

The Sumerians used a combination of base-6 and base-10 numeral systems. Their base-6 system left us several important legacies, such as the division of the day into 24 hours and of the circle into 360 degrees.

"Kushim" may be the first individual in history whose name is known to us.

The Hindus invented what is now known as Arabic numerals. The Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they encountered the system, understood its usefulness and spread it through the Middle East and Europe.

Chapter 8: There Is No Justice in History

Humans organised themselves in mass-cooperation networks by creating imagined orders and devised scripts (writing). These imagined orders where neither ⚖️ neutral nor fair. Unfortunately, complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination.

Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis. They are just the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths. One hierarchy in all known human societies is that of gender. Almost everywhere men have got the better deal, at least since the Agricultural Revolution.

Biologically, humans are divided into males and females. "Man" and "woman" are social categories. Since culture defines the attributes of a man and a woman, the meaning of manhood and womanhood have varied between societies. Contrary to today, during most of history, dominant men have been colourful and flamboyant, such as Native American chiefs with their feathered headdresses and Hindu maharajas decked out in silks and diamonds.

Patriarchy has been the norm in almost all agricultural and industrial societies. There is some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood. We do not know what this reason is. There are many theories, none of them convincing.

• 💪 Men are stronger

  There is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans. In most societies, it's the lower classes who do the manual labour.

• 🥊 Men are more aggressive

  The argument is that in times of war, men's control of the armed forces has made them the masters of civilian society too. However, physical weakness did not prevent women from being successful generals as aggressive brute is often the worst choice to run a war.

• 🎯 Men and women developed different reproduction strategies

  Men competed against each other to impregnate fertile women. Therefore men became more aggressive and competitive over time. Women during the time of pregnancy required help to survive and therefore agreed to whatever conditions the man stipulated. Therefore women became submissive caretakers over time. Here what is problematic is the assumption that women depended on men rather than on other women.

Interesting Facts

European imported millions of African slaves to work the mines and plantations of America. They imported slaves from Africa rather than from Europe or East Asia because: 1) Africa was closer 2) Africa already had a well-developed slave trade 3) Africans had partial genetic immunity to malaria and yellow fever.

When Communist China enacted the "one child" policy, many Chinese families continued to regard the birth of a girl as a misfortune. Parents would occasionally abandon or murder newborn baby girls in order to have another shot at getting a boy.

In many legal systems, rape falls under property violation. The victim is not the woman raped but the male who owns her.

The Bible decrees that "If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silvers, and she shall be his wife (Deuteronomy 22:28-9)"

As if 2006, there were 53 countries where a husband could not be prosecuted for the rape of his wife. Even in Germany, rape laws were amended only in 1997 to create a legal category of marital rape.

Chimpanzees use sex to cement political alliances, establish intimacy and defuse tensions.

Throughout the animal kingdom males tend to be more colourful and accessorised than females. Two examples are peacocks' tails and lions' manes.

Bonobo and elephant societies are controlled by strong networks of cooperative females, while the self-centred and uncooperative males are pushed to the sidelines.

Recent studies of the hormonal and cognitive systems of men and women strengthen the assumption that men indeed have more 🥊 aggressive and violent tendencies than women.

Part 3 - The Unification of Humankind

Chapter 9: The Arrow of History

Cultures have their typical beliefs, norms and values, but these constantly change. They change:

• in response to changes in the environment

• through interaction with neighbouring cultures

• to reconcile the internal contradictions of each culture

  For example, today we see social equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. These values contradict each other as equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off.

Overall, history is moving towards unity. From a practical perspective, the most important stage in the process of global unification occurred in the last few centuries, when empires grew and trade intensified. People began to cooperate with strangers, whom they imagined as "brothers" or "friends". Three universal orders led to this unification:

• economic - monetary order. For merchants, the world was a single market of potential customers.
• political - imperial order. For conquerors, the world was a single empire of potential subjects.
• religious - universal religions. For prophets, the world held a single truth for potential believers.

Interesting Facts

Tomatoes, chilli peppers and cocoa originated from Mexico. They reached Europe and Asia only after the Spaniards conquered Mexico.

Chapter 10: The Scent of Money

Foragers shared their goods and services through an economy of favours and obligations. They had no money.

The rise of cities and the improvement in transport infrastructure enabled specialisation. Specialisation forced a large number of strangers to cooperate. However, large cooperation networks don’t work with barter economies. Therefore, most societies developed money in order to cooperate effectively. Money enabled people to:

• ⚖️ compare the value of different commodities
• 🔄 convert almost everything into almost anything else
• 🏦 store and💰 transport wealth conveniently

Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When the first versions of money were created people didn't have this trust, so it was necessary to define as "money" things that had real intrinsic value (e.g. barley).

The real breakthrough in monetary history occurred when people started trusting money that lacked inherent value. The silver shekel was such an example and appeared in ancient Mesopotamia in the middle of the third millennium BC. Coins had two advantages over unmarked metal ingots:

• standardised weight indicating their value
• they had a signature of some political authority that guaranteed the coin's value

Once trade connects two areas, demand and supply tend to equalise the prices of transportable goods. Therefore, the mere fact that one party of the trade believes in something (e.g. gold) would cause the other party to start believing in it as well.

Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap. Money does not discriminate based on religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation.

When everything is convertible, human values, traditions and intimate relations are corroded and replaced with the laws of supply and demand. This risks making the world a marketplace where we do not trust the stranger but their coin.

Interesting Facts

In British Uganda, taxes could still be paid in 🐚 cowry shells in the early twentieth century.

The sum total of coins and banknotes is less than $6 trillion. More than 90% of all money - more than $50 trillion exists only on computer servers.

Chapter 11: Imperial Visions

An empire is a political order with two important characteristics:

• Cultural diversity. Despite their cultural diversity, empires led to a drastic reduction in human diversity by uniting cultures.
• Flexible borders. They can scale without changing their basic structure or identity.

Empire is a very stable form of government and has been the world's most common form of political organisation for the last 2,500 years. Although empires required oppression to be built they led to a significant proportion of humanity's cultural achievements. Portion of their profits financed philosophy, art, justice and charity.

Evolution has made Homo sapiens a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into "us" (same language, religion and customs) and "them". In contrast with this ethnic exclusiveness, from 550BC, when Cyrus the Great of Persia came along, imperial ideology has tended to be inclusive. Under this ideology, the empire was responsible for the welfare of the conquered peoples.

Since the imperial vision tends to be inclusive, it was relatively easy for imperial elites to adopt ideas from wherever they found them. Therefore, the cultural ideas spread by empires were rarely the exclusive creation of the ruling elite. Most of today's cultures are based on imperial legacies.

Today the world is divided into 200 states. Those states are not independent because:

• their economies are connected
• cultural trends spread with lightning speed
• they share the same global problems, such as climate change.

Interesting Facts

The first empire about which we have definitive information was the Akkadian Empire of Sargon the Great (c. 2250 BC).

Chapter 12: The Law of Religion

🛐 Religion has been one of the unifiers of humankind alongside money and empires. Religions gave superhuman legitimacy to social orders and hierarchies, placing some fundamental laws beyond challenge and thus ensuring social stability.

When animism was the dominant belief system, human norms and values had to take into consideration the interests of many beings such as 🐅 animals, 🌵plants, 🧚 fairies and 👻 ghosts. Such religions tended to be very local and to emphasise unique features of specific locations, climates and phenomena. Thus, while most known religions are universal (true always and everywhere) and missionary (spread their belief to everyone) the majority of ancient religions were local and exclusive.

The Agricultural Revolution seems to have been accompanied by a religious revolution. While in the past, plants and animals could be seen as equal in status to Homo sapiens, now they were property, owned and manipulated by humans.

However, human control over animals was limited. A leading theory about the origin of the gods argues that gods gained importance because they gave humans mastery over plants and animals.

When people lived their entire lives within limited territories their needs could be met by local spirits. However, when kingdoms and trade networks expanded, people needed entities with kingdom-wide power and authority. That led to the appearance of polytheistic religions.

Animists thought that humans were just one of many creatures inhabiting the world. Polytheists, on the other hand, increasingly saw the world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and humans. That way, Polytheism glorified not only the status of the gods, but also that of humans.

Polytheism does not necessarily dispute the existence or a single power governing the world. The fundamental insight of polytheism is that the supreme power governing the world does not have interests or biases and therefore is unconcerned with the worries of humans. Gods however only have partial power (e.g. god of war, rain god etc) and that is why they have interests and biases, allowing humans to make deals with them.

Over time, some followers of polytheist gods started believing that their god was the only god and thus monotheist religions were born. Monotheists tended to be far more 🥊 fanatical and 📣 missionary than polytheists. In contrast to monotheism, polytheism accepts the existence and efficacy of many gods and therefore is inherently open-minded.

Apart from monotheism, dualism was also born from polytheism. Dualistic religions support the existence of two opposing powers: 😇 good and 😈 evil.

Monotheism has some characteristics coming from both dualism and polytheism. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts.

During the first millennium BC, religions characterised by their disregard of gods started spreading through Afro-Asia. These religions suggested that the superhuman order governing the world is the product of natural laws. In these religions, Gods were subject to the laws of nature, as were humans.

The last 300 years, theist religions have increasingly lost their importance but natural-law religions have not. Some of the natural-law religions created in the modern age include liberalism, communism, capitalism, nationalism and nazism. These are all religions because they are a system of human norms and values founded on belief in a superhuman order.

As theist religions sanctify the gods, humanist religions sanctify Homo sapiens. Humanism suggests that Homo sapiens has a unique and sacred nature fundamentally different from all other animals and phenomena. The most important humanist sects are the following:

• liberal humanism

  “Humanity” is individualistic and resides within each individual Homo sapiens. The chief commandments of liberal humanism are what we call “human rights”.

  Our liberal political and judicial systems are founded on the belief that every individual has a sacred inner nature which is the source of all ethical and political authority. However, scientists increasingly argue that human behaviour is determined by hormones, genes and synapses, rather than by free will. For how long shall we separate 🧬 biology from law and political science?

• socialist humanism

  “Humanity” is collective and resides within the species Homo sapiens as a whole. While liberal humanism seeks freedom for individual humans, socialist humanism seeks equality between all humans.

• evolutionary humanism

  “Humanity” is a mutable species. Humans may degenerate into subhumans or evolve into superhumans. The main commandment is to protect humankind from degeneration and encourage its progressive evolution. The most famous representatives were the Nazis.

  Today, no one speaks about exterminating inferior people, but many contemplate using our increasing knowledge of human biology to create 🦸 superhumans.

Interesting Facts

The only religion that the Roman Empire refused to tolerate was Christianity. They didn’t forbid Christians their beliefs but expected them to pay respect to the empire’s gods and the divinity of the emperor as a declaration of political loyalty. When they refused to do so, the Romans persecuted them as a politically subversive faction.

On the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, French Catholics killed 5000-10000 French Protestants. More Christians were killed by Christians on that day than by the polytheistic Roman empire over its entire existence. The pope in Rome organised festive prayers to celebrate it and asked Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a painting of the massacre.

The first known monotheist religion appeared in Egypt, c. 1350 BC. Then Pharaoh Akhenaten declared the god Aten the supreme power ruling the universe.

Genetic reseach conducted after 1945 has demonstrated that the differences between the various human lineages are far smaller than the Nazis postulated. Given the scientific knowledge in 1933, the Nazi beliefs were hardly unacceptable. Scholars, in the most prestigious Western universities, published studies that allegedly proved that members of the white race were more intelligent, ethical and skilled than Africans or Indians.

Chapter 13: The Secret of Success

Trying to explain history is difficult. History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic. To acknowledge that history is not deterministic is to acknowledge that it is just a coincidence that most people today believe in nationalism, capitalism and human rights.

History has two characteristics:

• the hindsight fallacy

  What looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time and possibilities which seem very unlikely to contemporaries often get realised.

  We don’t study history to make accurate predictions about the future. We study history to:

  • widen our horizons
  • understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.

• history’s choices are not made for the benefit of humans

  There is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along.

  There is no proof that the most successful cultures in history (e.g. nationalism, capitalism, human rights) are necessarily the best ones for Homo sapiens. There is no such proof because different cultures define good differently and therefore we don’t have an objective metric to measure good.

Part 4 - The Scientific Revolution

Chapter 14: The Discovery of Ignorance

Until the Scientific Revolution (1500 AD), humans allocated resources mainly to preserve existing knowledge and capabilities rather than acquire new ones.

Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know was already known. Gods and wise people possessed wisdom, which they revealed to us in scriptures and oral traditions.

Modern science differs in three critical ways:

• 🤔 the willingness to admit ignorance

  This has made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive. In turn, this expanded our capacity to understand how the world works and invent new technologies.

• 🔭  the centrality of observation and mathematics

• 👩‍💻 the acquisition of new powers (e.g. new technologies)

Our admittance of ignorance extends to the shared myths which allow millions of strangers to cooperate. If the myths are doubtful then it is difficult to hold the society together. One of the things that has made it possible for modern social orders to hold together is the belief in technology and the scientific method.

Scientists usually assume that no theory is 100% correct. So, the real test of “knowledge” is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us.

Before the modern era, most human cultures did not believe in progress. They thought the golden age was in the past, and that the world was stagnant, if not deteriorating. The notion that humankind could overcome the world's fundamental problems by discovering new knowledge and inventing new tools was ludicrous and hubris.

For example, most religions and ideologies took it for granted that death was our inevitable fate. Our best minds were busy giving meaning to death, not trying to escape it.

For men of science, death is a technical problem. Our best minds are busy investigating the genetic systems responsible for disease and old age. The leading project of the Scientific Revolution is to give humankind eternal life.

Like all other parts of our culture, science is shaped by economic, political and religious interests. Science is unable to set its own priorities and incapable of determining what to do with its discoveries. That is why scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology (e.g. imperialism and capitalism). The ideology justifies the costs of the research, influences the scientific agenda and determines what to do with the discoveries.

Interesting Facts

In the past 500 years, human population has increased 14-fold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.

At 05:29:45 on 16 July 1945, American scientists detonated the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Up until the nineteenth century, the vast majority of military revolutions were the product of organisational rather than technological changes. For example, the advantage of the Roman army was its organisation, discipline and manpower reserves and not its technological advantage.

The most important military invention in the history of China was gunpowder. To the best of our knowledge, gunpowder was invented accidentally, by Daoist alchemists searching for the elixir of life. The Chinese used gunpowder mainly for firecrackers and only 600 years after its invention gunpowder was put to military use.

In most countries nobody is starving to death. In fact, in many societies more people are in danger of dying from obesity than from starvation.

Chapter 15: The Marriage of Science and Empire

The global centre of power shifted to Europe between 1750 and 1850, when Europeans conquered large parts of Asia.

Europe did not have any obvious advantage over the Asian powers. The difference was that Europeans were used to thinking and behaving in a scientific and capitalist way even before they enjoyed any significant technological advantages.

The products of this way of thinking compounded and suddenly became obvious around 1850. From 1850 onward, European domination rested to a large extent on the military-industrial-scientific complex.

Previous imperialists tended to assume that they already understood the world. Pre-modern age maps had no empty spaces. They gave the impression of a familiarity with the entire world.

In contrast, European imperialists were after both new knowledge and new territories. During the 15th and 18th centuries, Europeans introduced maps with lots of empty spaces.

The discovery of 🌎 America was the foundational event of the Scientific Revolution:

• It taught Europeans to favour present observations over past traditions
• Obliged Europeans to search for new knowledge at speed

The Aztecs and Incas showed little interest in the surrounding world. They were convinced that they knew the entire world and that they ruled most of it. The Aztecs knew nothing of the Spanish invasion in the Caribbean islands and the Incas knew nothing of the invasion of the Aztec empire.

Asian empires had the same parochial outlook as the native Americans. They believed that the world revolved only around Asia. Only in the 20th century, non-European cultures adopted a truly global vision and this was one of the crucial factors that led to the collapse of European hegemony.

Science provided the imperial project with:

• knowledge
• ideological justification for its actions
• technological gadgets

In return, imperialists:

• provided scientists with information and protection
• spread the scientific way of thinking

Both science and empire were supported by capitalism. Science and capitalism form the most important legacy that European imperialism has bequeathed the post-European world of the 21st century.

Interesting Facts

Between the 16th and 18th centuries, scurvy killed about 2 million sailors. The discovery of a treatment for scurvy by the British physician James Lind, greatly contributed to British control of the world’s oceans.

Darwin was the naturalist on HMS Beagle for her voyage around the southern hemisphere (1831–6). During that voyage he collected the material which became the basis for his ideas on natural selection.

On 12 October 1492, at about 2 a.m., Columbus’ expedition collided at the Bahamas. Columbus believed he had reached a small island off the East Asian cost. The idea that he had discovered a completely unknown continent was inconceivable for him and for many of his generation.

Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian sailor, took part in several expeditions to America. Two texts, published between 1502 and 1504, described these expeditions and argued that the lands discovered by Columbus were a new continent. These texts were attributed to Amerigo Vespucci. In 1507, Martin Waldseemüller, a respected mapmaker, published an updated world map naming the continent America in his honour. He erroneously believed that Amerigo Vespucci was the person who discovered it.

Most of the native population in the Spanish colonies at the Caribbean islands died because of either the harsh working conditions or the unfamiliar diseases brought from the Spaniards.

In July 1519, Cortés declared to the Aztecs that he was coming in peace, sent from the king of Spain. However, Cortés led an independent expedition and when he was taken to the Aztec ruler, Montezuma, Cortés took him for his prisoner. Ten years later, Francisco Pizarro followed the same approach to invade the Inca Empire.

The first non-European power that tried to send a military expedition to America was Japan. In June 1942, a Japanese expedition conquered Kiska and Attu, two small islands off the Alaskan coast. They captured 10 US soldiers and a dog.

The first Chinese world map to show America was issued in 1602.

Chapter 16: The Capitalist Creed

What enables the entire economy to grow is our trust that our future resources will be far more abundant than our present resources.

This trust allows credit to exist, which in turn finances new discoveries. New discoveries return profits which build further trust and therefore more credit. That way credit enables us to build the present at the expense of the future.

In the past people rarely extended much credit, as they didn’t trust the future would be better than the present. Since credit was limited, people struggled financing new businesses and therefore the economy struggled to grow.

That changed with the Scientific Revolution. The Scientific Revolution brought the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve. The idea of progress convinced people to put more trust in the future.

Adam Smith, in his book The Wealth of Nations, suggests that profits of private entrepreneurs is the basis for the increase in collective wealth and prosperity. That is because, according to modern capitalism, 💰 profits should be reinvested in 🏭  production, which is beneficial for 🌍 everyone. Therefore, by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself.

Most capitalists tend to argue that capital should be able to influence politics but politics should not influence capital. However, there is no such thing as a market free of all political bias. The most important economic resource is trust in the future and it is the job of political systems to ensure it, by protecting against cheats and charlatans. Free-market capitalism alone cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner.

Interesting Facts

In 1776, the Scottish economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, one of the most important economics manifestos of all time.

Modern magnates are far richer than the mediaeval nobility, but they are less interested in 💎 extravagant consumption, and they spend a much smaller part of their profits on non-productive activities.

In the early modern age, it was common for private companies to hire soldiers or even entire armies. Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), was a famous Dutch company that ruled Indonesia for almost 200 years. Only in 1800 did the Dutch state assume control of Indonesia.

The Dutch West Indies Company (WIC) built a settlement called New Amsterdam. The colony was threatened by Native Americans and the British. The British captured it in 1664 and renamed it to New York. The location where WIC built its wall to defend its colony is now the Wall Street.

In 1717 the Mississippi Company chartered in France. Speculators started buying its shares at unrealistic prices. Once the stock started plummeting, the French central bank started printing money in order to stabilise prices. This led to a financial bubble which burst and resulted in a loss of faith in the French banking system. Thereafter, the French had to raise money at high interest rates which increased their debts. This was the beginning of the French Revolution.

The British East India Company made fortunes by exporting opium to China. Millions of Chinese became addicts which led the Chinese government to issue a ban on drug trafficking. In 1840, Britain declared war on China in the name of “free trade”. Britain won and China agreed not to constrain the activities of British drug merchants. In the late nineteenth century, 10% of China’s population were opium addicts.

In 1821 the Greeks rebelled against the Ottoman Empire. Tradable Greek Rebellion Bonds were issued on the London stock exchange. When the Turks started gaining the upper hand, bondholders were at risk of losing their investments. The bondholders’ interest was the national interest, so the British organised an international fleet that, in 1827, sank the main Ottoman flotilla in the Battle of Navarino.

From the 16th to the 19th centuries, about 10m African slaves were imported to America. About 70% of them worked on sugar plantations.

Chapter 17: The Wheels of Industry

Economic growth requires energy and raw materials and these are finite. However, science and technology have invariably produced both new types of energy and materials and more efficient ways of exploiting existing resources.

The Industrial Revolution has been a revolution in energy conversion. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, humans didn’t know how to convert one type of energy into another. The only device that could do that was the body, converting the energy from food into muscle movements.

The body consumed energy that ultimately came from plants which obtained their energy from the sun. Therefore, the growth cycles of plants and the changing cycles of solar energy (e.g. day/night) dominated human history.

With the Industrial revolution, machines could be used to convert one type of energy into another, given we can invent the right machines. The crucial discoveries around energy conversion were:

• the appearance of gun that followed the invention of gunpowder
• the steam engine that could boil water to produce steam in order to move a piston
• the internal combustion engine, which revolutionised human transportation
• electricity

The Industrial Revolution was the Second Agricultural Revolution. Plants and animals started getting used as cogs in production lines similar to the way peasants used them in farms.

Animals have complex emotional worlds and treating them as ⚙️ machines not only causes them physical pain but also social stress and psychological frustration.

The Industrial Revolution increased productivity and released human resources from fieldwork. For the first time in human history, supply began to outstrip demand. This imbalance led to consumerism. Consumerism convinced people that indulgence is good and frugality is self-oppression.

Interesting Facts

The steam engine technology was born in British ⛏️ coal mines. It was used to pump out water so that miners could access the lower strata of the mines.

Aluminium was discovered in the 1820s. At that time it was more expensive than gold.

Fritz Haber, a Jewish chemist and a German citizen, discovered in 1908 a process for cheaply producing ammonia. Germans used that discovery to produce explosives. Fritz also pioneered the use of poison gas in battle.

🐖 Pigs are among the most intelligent of mammals, second perhaps only to the great apes.

Tens of billions of farm animals live today as part of a mechanised assembly line, and about 50 billion of them are slaughtered annually.

Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.

Chapter 18: A Permanent Revolution

The Industrial Revolution brought many unplanned changes in daily life and human mentality.

One of them was uniformity and ⏱️ precise schedule for almost all human activities like factories, schools and public transportation. All of them started working according to a timetable and precise artificial clocks, not based on the sun or the season.

The most important unplanned change was the collapse of the 👪 family and the local community. Functions like 🚑 healthcare, 🏫 education, insurance and 🛡️ protection that were previously offered by the family or the local community were now offered by the state and the market.

Although millions of years of evolution have designed us to live as community members, within 2 centuries we have become alienated individuals dependent on the state and the market. The emotional vacuum, created by the loss of intimate communities, is filled by imagined communities like the nation.

In the premodern era, people tended to assume that the social order was inflexible. People followed the status quo and looked back at the lost golden age. In the last two centuries, the social order became dynamic and is constantly challenged in pursuit of a better world.

In the late modern era, we have seen unprecedented levels of violence but of peace too. The new elastic order seems to be able to foster radical changes without collapsing into violent conflict.

Throughout history, most of violence came from local disputes between families and communities. In the modern era, the rise of the state (with its courts and police forces) has resulted in a decline of violence worldwide. It is undeniable that since 1945 international violence has dropped to an all-time low.

Limited international wars still occur but are no longer the norm. Never before has peace been so prevalent that people could not even imagine war. Scholars have identified the following factors to explain the situation:

• 💲 the price of war has increased dramatically

• 📉 the profits of war have declined

  Today’s wealth consists mainly of human capital and organisational know-how, not old-fashioned material wealth.

• ☮️ = 📈 peace has become more profitable

  During peace, in modern capitalist economies foreign trade and investments flourish. This leads to a tightening web of international connections that makes most countries less independent. Since governments cannot conduct independent economic or foreign policies they are unable to conduct a full-scale war on their own. Like all empires this new global empire, currently in formation, enforces peace within its borders.

• ☮️ a peace-loving 👑 elite

  Today’s politicians, business people and intellectuals genuinely see war as both evil and avoidable.

Interesting Facts

In 1784 each British city and town had its own local time, which could differ from London time by up to half an hour.

The British government legislated that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich Observatory time in 1880. It was the first time in history that a country obliged its population to live according to an artificial clock rather than local ones or sunrise-to-sunset cycles.

During WWII, BBC News was broadcast to Europe. Each news programme opened with a live broadcast of Big Ben tolling the hour. German physicists found a way to determine the weather conditions in London based on differences in the tone of the broadcast ding-dongs.

In most societies parental authority was sacred. Parents could do almost anything they wanted, including killing newborn babies and selling children into slavery.

In the year 2000, of the people who died, 1.5% died because of wars and violent crime, 2.25% from car accidents and 1.45% committed suicide.

In 1945, Britain ruled a quarter of the globe. Thirty years later it ruled just a few small islands.

Chapter 19: And They Lived Happily Ever After

Although in the last 500 years, the wealth and human capabilities have increased in an unprecedented way that doesn’t necessarily mean that overall happiness has increased.

There is a possibility that the improvement in material conditions was offset by the alienation caused with the collapse of the family and the community.

When evaluating world happiness it may be wrong to consider only the happiness of humans. Over the last two centuries, billions of animals have been treated as ⚙️ cogs by the industry.

Happiness does not depend on objective conditions of wealth, health or community. It depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations. Today, our high expectations and our intolerance of inconvenience may make us less happy than our ancestors.

Biologists maintain that happiness is determined by psychological and sociological factors but mainly by biochemistry. Therefore happiness consists of the pleasant bodily sensations that we experience.

If we accept this approach to happiness, then external events (buying a car, French revolution etc) are of minor importance to people’s happiness. Biochemistry remains unchanged and therefore the happiness levels one can experience are bounded and largely predetermined by one’s genes.

This assumption is contested by some scholars. They maintain that happiness is seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile.

As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Any meaning we ascribe to our lives is just a delusion. Perhaps happiness is synchronising one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. That way we can convince ourselves that our life is meaningful.

Both views assume that happiness is based on subjective feelings (of either pleasure or meaning) and identify the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of particular emotional states.

In contrast to both views, many religions and philosophies, such as ☸️ Buddhism, suggest that the key to happiness is to know the truth about🪞yourself. People identify themselves with their feelings without realising that they are not their feelings. Therefore pursuing particular feelings is not going to make them happy.

Interesting Facts

Money brings happiness, but only up to a point.

Illness decreases happiness in the short term. In the long-term happiness will be decreased only if the person’s condition is deteriorating or causes ongoing pain.

Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health.

Good marriages are correlated with happiness and bad marriages with misery.

Buddhism has assigned the question of happiness more importance than perhaps any other human creed.

According to the selfish gene theory, natural selection makes people choose what is good for the reproduction of their genes, even if it is bad for them as individuals.

Chapter 20: The End of Homo Sapiens

Darwinian evolution explains how natural selection governed the evolution of the world in the past. However, in the future, intelligent design might replace natural selection through:

• 🧑‍🔬 biological engineering (e.g. gene implanting)

  There seems to be no insurmountable technical barrier preventing us from producing superhumans. The main obstacles are the ethical and political objections that have slowed down research on humans.

  The Cognitive Revolution was likely caused by a few small changes to our internal brain structure. Bioengineering might lead to another small change and create a new type of consciousness. This might transform Homo sapiens into something altogether different.

• 🤖 cyborg engineering (beings that combine both organic and inorganic parts)

  Bionic parts supplement our natural senses and functions (e.g. eyeglasses).

  The most revolutionary cyborg project is the attempt to devise a direct two-way brain-computer interface. This will allow computers to read the electrical signals of a human brain, while simultaneously transmitting signals that the brain can read in turn.

  A cyborg using such an interface would be so fundamentally another kind of being that we cannot grasp the philosophical, psychological or political implications.

  • what if a computer-brain interface is used to link a brain to the Internet or to other brains?
  • what will human memory, consciousness and identity mean if the brain has direct access to a collective memory bank?
  • what happens to gender identity when minds become collective?

• engineering of inorganic life

  An example of inorganic life could be a computer program that can undergo independent evolution (e.g. machine learning). Although it would initially be coded by humans, it would be able to evolve towards unpredictable directions.

  These programs have been produced by a new evolutionary process independent of the laws and limitations of organic evolution.

  • Are these “living creatures”?
  • What if we could create a digital mind, composed of computer code, would that be a person?

  The real potential of future technologies is to change Homo sapiens itself, including our physique and our cognitive and emotional world. Therefore, there is a possibility in the future that beings with emotions and identities like ours will no longer exist.

  For science, death is a technical problem and all its projects are about upgrading Homo sapiens. Since these projects are unlikely to stop it is inevitable that Homo sapiens will be upgraded into a different kind of being. The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. Given we might soon be able to engineer our desires, the question we need to answer is “What do we want to want?”.

Interesting Facts

In 2000, Eduardo Kac hired a French laboratory to engineer a 🐇 radiant rabbit. French scientists created the radiant rabbit by implanting in its DNA a gene taken from a green fluorescent jellyfish. Kac named the rabbit Alba.

E. coli and several species of fungi have been engineered to produce insulin.

A gene extracted from an Arctic fish has been inserted into potatoes, making the plants more frost-resistant.

Geneticists have managed to extend sixfold the average life expectancy of worms. They have also engineered mice that display much-improved memory and learning skills.

The Sapiens genome is only 14% larger than mouse genome.

The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a US military research agency, is developing cyborgs out of insects.

In 2006, the US Naval Undersea Warfare Center reported its intention to develop cyborg sharks. They aim to identify underwater electromagnetic fields made by submarines and mines, by exploiting the natural magnetic detecting capabilities of 🦈 sharks.

In this chapter, Harrari mentions Retina Implant, a government-sponsored German company that is developing a retinal prosthesis that may allow blind people to gain partial vision. The company was dissolved in 2019. In their statement they wrote: “Our work has been hampered by the innovation-hostile climate of Europe's rigid regulatory and health systems.”

Mapping the first human genome required 15 years and 3 billion dollars. Today, a person’s DNA can be mapped within a few weeks at the cost of a few hundred dollars.

Afterword: The Animal that Became a God

We are:

• 💪  more powerful than ever before
• 😒 as dissatisfied and irresponsible as ever
• 🤔 unsure of our goals

Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?