How do societies evolve? Is it an incremental, though linear and inevitable, process where change is unnoticeable but perpetual until one looks back in wonder. Wow, things have changed, the observer remarks while remaining discombobulated at the realization of just how dramatic those changes are. Or is the process observable and felt in the moment? Wow, things really are changing fast. Probably both are real at different times and for different people.

It is clear that homo-sapiens (our largely misnamed tribe since the label suggests higher order thought) has evolved in remarkable ways over the some 200,000 years we’ve been around or wherever the starting line has been established. Over these many eons, some transitions can be elevated to the status of transformational discontinuities in which our world is remarkably and fundamentally different sometime after the interruption of business as usual is complete. Though identifying such salient inflection points specifically might be somewhat subjective, the exercise remains unavoidable if we want to understand who we are or, more exciting yet, where we are going.

Some discontinuities happened over long periods of time: the final dominance of Homo-sapiens over their Neanderthal cousins; the discovery of fire which altered eating habits, tribal behaviors, and body types; the agricultural revolution which shifted tribes from nomadic patterns to settled communities; the urban revolution (5 to 7 millenia ago) which led to increasingly complex social structures and primitive, if hierarchical, methods of social control; and the monotheistic revolution (2 to 4 millenia ago) which permitted broader control of socially approved dogma. Such revolutions must have seemed imperceptible in the moment. They were so gradual that they could only be understood and appreciated in hindsight, long after the fact. Fundamental changes in our distant past were glacial and seldom linear. There were many false starts and dead ends before change was grounded, sustainable, and irreversible.

In more contemporary times, the pace of change appears to have accelerated. Some transitions appear to have been initiated by external events. Others were sparked by technological innovations. Still others might be attributed to intellectual or cognitive breakthroughs. Did I mention that this exercise was subjective, if not idiosyncratic? For example, the increase in east-west trade in yhe 12th and 13th century might well have triggered the European Renaissance, stealing this blossoming of human centered thought and innovation from the nucleus of the Islamic Golden Age centered in Baghdad (which fell to the Mongols in the mid 13th century where much was lost).

Other transitions can be identified or at least offered as grist for speculation. The onset of the Bubonic Plague in the mid-14th century resulted in massive demographic changes, with population losses of 50 percent or more in places. This had extraordinary long-term impacts on existing feudal arrangements that had stifled social mobility and innovation up to that point. Then, we had the introduction of Gutenberg’s movable type printing revolution. This one technical breakthrough impacted religion (facilitated the Protestant revolution), increased literacy (non-elites began reading), accelerated the expansion of local languages, and stimulated formal education (more universities were founded). The world would never be the same.

Soon, the pace accelerated. In the beginning of the 16th century, the Protestant reformation challenged the existing hierarchical structure of society and rigid intellectual canons imposed by the Catholic Church. It also facilitated the establishment of stronger nation states. At the end of the 16th century, Francis Bacon’s intellectual insights began to introduce an early form of scientific inductive reasoning which altered how we learned about the natural world. Though Islamic scholars had earlier touched on these methodological principles several centuries earlier, they were finally sustainable by this moment in history. In the 17th century, an exploration of the globe blossomed as brave navigator explored unknown worlds and societies around the circumference of our earthy orb. Following that came the industrial revolution (Watt’s steam engine) of the 18th century, and the communications-travel revolutions (railroads, telegraph, telephones, diesal powered ships and cars) of the 19th century. Soon, ideas and people could communicate and experience new thoughts, cultures, and ideas with unprecedented celerity, comparatively speaking at least.

The speed of change became palpable and perceptible. The French and American Revolutions spurred radical innovations in how humans would govern themselves and their societies. The general European uprisings of 1848 signaled further discontent with the old, autocratic way of doing things. Then, the catastrophe of WWI helped assign many older autocracies and creaky empires into the ash heap of history. The Great Depression (followed by WWII) seemingly broke the back of some totalitarian regines and fostered a period of liberal, democratic hope for a large part of the world.

Over the course of my lifetime, change appears relentless and ceaseless. Every dimension of life … from science to communications to transportation and so much else … is changing at break neck speed. When I was born, flight was done by clunky, propeller-driven planes. By the time I was 25 years old, we had put a man on the moon. In my beginning, computers were huge behemoths based on vacuum tube technology. At best, they could do the smallest computations at (by today’s standards) glacially slow speeds. Now, our hand held devices permit us to access the world’s knowledge, to communicate around the globe effortlessly, and to manipulate the world in ways our parents could not possibly have imagined.

It is all so exciting. Or perhaps not! It sometines is hard to know what really is going on in the midst of such profound changes, or what it all means. And dont forget, Putin has restored a feudal system in Russia. Trump has pushed America toward a banana Republic form of an authoritarian regime. Our global climate worsens annually while our political elites dither. And we hurtle toward the newest and most profound revolution … generalized artificial intelligence … without much analysis nor reflection. The pace of social and technological change doesn’t always flow in a discernable direction. Moreover, that pace seems to be outdistancing our available wisdom. My point … accelerating transitions (inflection points?) are difficult to grasp and oft (always?) control us, not the other way around.

But here’s the question. Are all the transitions we can identify over the past several decades really discrete inflection points, or are they part of one large transformation, like the agriculture or urban revolutions. Even more intriguing, are we in the midst of a more profound transformation unlike any seen in the past? Might some future historians look back in several hundred years and remark: Oh yes, the 21st century marked the end of a major inflection point in social evolution where we transitioned from a carbon-based life form to a world ruled by sentient machines (i.e., from homo-sapiens to mechanicus-sapiens). That historian of the future will note that this radical new species was the start of reaching out beyond earth in a serious way.

On the other hand, I am struck by a quote from the iconic cosmologist Carl Sagan. Some three decades ago, not long before he passed, he asserted the following: “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time…when the U.S. is a service econony; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical facilities decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true. We then slide, almost without notice, back into superstition and darkness …”

There’s the rub. Is Carl’s dystopian prediction an informed guess about where we are (were) headed? Or is it a short-sighted feeling of angst generated by the uncertainties of the journey. Rapid change is unnerving, unsettling. It may partly explain the reactionary era into which America has fallen recently. Then again, our current irrational political and social choices may suggest something more profound … hints of some future dystopian darkness.

We are told that the singularity, when human consciousness and digital machines can be molded into one, is on the immediate horizon. I’m likely to pass from this mortal toil before that happens. Oddly enough, I’m not certain that missing this epochful event is a good or bad thing. My damn curiosity, however, wants answers … what would that world be like? My human sensibilities, on the other hand, fear the possible answers. If God has created this universe to trick and frustrate us, He’s done one hell of a job.

One final thought. The meme below perhaps contains the greatest lesson of all. Our lives, our fates, seem so important to us. Yet, if our earth were to vanish tomorrow, our personal galaxy would not take note. Further, the Milky Way is only one of some 2 trillion galaxies out there, which may be just a drop in the bucket of our full cosmos. I consider such things when I get vexed about Trump’s antics. In the end, we are all just temporary arrangements of stardust. Would anyone out there even recognize, never mind appreciate, what happens to us as we evolve into the future? Would anyone give a damn?

Probably not! On the other hand, our survival and evolution may be the most critical experiment in our vast universe. We just don’t know.