If only it were a reality, eh?

@MsKathleen You’re kidding, right?

@p-nullifidian from where I sit, I am having a hard time seeing how we have “improved”. Our diet makes us sick, we are poisoning our land and water, and we still can’t figure out how to get along. This all happened in my lifetime.

@MsKathleen When looking at history through the lens of our lifespans it’s understandable that one might not notice improvement. But when we compare where we are today to any other point in history, where would you really rather be?

A century ago, during a time when our knowledge of diseases was limited, our personal hygiene was dubious and life expectancy was less than half what it is today, 500 million people were infected by the Spanish flu killing 50 million. And yet less than 12 months from the start of the Coronavirus pandemic I was fortunate enough to be vaccinated against COVID 19. And as Steven Pinker has identified in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, violence in our species has significantly declined, over time.

Yes, we must continue to clean up our environment, but we’ve begun to identify and eliminate the toxins, and our diets are evolving from an over-reliance on meats and crappy food in cans to organically certified produce and a reduced dependency on meat.

@p-nullifidian Neither longer life nor “not dying from a pandemic” are indicators of “improvement”; they are merely indicators of increased longevity.

@MsKathleen What, pray tell, are your metrics for improvement?

@p-nullifidian Well, let’s see...just looking at the US...to begin with, “Citius - Altius - Fortius” on a grand scale would be a definite improvement, but only elite athletes meet that measure, and they are few and far between. The average human has not improved physically, other than being longer-lived. But we are longer-lived mostly due to the intervention of science. People died younger in the past due to natural dangers, like wild animals and accidents, diseases we did not know how to prevent/cure, and ignorance about the way the body works. Unfortunately, we do KNOW how to increase lifespan with diet and activity, but on average, we die younger than we need to, because we ignore science. So next in line, I would consider higher intelligence, reasoning, and general wisdom to be an improvement. We have made physical work easier, but we work longer hours, so that’s a wash. (I AM glad that we have legally prevented children from being forced into labor, in this country at least, but even so, there are children here who are enslaved, often by their parents). Understanding that there is an interconnected relationship between the planet and all living species is very high on my list of “how humans could improve”. Not to mention learning to be kind to each other, to help each other, to live in cooperative societies that respect the planet, as do many indigenous tribes. We have, in fact, degraded from “survival of the fittest” to “survival of the richest”, using “fittest” to describe both physical and mental attributes. Average intelligence has NOT increased. Have we reached our POTENTIAL? I say, “NO”.

@MsKathleen Pretty much every point you make resonates with me. After all, look who I've chosen as my avatar ... an 18th century writer and philosopher who despised privilege and advocated (in his tract, Agrarian Justice) for a universal basic income! Peace.