Modernity

Characteristics

Tom Murphy:

"What do I think we can say about modernity with a reasonable degree of confidence?

Modernity is a very new phenomenon on this planet: nothing of its kind has happened before.

Even extending the boundary of modernity to a 10,000 year run since agriculture began, its duration is exceedingly short on evolutionary timescales—even compared to our species’ existence of 250–300 kyr, which itself is short compared to many species’ lifetimes (i.e., modernity is uncharacteristic of humans).

The present hyper-active mode, characterized by science, is just 400 years old, and the industrial/fossil-fuel age is less than 200: a mere flash, contextually.

Modernity relies on non-renewable resources dredged out of the depths that are not integrated into ecological cycles and often create unprecedented ecological harm—the full extent of which we can’t possibly yet know. Even traditional agriculture chews up land on thousand-year timescales (much faster these days)—besides setting up ecological disconnection and objectification, money and capitalism, toxic social hierarchies and power concentrations, and human-supremacist religious and political regimes. For many materials, the prospect of depletion has become apparent after only a century or even decades of intense exploitation. The notion of maintaining current practices on millennium timescales is unsupported conjecture. Today’s practices and material profile represent a one-time stunt.

We have loads of evidence for rapidly declining ecological health, in virtually every measure. Accelerating biodiversity loss rates are consistent with the initiation of a sixth mass extinction. Modernity has every appearance of being grossly unsustainable. We’re sitting on such a glaring lack of evidence for other technological civilizations beyond Earth that it borders on evidence of there not being any (or at least rare in space and time: far short of a vibrant galactic civilization bombarding us with advertisements)."

(https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-10-01/evidence-please/)