Progress
I am so terribly sunburnt. I look like a lobster with a bikini line from the front. Oh well. It's worth it :D
I read a book over the weekend - Sigma Protocol by Robert Ludlum. If you like conspiracy theory/fast-paced action books, that's definitely one for the reading list...but what I especially liked about it was something it brought up near the end. If you plan on reading this, don't read on - major spoilers. Anyway, the Sigma Protocol (or so the book proposed) was a company of high-powered industrialists that basically designed history along the lines of what they believed was best for the world. They were responsible for the Cold War (history students, you want to read this book, believe me - it says Marshall wasn't responsible for the Marshall Plan :D), and everywhere there is some kind of political event, the Sigma Protocol is there: e.g., don't like the regime in Mexico? Arrange to have it changed. Politically macroscopic stuff like that.
Anyway, an issue that the book brought up that runs parallel to this was the idea that humans die too quickly. If you think about it...out of our 80-odd years that we live, we spend about 20 years reaching intellectual maturity and realizing our skilled potential. If you are a specialist in your field, it will take even longer to perfect your skills. And just when you've mastered your skills, just when you've reached your highest intellectual capacity...your body gives up on you. It starts degenerating and breaking down to the process of aging. In a way, as I started thinking as I read the book, we live our lives in almost perpetual frustration. When we're young, we have the capacity to achieve so much, but lack the knowledge to do so; therefore, we get frustrated. As we get older, it becomes a trade-off: we have the knowledge to achieve, but increasingly we lose the physical capacity to do so; therefore, we get frustrated.
And this is because the human body is pre-programmed to die. Once we're born, we start dying. Indeed. Cells die and are never replaced, or replaced with slightly less than perfect versions. Even our very ability to learn degenerates, which is exemplified by the fact that children learn languages with far greater ease than adults do.
On a cultural scale, this problem is multiplied. The "bad guy" in the book proposes that the reason humanity progresses with such agonizing slowness is because each generation spends most of its lifespan imparting knowledge rather than progressing. We spend most of our lives just trying to pass on the knowledge of the human race to the new generation before we die, and they do the same to the next generation, ad infinitum. The scope for true progress, therefore, is limited because, I suppose, it's like writing all your knowledge on a slate, only to have it wiped out before you've quite finished (and then you die of exhaustion anyway).
At this point, of course, the book waxes fantastical and proposes to have a way to arrest the aging process, and of course all the members of the Sigma Protocol have been around for a hundred years, and are all in fantastic health. This way, they can mould history unimpeded by the ravages of time - or at least, they have bought themselves more time to do more than impart knowledge.
But anyway, it's an intriguing thought. Would humanity benefit if iconic minds like Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin were still alive today? Would humanity really progress faster if we could live longer? If you believed in a God, you'd probably say that the human lifespan is God's design, and we should content ourselves with it. But we could also say that man was never made to fly, and yet we are; man was never naturally made to see the deep seabed, and yet we do...imagine how much we could achieve, if only we lived long enough to.