Honoring The Human Legacy

Humans gradually evolved from our animal ancestors over 100,000 years ago, living in the wild, struggling to survive.  Life was extremely difficult for our ancestors - food was often scarce, diseases were common, predators were everywhere and people didn't live very long.  Life was a major struggle for them, and only those who had the determination and intelligence to survive would end up being our ancestors, having children who also could meet the challenges of an overwhelmingly difficult world.

This constant weeding out of the ones who could not meet the extreme challenges of the wild world, along with the variation in each new generation gradually improved the natural abilities of our ancestors.  Many of these improvements were in the ability to learn and the ability to manipulate the things around them.  These valuable abilities allowed us to learn from each other, so that when one of us figured out how to do something useful, others could learn it from them, pass it on to future generations and even build on and improve each other's ideas.  This allowed each generation to inherit the accumulated knowledge of those who came before and to benefit from the accomplishments of people who lived thousands of years before.

Over time, humans gradually developed better and better ways of sharing knowledge, inventing languages that continued to grow in their complexity and precision.  As language developed, it empowered humans, allowing them to coordinate their activities better, forming more effective teams, working together as though all of them formed a larger, more capable organism.  Language also made it easier to pass more knowledge through the generations, so that more of our hard-earned innovations and ideas could be carried forward and improved on.

As our knowledge and innovations gradually accumulated, we became increasingly powerful, more able to manipulate our environment to ensure a better food supply and better able to protect ourselves from the many dangers of the world.  These advances allowed our population to grow, and a larger population meant more people developing ideas and technologies.

This cycle of innovation continued, each generation making small improvements, contributing to the gradual increase in the abilities of humans.  Humans developed a wide range of ideas and technologies, including agriculture, engineering, writing, religion, philosophy, mathematics, morality, music, science and art, with each generation passing on and improving what had been done before.

The creative genius of humans seemed to explode as we formed larger societies where people could work together to develop ideas and technologies.  The pace of innovation continued to grow faster in all areas, and humans began to understand some very fundamental facts about the world we find ourselves in and how we became who we are.  We also continued to pursue all kinds of art, ideas and technology, faster than ever before.

This is the human legacy.  We were once animals living in the wild, living difficult and painful lives.  Over time, we struggled to rise above that, with each generation remembering what had been passed down through their ancestors, building on that and passing it on to future generations.  Because of the courage, discipline, intelligence and innovation of our ancestors, we are here and have all the good things in life that we do.

We have inherited this legacy from the vast millions who have gone before us and from those who are among us now, still working hard to move us forward.  We literally would not exist without all the hard work and innovation of the millions of humans who have embraced this legacy and lived with the motivation of making the world better and making humans better people.

We owe everything we have to this human legacy, and we find ourselves in this world, since the time we were young children, gradually waking up to realities larger than our own immediate surroundings.  We gradually become more aware of the other people in the world and of all the people who came before.  The world is not what we thought it was when we were children - it is far larger and far older than we can imagine, and humans have been here, transforming ourselves and our world far longer than we can grasp with our impatient minds.

The human legacy has been a journey of slowly waking up to what the world is, like a child gaining more insight and abilities while growing up.  Now we see a world far different than our ancestors ever imagined.  We are on a planet, floating around a star, unimaginably far away from anything else that could be home for us.  We are alone and precious in this desolate vastness.  It is just us and this planet, with this thin film of life that has struggled so hard for billions of years to survive, making gradual changes and passing them on to the next generations who do the same, transforming themselves and the world.  We are the results of this evolutionary process, and we are carrying that legacy forward.

As we understand the human legacy and the legacy of life on this planet, we are moved by the sheer courage and heroism of our ancestors, to have struggled through such insanely difficult lives and were successful - for many millions of  unbroken generations.  We are the descendants of those who had that courage and who survived such extreme situations.  We are also the descendants of those who valued knowledge and progress enough that they carefully sustained these values, added to them and passed them on to future generations.  That is who we are, and that is our legacy.

As we embrace the human legacy, we feel moved to participate in this ancient practice of adding value to the world, to see ourselves as more than isolated humans, each pursuing our own narrow interests.  We can see ourselves as partners with all the humans who struggled so hard and so courageously to make the world better and to make humans better.  That is our legacy, and we can honor that legacy by engaging with the world and working hard to improve whatever we can.