Time – Will we use it for growth or our ultimate demise?

Time: The Ultimate Resource

The history of the human race can be summed up in two words: accelerated growth. The rest are commentaries.

For a very long time early man lived in caves with the daily hardship of foraging for food outside it and avoiding being on the menu of bigger, stronger and faster animals than ourselves. We probably started out as herbivores and upgraded to being carnivores when we discovered winter was not a particularly good time to be a health fanatic surviving on a vegetarian diet.

When all of us were huddled together in a cave with only one entrance something magical happened: time was discovered and we got to sleep better.

Consider the alternative: sleeping in a jungle at night in an open space. That was the equivalent of being put on a plate and laid out invitingly on a buffet table in an open-air restaurant. Alfresco dining was never our ancestor’s thing: especially if you were the main menu. You would never get a good night sleep because it would be a night marred by nightmares wondering whether you would end up as supper for some animals who weren’t too concerned with the ill effects of late night eating.

Lack of sleep or sleep deprivation was a recipe for a short life. Apart from the health benefit of a fully-rested body, one tended to get careless when not focusing on the task at hand: a constant struggle to be a diner and not dinner.

With ‘time’ the progress from caveman to a homeless man was inevitable. Someone, while huddling in the cave, would figure out that they should take a risk by looking for a better cave to squat. He probably sold the colony this story although he might be working on a different agenda. In all likelihood he was secretly hoping to find a more accommodating environment to live in and not merely a nicer cave. No doubt this person hated the cold and fantasised how wonderful it would be if there were only one entire season of summer yearly. To persuade the colony to move to a better home was difficult enough let alone asking it to believe in a fantasy place with warm weather all year-round.

It is a truism that people who had no experience of a different world always imagined them to be false as the status quo is more comforting and assuring. (For this reason alone no matter how good our local universities seemed to be it can never offer a superior education with an open mind offered by one abroad in a progressive country.)

This journey of hope the colony was about to take started from the availability of the most precious commodity in the world: time. When early man in caves found time they also found a better future and world than the one they lived in. This sequence of progress for our ancestors would be repeated time and time again: no pun intended. Whenever there was more leisure time than work time there was evolutionary progress.

There were many caves and many colonies and the idea of seeking out a better home probably occurred simultaneously to all these cavemen. Not all of the colonies that ventured out of their caves to seek a better home made it. Those that did became stronger for it. The experience would stand them in good stead because along the way they would encounter the wonders of nature and also its dangers. They would have learned something from overcoming obstacles and developed a keener sense of detecting danger when they were on the move and living in open space at night. When they finally settled down it would be in a place where water was easily available and the climate more accommodating.

In such a place they would find foraging for food so much easier. With an accommodating climate, plant life was multifarious and within easy reach of the colony. They could work half as hard and gather twice as much every day. Again, the extra time saved from daily work offered an opportunity for some dreamer to imagine a world when he didn’t have to work odd hours everyday. When the colony settled in one place the population of the group was directly correlated to the availability of food in that area. If there weren’t enough food to support a large population, there were only two alternatives: steal from other colonies or grow your own.

Needless to say both routes were taken and success stories could be found in either of them. The interesting thing was that stealing from others might have actually helped human evolution along the way. To steal from others you need either to be stronger or you have a weapon to ambush your victims. If you were stronger then you wouldn’t need to steal because you would be well-fed. Whoever was weaker would also be in no better position than yourself. It was thus probable that the need to overcome stronger opponents necessitated the invention of killing implements. The spear was invented to kill other humans and only later found a use in killing wild animals when humans became harder to kill given the intelligence parity between killer and victim. This group became hunters or gatherers as killing was always riskier than gathering food: plants don’t retaliate.