There has been life on Earth for billions of years. Human have used tools for millions of years, tamed fire for hundreds of thousands of years, created art for tens of thousands of years.
Yet only in the last hundred years or so have we started to create artifacts that are likely to survive for most of the remaining lifetime of Earth: Vast areas covered in concrete that will show up in future geological strata, say, or spheres of almost indestructible tungsten carbide in ballpoint pens.
All other things we have ever created, including the cave art, the rock tools, and the pyramids, will be gone without a trace in a billion years or so. As Maciej Cegłowski writes on Mars of the Rest of Us, we can’t even tell for sure if there have been other civilizations on our planet that have disappeared without a trace.
What sets our civilization apart is not our intelligence. Intelligence is required but not sufficient. No other quality we have individually is the deciding factor either. Nor is it language, or writing, or culture. As Ian Brownlie writes, instead it’s our civilization’s drive to ask questions, to explore, to look outwards, and to do so generation after generation. I’d like to suggest Civilizational Curiosity as a way to describe this urge.
This fragile compulsion may be the most precious thing we have. It’s the flame that must not die.
