Chapter 2: Knowledge Creation & Universal Ascendance

South of Boston is Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum which demonstrates how the Pilgrims lived when they came to America in 1620. The houses are crudely built with rough hewn logs, thatched roofs, and thin walls with no insulation to protect against the cold New England winters. The floors are made of dirt. There is no plumbing, and heat is derived from burning wood in stone fireplaces. The village is small. Transportation is primarily by foot.

The Pilgrims lived in a primitive state, at the mercy of the land, weather, and diseases. More than half of the English settlers died during the first winter. 

In many ways, the Pilgrims' condition was not substantially different from humans who had lived one thousand years, or even five thousand years before: no real medicine or scientific knowledge of how the body works, the slow development of tools to help with construction and agriculture, the use of animals for transportation and work.

When the Pilgrims escaped to America, the world population was approximately 500 million people. A respectable number but certainly not overwhelming. Humanity was on a slow growth path, burdened with disease, superstition, and a very slow increase in technology and living conditions. 

That all changed in 1687 with the publication of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principa Mathematica, which many scholars consider to be  the beginning of the Enlightenment. The central ideas of the Enlightenment were the use of reason and the senses as the primary sources of knowledge, combined with ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, constitutional government, and the separation of church and state. These concepts created the foundation for the modern Western world and for the most massive explosion of growth and progress in human history.

From 10,000 BCE to 1700 AD, the human population increased from 4 million to 600 million. That’s an increase of 596 million over 11,700 years, or an increase of 51,000 per year. From 1700 AD to 2019, the population increased from 596 million to 7.7 billion, an increase of 7.2 billion over 320 years. That averages out to a growth of 22,500,000 per year. The graph below shows the extraordinary change in trajectory which started almost immediately after the advent of the Enlightenment. 

Human wealth also became supercharged after the advent of the Enlightenment.

The growth in wealth emerged as a byproduct of the scientific method and a reason-based way of looking at the world. It started in the UK, spread to Europe, North America, Asia, and is still, to this day, spreading across the rest of the globe. 

The fertilizer that farmers use to grow plentiful food, the medicine we use to cure disease, the vehicles we use to travel, the materials we use to construct our houses, the knowledge we use  to predict the weather, the media we use to deliver entertainment - all of these had their beginnings in the Enlightenment, and the industrial, scientific, media, and agricultural revolutions which followed.

And these revolutions are not slowing down; they are accelerating. In his book, The Beginning of Infinity, the physicist David Deutsch posits that humans have the ability to push knowledge creation to infinity, allowing humanity to expand across the stars, conquer death, and unravel the deepest mysteries of time and matter. There is no physical law preventing this from happening, just a lack of knowledge. And knowledge creation is increasing exponentially . Buckminster Fuller, the renowned 20th century inventor and visionary, developed the “Knowledge Doubling Curve.” In 1900, according to his calculations, knowledge doubled every century. By the end of World War II , knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Experts believe that today, knowledge is doubling every 13 months. According to IBM, the growth of the Internet of Things means that in the near future, knowledge will double every day.

As we unravel the mysteries of our genetic code, begin to explore space, peel back the physics behind fusion and other sources of energy, and develop knowledge across the face of the planet and universe, humanity will become even better at reordering our world.

Consider setting up a colony on Mars. There is no physical law that prevents this. Only the lack of knowledge on how to efficiently produce oxygen, turn martian soil into rich land capable of growing crops, use resources on the planet to construct building materials, and adapt the human body to less Mars gravity are holding us back. In many ways, these are similar to the obstacles the Pilgrims faced when they landed in Plymouth on November 11, 1620.

There are challenges. Earth’s environment has taken a beating from humanity’s growth. We’re changing the land and atmosphere and exterminating non-human species. We don’t fully understand the impact of doing this. While almost every human today is better off than the Pilgrims were in that cold winter of 1620, progress has not been equally distributed. Some in the United States and the world live with enormous resources while others still struggle to survive. In the United States, groups have been marginalized by historical racism while others have been waylaid by technological change. 

The key to solving these problems is to structure a society where knowledge is widely shared and disseminated so that everyone can use their God given talents to move the country, the world, and humanity forward. Where humans can continue to elevate themselves and become knowledge creators. Once a person has become a knowledge creator, he or she is considered to have achieved Ascendance.

Humanity has accomplished much in the last four hundred years. The United States, as a reason based, knowledge creating society, has been behind much of this advancement and profited from it. The standard of living has increased far beyond what our ancestors could have imagined. But, the ingredients to create knowledge don’t just happen, they have to be nurtured and protected. Ascendance is about recommitting to those ingredients, taking what we have learned over the last four hundred years, and preparing to supercharge knowledge creation into the future. The goal is to create a world where we are all knowledge creators and where we can all benefit from universal Ascendance.