A futurist has claimed that there are three phases of human evolution, and our species is currently in the second phase.
Jeffrey Charles Hardy, who founded the non-profit Care for Peace, developed a global perspective of the ‘human timeline,’ putting us in the ‘Suspended’ state.
The first phase, which lasted for about 2.5 million years, saw humans conquer nature, but now Hardy believes we have shifted ‘toward sustainable coexistence of the planet and its inhabitants.’
In the suspended state, humans will have to ‘reassess and move away from the unsustainable practices of unlimited growth and waste that we inherited from the first human evolution,’ said Hardy.
He continued to explain that we have been idling since the creation of the atomic bomb in 1945 that solidified our dominance over nature, but the only path to the ‘Second Stage’ is to reverse the damage that has been done.
Humans are in a state of ‘suspended evolution’ after spending more than two million years in the first stage while they conquered nature. There are three stages of evolution: the first which lasted for 2.5 million years, the suspended – which humans are currently in – and the second evolution
The phase of human evolution we are in now is suspended because we don’t have a plan for the Second Human Evolution.
‘It’s yet to be determined and is ours to imagine, discuss, plan, design, and implement,’ said Hardy.
The visionary emphasizes that society must learn from the past and utilize insights from academics, media, governments, and non-government organizations to facilitate this groundbreaking transformation. ‘The process is the solution.’
Hardy said his evolutionary human timeline was inspired by his experience as an international healthcare planner in the 1970s.
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He realized that peace could be sustained through people’s compassionate actions, leading him to embark on a global mission to create a timeline to address humanity’s biggest issues like climate change and environmental degradation.
It was then that Hardy created four templates.
They included the personal prime directive that focused on individual values and responsibilities, and the relational prime directive that explained the importance of harmonious relationships.
The second two templates encompassed the cultural that balanced a person’s holistic well-being and organization which aligned with more peace and sustainability goals.
‘When working as a hospital corpsman, I remember tending to young, sick or wounded seamen returning from the Vietnam War,’ Hardy recalled.
‘In those moments of administering shots, changing gauzes, and simply being there for them, I realized there is an intrinsic relationship between caring for others and the feeling of peace.’
For millions of years, humans attempted to conquer nature, more recently through industrialism, believing that the world is ours to dominate.
Humans conquered nature by striving to control everything around them by urbanizing cities and infrastructure.
This allowed for the expansion of the human population, introducing mining and fossil fuels for energy and using irrigation, crop rotation and selective breeding to increase food production.
Hardy argued that this mindset moved humans into the suspended stage of evolution since the 1950s after designing nuclear warfare that could destroy humanity. The aftereffects of the atomic bomb which killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people when it was deployed in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 are still being felt today
In 1949, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud argued that civilization’s progress required ‘taking up the attack on nature, thus forcing it to obey human will, under the guidance of science.’
Humans have remained in the suspended phase of evolution since the 1950s after the government created the Manhattan Project which was in charge of designing nuclear warfare that could destroy humanity.
The creation of the atomic bomb signified ‘humanity’s complete domination over nature and signified the end of the First Human Evolution,’ a press release said.
The aftereffects of the atomic bomb, which killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people when it was deployed in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, are still being felt today.
Areas of the US including Missouri and Utah continue to experience cancer-causing radiation poisoning from mines and nuclear waste nearly 80 years after the attack.
The World Nuclear Association reported that ‘the nuclear industry still has no solution to the ‘waste problem.”
Although governments have worked to implement waste prevention and recycling programs, the Stanford University School of Sustainability estimated it would cost at least $300 billion to clean up the residual waste from the Manhattan Project alone.
Jeffrey Charles Hardy (pictured) is a healthcare futurist who says that after millions of years, human evolution has stalled
Hardy warned that humans will continue to be in a suspended state of evolution until we recognize the need to reduce waste created during the first evolution.
‘What I call the suspended human evolution is suspended because we’re flopping around like fish on the deck or we’re in one of those Indiana Jones movies where we’re on one of those bridges that go from one side to the next and there’s a chasm down below, and if we fall we’re going to die,’ Hardy said on the Care More Be Better podcast.
He explained that humans won’t be able to move into the second evolutionary stage until they devise a plan to overcome and eliminate waste and unsustainable growth created in the first evolution.
‘You really have to have to get into this discussion with the rest of the world if we are going to get from the first human evolution which is dead and it’s gone over to a second human evolution which we have not planned yet,’ Hardy said.
‘It’s yet to be determined and is ours to imagine, discuss, plan, design, and implement,’ Hardy said, adding that academics, the government and non-government organizations will need to learn from the past for ‘groundbreaking transformation’ to occur.
‘The first human evolution is over and we have to … learn from our mistakes, learn from the past, learn from our history, learn from each other and start talking and discussing what that second human evolution must be.’