Jeffrey Charles Hardy, founder of the nonprofit organization Care for Peace, has stated that humanity is currently experiencing three phases of evolution. According to him, we are on the brink of the second stage, caught in a state of limbo. Hardy, a futurist, has developed a global perspective known as the “human timeline” and claims that human evolution has come to a standstill. During the first stage, which lasted about 2.5 million years, humans relentlessly sought to conquer nature. However, he argues that it is now time for “sustainable coexistence between the planet and its inhabitants.” Hardy clarified that evolution has stalled since the creation of the atomic bomb in 1945. That event solidified our dominance over nature, but the only way to progress into the second stage is to reverse the damage done. In our current suspended state, we must reevaluate our past and “move away from the unsustainable practices of unchecked growth and wastefulness that we inherited from the first phase of human evolution.” In other words, to move forward, society must learn from its past, as reported by the Daily Mail.
What else should we consider, according to Hardy? For millions of years, humans have tried to dominate nature, especially in recent times through industrialization, believing that the world belongs to them and that they can control it. Ultimately, people have subdued nature in their quest for control, building cities and developing infrastructure. They have increased the population, begun extracting natural resources, and utilized fossil fuels, while also implementing irrigation, crop rotation, and selective breeding to boost food production.
In 1949, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud argued that for the progress of civilization, it was necessary to “launch an offensive against nature, forcing it to submit to human will under the guidance of science.” Humanity has been in a suspended phase of evolution since the creation of nuclear weapons capable of destroying the world. The development of the atomic bomb marked the complete domination of humanity over nature and the end of the first stage of human evolution. Meanwhile, the World Nuclear Association has reported that “the nuclear industry has yet to solve the waste problem.” Hardy warned that humanity will remain in this suspended state until we recognize the need to reduce the waste generated during the first stage of evolution.
“What I call the suspended phase of human evolution is akin to floundering like fish on a deck, or like in that Indiana Jones movie, being on a bridge over an abyss—if we fall, we die,” Hardy said. He explained that people will not be able to transition to the second evolutionary stage unless they develop a plan to overcome and eliminate the waste and unsustainable growth that arose during the first stage. “We will need to engage in discussions about this with the rest of the world if we are to move from the first phase of human evolution to the second,” the futurist noted. “The first human evolution has ended, and we need to learn from our mistakes, learn from the past, learn from our history, learn from each other, and start talking and discussing what this second stage of humanity should look like,” he added.