A futurist claims that there are three stages to human evolution, and that our species is currently in the second stage.
Jeffrey Charles Hardy, founder of the non-profit organization Care for Peace, developed a global perspective on the “human timeline” and placed us in the “suspended” state.
In the first phase, which lasted about 2.5 million years, humans conquered nature. But Hardy now believes we have moved to “a sustainable coexistence of the planet and its inhabitants.”
In the suspended state, humans will have to “reassess and abandon the unsustainable practices of unlimited growth and waste that we have inherited from early human evolution,” Hardy said.
He went on to explain that since the atomic bomb in 1945, we have done nothing, which has given us ever greater power over nature. However, the only way to the ‘Second Phase’ is to undo the damage that has been done.
Humans are in a state of ‘suspended evolution’ after spending over two million years in the first phase while conquering nature. There are three phases of evolution: the first which lasted 2.5 million years, the suspended – where humans are currently – and the second evolution
The stage of human evolution we are now in is on hold because we have no plan for the Second Human Evolution.
“That is yet to be determined and it is up to us to conceive, discuss, plan, design and implement it,” Hardy said.
The visionary emphasizes that society must learn from the past and use insights from academics, media, governments and non-governmental organizations to make this groundbreaking transformation possible. ‘The process is the solution.’
Hardy said his evolutionary human timeline was inspired by his experience as an international health care planner in the 1970s.
He realized that peace could be sustained through the compassionate actions of people. This led him to launch a global mission to create a timeline to address humanity’s greatest problems, such as climate change and environmental degradation.
Hardy then created four templates.
They included the personal primary guideline, which focused on individual values and responsibilities, and the relational primary guideline, which explained the importance of harmonious relationships.
The second two templates include the culture that balances the holistic well-being of an individual and an organization that aligns with broader peace and sustainability goals.
“When I worked as a hospital aide, I remember caring for young, sick or wounded sailors returning from the Vietnam War,” Hardy recalls.
“In those moments when I was giving injections, changing gauze and just being there for others, I realized there is an intrinsic relationship between caring for others and a sense of peace.”
For millions of years, man has tried to conquer nature, most recently through industrialization. He believed that the world was ours and that we could hold sway over it.
Humans conquered nature by trying to control everything around them through urbanization of cities and infrastructure.
This allowed the world population to grow, introduced mining and fossil fuels for energy, and increased food production through irrigation, crop rotation and selective breeding.
Hardy argued that this way of thinking had put man in suspended evolution since the 1950s, after he had designed a nuclear war that could destroy humanity. The aftermath of the atomic bomb that killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people when it was used in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 is still being felt today.
In 1949, the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud argued that the progress of civilization requires “assaulting nature and forcing it to obey the human will under the guidance of science.”
Human evolution has been on hold since the 1950s after the government set up the Manhattan Project, which was responsible for designing a nuclear war that could destroy humanity.
The creation of the atomic bomb meant ‘the complete domination of mankind over nature and marked the end of the First Human Evolution’, a press release said.
The aftermath of the atomic bomb, which killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, is still being felt today.
Areas of the US, including Missouri and Utah, still struggle with 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’.’
While governments have worked to implement waste prevention and recycling programs, Stanford University School of Sustainability estimated Cleaning up the Manhattan Project’s residual waste alone would cost at least $300 billion.
Jeffrey Charles Hardy (pictured) is a healthcare futurist who says human evolution has stalled after millions of years
Hardy warned that man will be in a state of suspended evolution until we recognize the need to reduce the waste created during early evolution.
“What I call suspended human evolution is suspended because we’re bobbing around like fish on a deck or we’re in one of those Indiana Jones movies where we’re standing on one of those bridges that goes from one side to the other and there’s a chasm below, and if we fall, we die,” Hardy said on the Care More Be Better program. podcast.
He explained that humans cannot reach the second stage of evolution until they devise a plan to overcome and eliminate the waste and unsustainable growth that arose in the first evolution.
“You really have to have a discussion with the rest of the world if we want to go from the first human evolution, which is dead, to a second human evolution that we haven’t planned for yet,” Hardy said.
“That is yet to be determined and it is up to us to conceive, discuss, plan, design and implement,” Hardy said, adding that academics, government and non-governmental organisations must learn from the past to ensure a “game-changing transformation” can take place.
‘The first human evolution is over 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 that second human evolution should be.’