While I was in Australia, I went to see a preview book launch by Barry Jones, one-time Science Minister and polymath politician, for his autobiography. He mentioned that some historians see the world as changing in 200-, 400-, 500-, and 2000-year cycles. The mathematical view of these cycles would be fun, but beside the point. History is story-telling, and what these cycles do is help us see where we are now: at the end of the modern era, the late modern era, and what theologians dubbed the Age of Pisces. In other words, we are in a time of deep confusion in preparation for emergence on a far shore that we do not know. There, if we finally choose life, we can find our place in evolution, recover lost abilities, and learn to cooperate with evolution and. In time, to enhance the earth that produced us.
This means that it is time for us to take stock, prepare to emerge into a new worldview, and to continue to adapt and evolve with the body of life that gives us life on our unstable planet in the mysterious astro-geomagnetic context that periodically throws us curveballs which can push the evolutionary reset button (because we don’t matter in the scheme of the universe). It is up to us to look out for ourselves—or to choose destruction and devolution.
The gifts of the trees of knowledge and life are not to be received without both freedom and the responsibility of acting wisely. We have a little experience with this, but our best has not been good enough; rather, it has become a menace to a living future and all other gifts we take for granted.
Schematic of the DART mission shows the impact on the moonlet of asteroid (65803) Didymos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Test#/media/File:Dart-poster3.jpg
The task ahead is to take stock of who, what, when, where and why Homo sapiens doctors exist; to harvest past wisdom; to retire habits that no longer serve; and to begin to become, one day at a time, more than we have been before—and also no less. All of this rests on relating to time in a new way, centered on biological time, until we have recovered with the body of life. Biological time, like life on earth, is nested: evolutionary time, the times of the origins and endings of species, each individual lifespan, and—least important of all during recovery—clock time.