The 1973 television series, The Ascent of Man, by the British mathematician and science historian, Jacob Bronowski, is approaching its 50th anniversary. Its intelligent commentary on the evolution of science in human civilization is still relevant today. However, events in the last few years have imbued Bronowski’s erudite praise of our scientific accomplishments with an unsettling irony.
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The Quadra Project: The Club of Rome
This year, 2022, marks the 50th anniversary of The Club of Rome’s 1972 publication of The Limits of Growth, a book that attempted to warn humanity about the consequences of excessive use of the world’s resources. The genesis of the idea came two years earlier from an Italian industrialist, Aurelio Peccei, who invited to Rome a group of scientists, businessmen, academics and diplomats to explore how they might address his concerns.
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The Quadra Project: A poem for our time
The long narrative poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was published in 1798 during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Even by this time, however, the devastating consequence of burning coal to fuel the proliferation of factories was evident. Once pristine valleys were transformed into darkened wastelands of smoke and soot, bucolic streams and rivers were turned toxic black, quaint villages were converted to slums of indentured labourers, and the maw of multiple machines was making people into consumable and disposable objects. The artistic reaction to this perceived travesty was Romanticism, an effort to save humanity and nature from a revolution that was perceived to be destroying both.
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The Quadra Project: Taking our temperature
In February 2022, our planet was 1.19°C warmer than the pre-industrial temperature of 13.7°C calculated from the collected global records in the 1880s. The Industrial Revolution technically began about 100 years earlier, but no extensive measurements exist to verify the combined surface temperature of both land and water during those years. Between 1920 and 1940, the global temperature rose 0.1°C per decade, 0.2°C during the 1980s, and 0.61°C per decade since 2000. This ascending trajectory corresponds to a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from about 280 parts per million to about 420 ppm, and ends the 10,000 years of relative climate stability that has allowed human civilization to flourish.
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The Quadra Project: the Social Game
In the 300,000 years that Homo sapiens has existed as a distinctive species, we have done very well. During this time we have outlived at least five other hominids, including Homo neanderthalensis, which became extinct a mere 40,000 years ago—depending on ancestry, we actually carry traces of Neanderthal genes as a result of interbreeding. We have also managed to populate the entire planet, an accomplishment that has puzzled those who have tried to explain our unprecedented success. Luck was obviously a factor. But an another is now emerging from the genomic analysis of a rare disorder known as Williams Syndrome. (see “The Last Human” by Kate Ravilious, NewScientist, 29 Nov. 2021.)
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