One way to look at the history of human civilization is that it has been a 200,000-year-long process of just trying to reduce the number of things that could kill us.
Until fairly recently, for example, there were large saber-toothed cats, the size of lions or bigger, living on most of the world鈥檚 continents. They died out as humans were becoming more numerous, and were colonizing many of the places where the cats once ruled.
Why? Was it the changing climate as the last great ice age ended that drove the cats to extinction?
Or was it the fact that humans armed with flint-tipped spears were determined to get rid of at least one thing that scared the heck out of them?
Living here in the early 21st century, we don鈥檛 really appreciate just how many ways there were to die suddenly until just recently. The number of animals that could just show up and kill you, for example. That included not just wolves and bears and tigers, but snakes, scorpions, venomous jellyfish, angry moose, your own livestock if they got spooked by something, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and infection from getting stabbed by porcupine quills.
That doesn鈥檛 even count diseases.
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The invention of agriculture itself was a giant thumbs down to the idea of mortality. The whole idea of growing grains is you store a whole bunch up, and then everyone in the village gets to eat, every single day of the year.
The great death-reduction game ramped up in earnest in the early 20th century as medicine became professionalized, we created strict standards for clean water and uncontaminated food, and developed a host of new vaccines and antibiotics. The number of things that could no longer casually kill us was dramatically reduced! How many people do you know who have died of scurvy, for example?
Yet our brains are the same all-too-human thinking machines we鈥檝e been lugging around since giant 20-foot-long monitor lizards roamed the earth (look it up, they鈥檙e horrifying). Our culture, our mental software, has changed, but our hardware is still set to watch out for those darned saber-toothed cats.
We鈥檝e defeated so many causes of sudden and imminent death that we could all live to a great age by sitting quietly indoors on soft furniture, taking our vitamins, brushing and flossing twice a day, getting light exercise and eating our recommended intake of dietary fibre.
But boy, we鈥檇 get bored fast! And part of us is still wired to think that life is short, so why not drink a six pack with your friends and then race around the gravel pit on ATVs while shooting at each other with Roman candles? (This is not a suggestion.)
The biggest threat to our own lifespans is now ourselves. The last century or so is the first time since we came down from the trees that this has ever been true. I can鈥檛 help but wonder if we鈥檒l ever get over it.
