The only scientifically provable difference between humans and other animals is our ability to transmit information across distance and time. That ability is the direct cause of all of our accomplishments, whether architectural, artistic, religious, culinary, technological, literary, or medical.
Consider our ancestral history: 3 million years ago, we learned how to transmit tool-making skills from one generation to the next. 1.5 million years ago we began to teach each other how to control fire. 300,000 years ago we began to communicate in spoken language. 40,000 years ago we began to create cave paintings, sharing information with others, even after death. 10,000 years ago we began to form permanent settlements, sharing information about farming, and sharing and agreeing-upon secular and/or religious rules to help one another discern what is peaceful and helpful, and what is violent or dangerous.
Then, 6,000 years ago, we figured out the written language. That's when things really began to speed up. 5,500 years ago we shared the invention of the wheel. 5,400 years ago we shared how to use levees and canals for irrigation. 5,000 years ago we formed the Silk Road, an extensive interconnected transcontinental network of trade routes, connecting East, South, and Western Asia with the Mediterranean world, as well as North and Northeast Africa and Europe. We learned how to become traders, merchants, pilgrims, missionaries, soldiers, nomads, and urban dwellers; we shared information about calligraphy, fishing, and trapping. Natural disasters occurred, causing ancient cities to be abandoned, trade routes to be lost, literacy to decline - but no force can stop an idea whose time has come.
Every period of more recent immense human growth has also been due to improvements in communication, for example, the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in the mid-1400s led to widespread literacy and the ability to widely agree on the scientific method, which was invented in the early 1600s. Modern knowledge has arrived into the human landscape at a galloping, exponential rate, with each improvement in communication, decreasing the time we have had to wait for each successive improvement to arrive.
The speed at which human beings have become something entirely new and different is astounding. We would seem like God-like alien creatures to anyone alive over 99% of human history. In fact, properly defined, human history should begin with human knowledge, rather than our biological origins. When we talk about our human history, we tend to talk only about our very recent history, relatively speaking. Everything before the spread of information is genuinely animalistic, and therefore uninteresting. We know, at some innate level, that the time before we could share knowledge with one another is not truly a part of our origin story.
In this context, the internet is greatly, greatly underrated, and we have not yet even begun to truly understand how it will shape our future. When "human" is properly defined by our ability to communicate, then on the grand scale of our biological history, not only is the internet brand new, we humans ourselves are brand new. By providing us with near-instant, high quality information even across stupefying distances, the internet magnifies the very thing that makes us human.
Already, our lives are dramatically improved by the immense knowledge at our fingertips. Thanks to the internet, people can easily and cheaply learn how to become a self-taught master chef of international cuisine, read original news sources rather than relying on anyone's interpretation, buy and sell used goods and budding artists' work, learn how to weld, do carpentry, and make knives, and find like minds even if those minds live on the opposite side of the planet.
We have far more information available, and of far better quality, than at any time in human history. All logical, rational evidence therefore points to this single, glowing, beautiful fact: We have only just begun to scratch the surface of the true human potential.
