The 12,025 Calendar is here! Get it now before it sells out. And stay tuned until the end of this video for a sneak peek of this year’s very special edition.
Being a human in the 21st century often feels frustrating. We are clearly at the high point of our species – never have so many of us lived so well, been so healthy and well off. At the same time life is incredibly hard – more than 15 thousand children died yesterday, 700 million people live in extreme poverty, even within rich societies there is loads of unfairness and daily struggle.
We are divided, unable to solve our problems while creating new ones, destroying our world in the process. In many ways the vibe is that we live in dark times. It is so easy to feel disconnected and powerless in the face of problems too big to solve.
And so the state of the world fills many of us with doom, hopelessness and sadness. We feel it too. It is one of the most pervasive stories of our time and there is a lot of truth to it.
But as Terry Pratchett said, we are the storytelling ape, we think in narratives and live in a network of stories that make up our world. So without minimising the darkness, we want to add a story that we find helpful for dealing with the world. This is subjective and not a science video, so you don’t need to buy into it.
Our story begins with the first moment that ever was. 14 billion years ago time and space began from some kind of state of pure energy. From this very first moment the universe grew and evolved.
Things that were one became many. Energy turned into forces and particles, out of chaos emerged the laws of nature. From these ingredients stars arose, gigantic engines, turning simple stuff into complex stuff only to die violently and spread the new complexity around.
Out of this more complex stuff, new stars and more worlds emerged, repeating the cycle until most of the simple stuff was used up and most stars that will ever be born had been born. And then, on one planet, where the conditions were just right, dead particles and molecules combined to make another jump in complexity. Maybe the laws that govern everything were destined to make life happen.
Maybe it was just a cosmic dice throw. But life, now the most complex thing in existence, wasted no time and spread to even the tiniest corners. For billions of years cells held on, fighting against the elements and each other, evolving in the process.
Until one day they came together and made another jump in complexity, to plants, animals and fungi. First in the oceans, then on the land. Earth was now the stage of something grand, a complexity acceleration machine going at full speed.
Millions of new species emerged and vanished. Life was beaten down over and over, but every time it came back stronger. Resettling niches filled with corpses of the ones that came before.
Most of these beings are hidden in time forever, we only know their faint echoes. Until a few million years ago an animal looked at the night sky. It looked at its hands.
It saw its reflection in a puddle. And it realised it existed. That it was alive.
Here and now. You probably had such a moment as a small child, mundane and majestic at the same time. This is where the human story begins, about six million years ago, with the hominins.
Still just another animal among many others. They split into many families and lineages evolving further or disappearing again. But for some reason their evolutionary niche enabled their brains to grow and they learned more about this strange world.
They prayed to the stars, they tamed fire and turned stones into tools. They celebrated and cried together. Life was hard and brutally short but together they endured – probably by telling themselves stories about the world.
For almost 250,000 generations they built a biological foundation. And then, at some point 200,000 years or about 10,000 generations ago they became us. Humanity had arrived.
Our ancestors did not waste any time. Their world was still hard and unforgiving, but out of pure stubbornness they did not accept that. They wanted their lives to be better.
So they made better tools and learned to preserve their knowledge beyond death. Progress started slow. And then suddenly they (or better WE) made the planet our own.
Agriculture and the first villages and temples snowballed into civilization. Kingdoms and empires, technology, writing, astronomy, medicine, philosophy. A hot second later, science, industrialization, the modern world, the information age where we are today.
Earth is truly ours now. We changed it in ways unfathomable a few short generations ago. We turned the land into fields worked by millions of machines, built thousands of gigantic jungles made of sand and metal.
We split the atom and travelled to other worlds. Everything is different today. Except us of course.
We humans have not changed. We were molded by a cold and unforgiving world, where we needed to be hard and brutal to survive. We are all still bound to our nature that made us so successful.
We still tell stories, are hungry for food, greedy for resources, desperate to be accepted by our peers. We are scared by the dangers that lurk in the dark, imagined and real ones. We are still brutal to each other and the animals we hold power over.
We are still territorial and possessive, we fear losing what we have, and we fear change. We downplay the damage we cause and ignore the people in need outside our tribes. Humans are not nice and if we look at our history, how could we expect ourselves to be?
In nature we see great beauty but also endless violence and struggle, devoid of morals or kindness. We are an instinct driven apex predator that survived in an uncaring world, only now we have coal plants, nuclear weapons and social media. This would be hard to handle for any animal, so it makes sense that we continue to follow the impulses so deeply ingrained in us.
But this is only because we have not yet caught up with the mind numbing gift we have been handed. The real tragedy of humanity today is that we are these amazingly powerful beings that have not awoken to their potential. We are trapped in the present and the mindset of a scarce world.
But aside from the physical limits of the universe there is nothing stopping us from creating a literal paradise for ourselves. This seems so daft, but it is true. If we dare to tell ourselves a different story about who we are and who we could be.
Humans throughout history felt like they would witness the apocalypse and this feels especially true today, but you are probably not living in the end times. There is a solid chance that humanity will persist for thousands, maybe millions of years. If this might be the very start of our history, what can we dream of achieving?
Just like our very first ancestors six million years ago, we may be the ancestors of another 250,000 generations of people. But while the hominins found themselves powerless in a world they had to adapt to, our starting conditions could not be more different. It’s like we got handed a save file of a game where others put in millions of hours of work – and where we can decide what game we want to play in the future.
The world is still horrible. And it is also the best world that has ever existed. And we can make it so much better.
An optimistic person living in the year 1924 would not believe the progress we have made in just a century. How much we reduced poverty, how many diseases we cured, how much free time we have, what kind of luxuries are ordinary to us, what technological wonders we take for granted, how few of us die in war, how many live in a democracy. And today we might very well be gearing up for a jump like our ancestors 10,000 years ago, when agriculture changed everything for everybody.
From AI possibly transforming the information age, to biotechnology enabling us to manipulate the language of life itself, to new sustainable ways of harvesting the energy we crave. If we start thinking in decades and centuries, it is perfectly reasonable that we will solve our problems. We can eliminate poverty, maybe all material needs.
Defeat all diseases, maybe even death itself. We have the potential to restore balance to the climate and heal the planet again. We may be able to adapt to the information age and make lasting peace.
None of this is guaranteed and it will be hard and full of failure and setbacks. Some things will get worse before they get better. We will run up against our nature over and over again.
But if we manage to clean up our act we could create a world better than we dare hope for. You get to do that. You get to live in a world that is deeply flawed but also the best it ever was.
And you get the opportunity to make it better. A world with the smallest amount of suffering possible, that fits our nature and inspires us to be the best version of ourselves. It’s time.
Let’s reveal the 12,025 Human Era Calendar. Lets travel back 200,000 years, to humanity’s greatest journey, that took our ancestors from East Africa all across the planet. With nothing on their feet and only primitive tools, they set out to cross valleys, climb snowy mountains and fight fierce predators to find their new home in an alien land.
Join us in 12,025 and discover a new world every month while keeping track of your own adventures. Let this calendar be a celebration of the achievements of these early humans. They managed to survive in harsh climates navigating a world where they are both hunter AND prey.
All while continuously advancing our species and making it possible for you to watch this video right now. Each year we release a new edition of this very special passion project. Because we believe that stories are important and shape who we are as a species.
That’s why we chose a new year zero for our calendar. It represents the beginning of the human era 12,000 years ago. A time when we first started working together on a larger scale, laying the foundation for what it means to be human today.
The calendar also has a special significance for us here at kurzgesagt. We started out as a small studio with a dream to inspire people all around the world. But as we soon found out, creating elaborate videos for free is a really bad business model – and it was not sustainable.
Then, in 2016, everything changed when we created the first Human Era Calendar. It was a huge success and sold out within a few hours. It has kick-started the kurzgesagt shop and the creation of more high-quality science products.
It has also enabled us to grow our team, improve our video quality and research standards, and still release our videos for free for everyone. So get this special ode to humanity and become a part of the kurzgesagt story. Add a poster or a plushie for an even bigger impact.
We’ve also prepared a few amazing deals for you. Thank you so, so much for coming together every year to make all of this possible! See you in 12,025!
