"The Most Important Century"
My insomnia-induced trippy thinking about exciting future and extraordinary historic events.
Housekeeping
We’re moving this email list from Drip over to Substack, so from now on you’ll receive our biweekly Double emails in this Substack wrapper.
Why? Because Substack makes it easy to publish all emails we write also automatically as blog entries (so that there is a public archive of everything we write), and because we love Substack as a platform with great writing. Enjoy!
If you read this in Gmail, then please drag this email over to your ‘primary’ tab or star it. Let’s make sure the emails from our new email address will land in your mailbox properly.
I flew from Bali to San Francisco last weekend.
I’ll tell you this: the 11-hour time difference messes you up.
So I had a lot of “ceiling time”, where I just couldn’t sleep at all.
So what did I think about?
I thought about how it’s a pretty dope time to be alive!
Specifically, I’ve been thinking about a rather trippy concept this weekend.
Here’s the thing — it seems likely to me that…
In our lifetime, we will witness no less than THREE extraordinary historic events, that will still be talked about in every middle-school history book in thousands of years from now.
It might just be that we’re born in a pretty incredible time.
Some people call it The Most Important Century (and wrote about it).
It’s a crazy idea.
But let me walk you through them:
1.) AGI
It seems pretty likely that we’ll get Artificial General Intelligence or AGI.
A complete game-changer for humanity.
For the first time, we’ll no longer be the apex predator on the planet anymore.
Depending on your outlook on how this will all specifically go down, that’s either incredibly exciting or extremely concerning.
But in either way, it’s a pretty big deal. Definitely an event, that will be mentioned in history books in thousands of years from now. More comparable in scale and impact to “the beginning of agriculture” than say Napoleon or the invention of the internet.
2.) Going multi-planetary
It seems pretty likely that we’ll make our way to Mars.
We’ll no longer be constrained to just this one planet where all of human history till now has taken place, and we’ll start being an interplanetary species.
If you consider that Columbus is still going strong 500 years later, imagine how much bigger and cosmically consequential going interplanetary would be.
Definitely will get mentioned in history books in 5,000 years from now!
–––
And you thought that’s pretty cool?
That you most likely get to experience not one but TWO of the absolutely most stunning and era-defining events of human history in the long arch of time?
Think again.
There’s a third thing…
3.) Don’t Die
I think there’s a pretty reasonable chance that in the next decades we’ll be able to figure out how to make people live till say 130 years old. If we do that, then that would buy someone like me basically another century of scientific progress to fully cure aging and avoid death.
(A hundred years is a long time to make progress. 100 years ago we had just discovered antibiotics, but doctors didn’t really wash there hands yet before doing surgery…)
I think there’s a decidedly non-zero chance that both you and me, dear reader, will live past say 250 or 500 years of age, if we so choose.
For sure in a thousand years from now the sheer idea that people would all die after a mere 80 years will sound absolutely horrifying and barbarian and brutish.
So curing death will certainly get mentioned in those thousand-year-hence history books, too!
.
.
Isn’t it an incredible time to be alive?
What are the odds that—of all the people that have ever lived and will ever live—that you and I just happen to be born part of what will conceivably be seen as humanities greatest generation?
It’s incredible.
What do you think?
Exciting future, or insomnia-induced hallucinations?
How many of these 3 things do you think you will live to witness?
Cheers,
—Pieter
P.S. What has all this got to do with growth marketing?
In my mind, we need much more innovation. We need new ideas and new knowledge to hit all of the above three milestones. And to do that, we need wild ideas to succeed dramatically. We need startup ideas to become big and impactful.
We need optimism.
We need growth.
For someone like me who sees death as disease to be cured, loved the last point! :)