The PHI Era and The Devolution

How will people regard our era two centuries from now?

The Renanzonce: 23rd Century Revival series will soon be in print. Here’s the basis of the storylines.

The Peak Human Intellect Era (1940 - 2040)

The Peak Human Intellect Era was from 1940 to 2040. It is commonly called the PHI Era or the PHIE (pronounced fie).

1940-1945: World War 2 and The Atomic Age

While many of those advances were borne of war, they were unprecedented and astounding. Atomic energy. Communications. Electronics. Jets. Rockets. Computers. 

1945-1962: A Car in Every Driveway

The USA put its wartime factories to work making home appliances, cars, and bigger and faster airplanes. But those advances took an unseen deadly toll on the Earth and humanity. 

1962-1969: Fly Me To The Moon

President John Kennedy, promised America would put a man on the moon by the end of this decade. His assassination in 1963 drove America’s singular focus on making that dream come true. The country’s myopic technology race also brought the environment-busting creations of the Boeing 747 and the Concorde Supersonic Transport. 

1969-2007: The Information Age

Engineers created the Internet in 1969 to link the world’s computers. By 2007, the smartphone was readily available. While its creation seemed brilliant, no one foresaw its role in reducing the average human intellect. 

2007-2017: Smartphones & Tablets 

Intellect was no longer essential to human survival as tiny, portable screens sucked human intelligence into a mindless pit of dependency while spewing out powerful and coercive messages to buy everything the mega-rich wanted to sell and believe everything the politicians wanted you to fear.

2017-2032: Disinformation - Humanity’s Iceberg

Humanity struck the proverbial Titanic iceberg in 2017 as hatred became a desired trait for a vast bloc of the USA’s population. The most intellectual Americans nearly stopped reproducing because they didn’t want to bring children into a world with so little hope for an intelligent future. 

2032-2040: Going Under

Darwinism is the “science of natural selection,” which moves in the direction the species is moving. When a species devolves, the natural selection of Darwinism ensures that it continues downward. 

Evolution or Devolution: Darwinism is agnostic.

The Devolution

While Darwinism eroded future intelligence, the world still had an aging generation that had lived, worked, and invented during the latter decades of the PHI Era and saw the spiraling trend. They had the scientific means, so they tried to reverse the trend with genetic engineering to ensure the next generation would produce the most intelligent humans ever. 

Disaster Struck

But the opposite happened: Their genetic engineering backfired and made those with the greatest intellect sterile. The more intelligent they were, the less likely they could reproduce. 

Of all the 21st Century predictions about the future—flying cars, manipulating the weather, exploring other solar systems, even dystopian futures with cyborgs killing humans—nobody expected the future would lack civilization’s most vital ingredient: intelligent people. 

Most people misunderstand Darwinism as “the theory of evolution,” which sounds as though a species will continually evolve and improve generation after generation. 

But no. Darwinism is the “science of natural selection,” which moves in the direction the species is moving. When a species devolves, the natural selection of Darwinism ensures that it continues downward. 

Evolution or devolution, Darwinism is agnostic. 

After 2040, intelligence flowed out of humanity like a raging torrent. And then, the first generations of the post-PHI Era began to out-reproduce the intellectuals, and Darwinism set the course of The Great Devolution. But there is nothing “great” about a species spiraling toward oblivion, and it became known simply as The Devolution. 

Hope For Humanity

While the downward spiral of The Devolution tightened and spun faster and steeper, near the end of the PHI Era, in 2038, scientists designed and began building one last massive and brilliant project: The Shenandoah Hadron Collider (the SHC).

In the greatest scientific accident since the discovery of penicillin, the few remaining scientists running the SHC accidentally discovered time travel that allows them to extract people from the past.

They turn to the PHI Era, bringing history’s greatest intellectuals into a world that has solved its social ills.

The Cevolution

Humanity finally matures enough to “cooperate to graduate,” using our diversity to advance humanity instead of fighting over our diversity. 

While a positive psychometry permeates 23rd-Century life, humans will never be perfect and utopia is only fiction, but we’ve entered the Cevolution (the Consciousness Evolution) in which humanity collectively moves into The Noösphere.

While this stage of evolutionary development is dominated by consciousness, the mind, and interpersonal relationships, there will always be bad actors who need another lifetime or two to fully evolve.

Social Media Driven

Are you ready for the future?

Renazonce is a social-media-driven story series in which readers can nominate themselves to be extracted into the 23rd Century to help with the Cevolution. 

Send your bio to the author and explain how you would contribute to The Cevolution. If selected, you’ll be the feature extractee in a future episode.