You know from science the story of the Great Acceleration.

The Earth, now some 4.5 billion years old, was relatively young when life first showed up. Rounding heavily, Earth’s first hundred million years brought water, and its next couple hundred million brought life. But until Earth was nearly 3 billion years old, life meant single cells.

Those cells made the most of the single life; they learned to capture energy from the sun, pumped the atmosphere full of oxygen, and had loads of sex. But it was tawdry stuff, and they didn’t really figure out how to bond until a billion and a half years ago, when multi-cellular organisms began to flourish.

Then, a mere half billion years ago, in the final third of the multi-cellular age, itself the final third of Earth’s story so far, biology had its big bang: the Cambrian Explosion. A billowing diversity of animals and later plants (yes, later plants) sprang and sprouted forth. Some 225 million years ago dinosaurs and mammals began to blossom, long before the first flowers did. Change kept speeding up.

To trace our own line, the final third of the age of mammals brought primates. The final quarter of the age of primates brought apes. Then great apes, then hominins, then australopithecines, then humans, then a few hundred thousand years ago – in the final ten-thousandth of Earth's story to date – anatomically modern ones.

100 thousand years ago, people had thoroughly peopled Africa. 50 thousand years ago they were peopling Eurasia, then some 20 thousand years ago the Americas. Five thousand years ago we started writing our story down. 600 years ago we began printing it. Sixty years ago we started digitizing it. And in the last few years, we’ve created thingamajiggers that digest damned near everything we’ve ever written and tell the whole story back.

You can quibble with the details. You can jump to debunk the common misconception of steadiness; evolution is a story not just of the fittest but also of fits and starts. Short periods of rapid change punctuated long periods of equilibrium. But the core narrative of acceleration holds true. Complexity begat complexity. Punctuations between equilibria got ever closer. Change kept speeding up. That is the Great Acceleration.

You know another story, the Story of Progress.

This narrative sometimes borrows from science, but at its core, it is not scientific. It is not scientific, because progress implies directionality towards something better, and science cheerfully acknowledges that concepts like “bad,” “good,” and “better” are outside of its purview. The scientific telling of evolution, for example, does not involve species getting better, per se, only more fit. (Despite its vernacular connotations, the scientific meaning of evolve is to change, not necessarily to improve.)

So science does not tell the Story of Progress, but our culture sure does. The story has no one source, no lead author, and no seminal text, but it is inescapable. Life for us humans has steadily gotten better, the story goes. We have better houses with running water and temperature control and safe beds. We have abundant food and clean water. We have miraculous medicine and efficient transportation and global communication. We have art, music, literature… The arc of history is long, but it bends towards good shit.

There are counter narratives. Some ask how well we’ve distributed the benefits amongst ourselves. Others point to losses of biodiversity or ecosystem health. And many question whether in focusing our efforts on material gains we have suffered spiritual losses, arguing that today we are lonelier and narrower and shallower and more vulnerable to volatility. Are we really growing ever more fulfilled, more loving, more replete with healthy consciousness, more whole?

This essay will be full-throated neither in endorsing nor rebutting the Story of Progress. It will focus on a simpler point: the Great Acceleration and the Story of Progress are getting harder to reconcile.

The two stories may seem like one, a story of the Acceleration of Progress. They are not.

First off, the Story of Progress centers on humanity; things are getting better for people. The Great Acceleration does not; it predates us by billions of years. And if it is to continue its exponential path, it must soon leave the pace of human cognition behind. The Great Acceleration could very well proceed without us; whereas, without us, the Story of Progress, at least as we have told it, must end.

In fact, the Story of Progress tends to pay surprisingly little attention to acceleration. Our science fiction mostly tells stories of future centuries where, yes, things change, but the rate of change is not especially noteworthy. The basic mechanics of life are the same at a future tale’s beginning as at its end. In reality, if the Great Acceleration continues, an overwhelming, noticeably increasing pace of change itself will become an undeniable, central theme of life.

To continue our acceleration apace would mean ever more frequent punctuations of upheaval with ever shorter periods of equilibrium. We have no place in the Story of Progress for change so rapid that no ground seems solid enough for mooring. We can't make that future sound positive enough to call it "progress". To the extent we tell this accelerant story at all, we tell it through the Singularity, a point beyond which we can see nothing. The Singularity is thus, in a sense, the end of the Story of Progress and indeed of all stories. We have no idea what comes after it. It is a narrative black hole. (And, they tell us, it is not far off.)

So storytellers often conveniently avoid the Singularity and tell the Story of Progress with only a light touch of acceleration. For example, we like plotlines where we continue our human-paced lives beyond the confines of the Earth with the help of accelerated technical prowess. We get to imagine that we keep peopling; soon we will people the planets. Later we might just people the galaxy. We tell stories of a future where spaceships travel faster than the speed of light but decision-making somehow still proceeds at the speed of human thought. The former may be implausible, but within the Great Acceleration, the latter is unthinkable.

The world’s decision-making would simply be too fast for us. Today humans drive the acceleration, but if the acceleration is to continue, we’ll have to cede the wheel.

When we try to zoom out and forecast the trajectory of the Great Acceleration, we usually end up in a paradox. The Fermi Paradox, specifically. If earth-like planets drive inexorably towards life, life towards intelligence, intelligence towards super-intelligence, and super-intelligence outward across the universe, Fermi asked, then why don’t we see evidence of life expanding all over the galaxy? Or, more concisely, where is everybody?

Not that the paradox has no answers; there are many. Perhaps life is not so inevitable. Or intelligence or super-intelligence isn’t. Or we’re just too dumb to contemplate this question or we’re listening wrong or the galaxy is too big or its other intelligent beings are hiding or they’re among us already…

Or, perhaps we see nobody out there, because our galaxymates have already followed the most obvious progression of the Great Acceleration: they sped themselves to extinction.

Human extinction lands as all too plausible. The list of most feared causes – once topped by nuclear war and climate change and other human-driven sources of ecosystem collapse – is now dominated by Artificial Intelligence p(doom) scenarios, from AI-generated viruses to robot uprisings to the almost-charming idea of silicon-based agents obsessed with making ever more paper clips and willing to crush anything that might slow them down.

You don’t have to latch onto any single scenario to buy into the notion that the Great Acceleration might kill us all. You just have to believe that going faster and faster and faster ad infinitum adds dangerous volatility likely to end in a catastrophic crash.

Let me be so emotional and unscientific as to say that human extinction is not good. I don’t want it. I don’t think we want it. We want to thrive, not just go faster.

The outcome we want is the longshot underdog triumph of the Story of Progress over the Great Acceleration.

That’s a tall order. The Great Acceleration is a 4.5-billion-year trend. It is the deep undercurrent of complexity begetting complexity. It's how Earth works. The Story of Progress is just a bedtime story we tell ourselves. It’s a self-perpetuating marketing campaign. It’s the stuff of culture and politics and capitalism and indulgent history-telling, and a great many of us don’t buy this story at all. How can we expect a fairy tale to slay science?

We’ll have to alter both stories.

The seminal flaw of the Story of Progress, and the one we have to change, is its lie of inevitability. Of course the present is better than the past, it says, otherwise we wouldn’t have chosen this route. But we, individually and collectively, make dodgy choices all the time. We fall to seduction, to laziness, to bullying… We avoid, we miscalculate, we rush, we assume… We should not assume, therefore, that we have routinely made wise choices, inevitably leading to progress.

The new Story of Progress that we need to tell instead, is that a better life – for humanity and others – is possible but far from guaranteed. It has become common parlance to ask what the universe is telling us. In truth, it’s all too quiet. The galactic silence tells us disturbingly little about what that path is, except to refute the de facto narrative that we are predestined to spread across the stars. If that's so, where is everybody?

If survival is possible, it must involve a great domestication of the volatile. It must mean our technology yields to our wisdom, not vice versa. It must require greater balance than we’ve ever mustered before, balance of present and future needs, for example, and of change and continuity, of individual and community, of diversity and unity...

And the all-too-obvious conclusion is that our current political arrangement cannot and will not sustain any such undertaking. Who can believe elections, with their wild tantrums, tame volatility? Who can pretend that campaign cycles invite prudent long-term thinking? Who thinks that is wisdom?

I’ll be blunt: if we continue to base our governance on popular elections, I don’t think humanity will survive long. Few tools are so poorly fit to purpose as elections are to yielding wisdom; they have failed egregiously and will continue to. To place our survival of this exponential moment in the hands of politicians is nakedly craven.

Our best shot to survive and thrive is genuine democracy. We need democracy that engages and elevates. We need our collective wisdom in charge. We need an explosion of sortition-based representation and earnest deliberation. We need a democratic big bang.

How exactly would a healthy democracy hack the Great Acceleration? No one of us is wise enough to know. But if ever there was a time to slow down and decide a way forward deliberately, it is now. For the moment, humanity arguably still represents the edge of the acceleration, of complexity begetting new complexity. We can still plausibly choose what to beget and what not to beget. We still have a chance to control our own story.

We’ve been told we have no choice. We have to build super intelligence and fast, or someone else will. Someone with intentions darker than ours. Sure, the Singularity is coming, sure we have no idea what will follow, but we have no choice but to leap into and trust the inevitability of progress.

But progress is not inevitable, and for the moment we do still have choices. Thriving is possible if and only if we act swiftly to solve the problem of how to pace ourselves and steer wisely together.