How the Ethos That Led to the First Thanksgiving Should Guide Us in the New Age of Discovery
Four centuries ago, Native American visionary Tisquantum asked the civilizational question: how should we get along and manage the new reality wrought by the Age of Discovery? It’s worth thinking on this day of a similar question of yet vaster scope, one posed by two futurists: How will we actually run and govern a planet transformed?
A review of “Children of a Modest Star — Planetary Thinking for An Age of Crises”, by Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman, Stanford University Press, 2024, 307 pp
So here’s a question to ponder just before you’ve polished off the last slice of pumpkin pie, made peace with the visiting uncle over just-concluded election results, and settled on your picks in today’s NFL lineup:
What might Tisquantum, the indigenous entrepreneur — in the original sense of that word, to undertake or begin something — who founded our Thanksgiving tradition four centuries ago, say on our current moment? What might this early sojourner between continents, cultures, languages, political systems, language, and even technologies advise us on civilizational fusion, artificial intelligence, and the urgent need for a new ethos to organize ourselves?
I realize it’s a quantum leap I’m trying to make from a famous dinner in 1621 — shared between some 50 ravished Pilgrim settlers who’d landed on Cape Cod less than a year before and 100 or so native Wampanoag people — to the future of the planet. But these are quantum times, so please, bear with me. The future of the planet, and the emerging new order of things, are subjects I want to explore more deeply in the coming year, reflecting the ideas of numerous leading thinkers, including the authors of the new book I reference above.
First, though, a quick refresher on Tisquantum, who you probably got to know as “Squanto” in a Thanksgiving lesson when you were in elementary school. He’s not a major figure in American history, but he’s certainly a pivotal one, a think-outside-the-box innovator. A native of the region near where the pilgrims landed, he was captured by an English explorer in 1614 and sold into slavery in Spain. Escaping to England, he learned English, European technology, and eventually returned to his homeland in 1619, only to find his tribe decimated by disease. He aligned with a neighboring tribe, the Wampanoag, and wound up the interpreter, guide, and mediator between Native peoples and the Pilgrims. His knowledge of English and local agricultural practices made him invaluable. Tisqauntum taught the settlers to cultivate corn, fish, and navigate local resources, helping them survive their first harsh winter.
The Pilgrims probably would not have survived if he hadn’t been around. And most famously he conceived and launched the cross-cultural harvest festival Americans will celebrate on Thursday. As someone who thinks a great deal about the scale and scope of innovation, Tisquantum’s are impressive. Because of the ball that he put in play, Americans today will consume 46 million turkeys (except me and other vegetarians), 50 million pumpkin pies, and 80 million pounds of cranberries. Before tomorrow’s Black Friday sales are over, retail sales will have added $9 billion to the nation’s GDP.
A lesson from the first ‘Age of Discovery’ as we enter the second
Sure, a lot of other things, some wonderful and some horrible, have ensued in the centuries since. But in a nutshell, Tisquantum’s moment embodies the positive beginnings of the cultural, technological, and economic exchanges that define globalization today.
In a sense, Tisquantum’s idea was the capstone event to the Age of Discovery that began with Columbus’ crossing of the Atlantic in 1492. It was really the first solid declaration of, “Hey, we can make this new reality work if we just figure a few things out.” That what came next in terms of slavery, colonialism, world wars, atomic bombs, and more is certainly the challenge to his optimism. But let’s not discount Tisquantum’s intentionality as we find ourselves in an even more dramatic Age of Discovery in 2024, with unimaginable technologies unfolding before our eyes that will change and alter everything we know and do.
Leaping from the Pilgrims to today, just as the explorers revealed and created a new reality, in just the past century brilliant scientists, scholars, and explorers have revealed much about the thin film of life within which we live. Columbus and his colleagues popularly revealed that the world was round. Today, we passengers on our own small ship in the cosmic ocean are learning just what it means to tag along behind the forces of the cosmos. We are sandwiched within this thin crust of vitality, this unique biogeological synthesis of carbon, oxygen, and other elements that wrap around our orbiting rock.
Together, we journey further atop our modest planet as it hurdles us at 67,000 miles per hour along our orbit, while our solar system moves us simultaneously at a half-million mph through the Milky Way. It’s a fast trip onward as we rush through what is, as far as we know, a lifeless universe.
I marvel at the wondrous ways that the universe makes much on our speck of a planet seem inconsequential by comparison — from the literal “seas of diamonds” that may exist on Uranus and Neptune to the Moon’s abundant rare earth minerals needed to metamorphose our reality with the data-driven explosion of new technology led by artificial intelligence, or AI. And perhaps there is some form of “life” out there still to be discovered. Scientists have just recently found evidence of water fixed deep within Mars that, conceivably, could support microbial organisms.
Yet the more we know about the cosmos and beyond, the more vivid is the uniqueness of our precious, fast-moving patch of biological life. Joining us in this slice of biological existence are about 34,000 species of fish, 11,000 species of birds, 6,400 species of mammals, nearly infinite stores of bacteria across some 40 phyla, and countless other forms of life. But so far as our telescopes and space probes can tell, we are the only known biological life in the universe.
As Canadian astrophysicist Hugh Ross is quoted by Ray Kurzweil in his latest book (I wrote this summary of it), the odds of all the factors coming together to create life on our little patch of biochemistry and geology are akin to “the possibility of a Boeing 747 aircraft being completely assembled as a result of a tornado striking a junkyard”.
Yet here we are. Humanity as a collective Tisquanto and his two new tribes, figuring it out as we go along on our tiny island in the vast sea of the cosmos.
It’s against this frame of the infinite universe and our very finite place in it that Children of a Modest Star poses two broad discussions — one underway and the other urgently needed.
The first exercise is on but well-traveled intellectual terrain: the data-driven technological cocoon that binds us together on this island in ever more dense and layered ways, from the cables under the sea, to the satellites hovering above us, to all manner of digital mesh in between.
The second more novel discussion, however, is as important as it is abstract: How should we organize and run our hyperconnected patch of life-supporting real estate with so many challenges that defy the conventions of the nation-state system we’ve been using for 400 years? It is a profound question as it invites us to think beyond the current and all-too shallow debates we are having about the impact of AI. This is hopefully about to change.
I want to make clear that I’m not a deregulation absolutist and there are helpful elements in President Biden’s executive orders on AI, in Europe’s AI Act, and I hope from what will emerge from the incoming prospect of an “AI czar”. Whatever your views on the shape of things to come, we must face the harsh reality that slow-moving governments simply can’t keep up with the pace of technology, and certainly not with the warp speed pace of AI. (Note that consensus projections for the invention of AGI now range from 2026–2029, with Kurzweil sticking with his “long-pole” prediction of 2029 in his latest book). We are approaching a new age that will require new modes of thinking, particularly from entrepreneurial companies like our own at data.world, which are creating the frontier tools of such great promise.
From ‘homo sapien’ to ‘homo techne’ in the noosphere
As this transformation accelerates, this first, AI-focused discussion is a broad one, creating among other things new language in which many have engaged, including me. This emerging convergence of AI and other digital technologies with our patch of habitable real estate has been described as the “Agora” by my friend and collaborator, the author Byron Reese, whose most recent book is, We Are Agora (we discussed it together on the Austin Next podcast at that link.) For technology sage Kevin Kelly, it’s the Noosphere, a term coined by the Soviet scientist Vladimir Vernadsky in the 1920s. Others who have touched upon this emerging planetary hive of intelligence, and about whose work I’ve written, include technology authors Chris Wiggens and Mathew L. Jones, CEO of Microsoft AI Mustafa Suleyman, and Stanford University computer scientist Dr. Fei-Fei Li. The most prominent explorer of this notion is certainly the futurist and head of Google engineering Kurzweil, whose most recent book that I just mentioned envisions a kind of technological merger of own biology with digital systems.
Another contributor to this body of important thought is LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman who invented the term “homo techne” to replace the familiar “homo sapien”. The phrase reflects his insight that humanity evolves through the tools and technologies we create, a critical concept we must not lose sight of — we are our tools, from the first hatchet created with the “Levallois technique” 300,000 years ago to the latest update of ChatGPT.
By whatever name we give it, I believe the emerging new reality as the biosphere and technosphere become one is leading us on a journey toward abundance. It’s what I have termed Renaissance 2.0 and what our son, Levi, has presciently called The Age of a Billion Dreams. For our part at data.world, we’re helping propel us on this journey with our expansive, decade-old endeavor and suite of products to convert the explosion of data at the heart of this transformation into meaningful, actionable information. Most recently and dramatically, we’ve launched what we’ve dubbed the AI Context Engine(™), a platform that opens up vast stores of data that were previously locked up and unusable by the Large Language Models (LLMs) of AI.
For their part, Blake and Gilman call this the “Sensorium”, the “planetary array of instruments, algorithms, and integrated computer stacks to sense and make the patterns visible…” The result is a “planetary sapience”, they point out, an aggregated fusion of machine and human intelligence enabled by technology. It is what yields our awareness of just how embedded we are within the systems comprising our habitat, a magnification of another relatively new term coined by atmospheric chemist Eugene Stoermer in 2000, the Anthropocene. It’s an unofficial name for our era when human activity is fundamentally affecting and changing the planet.
I’ll get to a summary of the fascinating vision Blake and Gilman hold for how we must ultimately preserve our fragile habitat, organize life within it, and ultimately govern ourselves in innovative new ways. But bear with me for a brief explanation of how they see the broad scope of change in historical context.
As Children of a Modest Star vividly explores, the essential transformation described in so many various ways adds up to a “de-centering” of our self-perceptions of our role on the planet. We are quickly realizing that we are not outside the flows of life, but intimately part of them, even as we change the very nature of those flows. Historically, they call this collective realization the “third de-centering.”
To back up, the first de-centering was in 1543, that shuffling of paradigms wrought by Nicolaus Copernicus, whom you’ll recall moved our understanding out of the center of the “solar system” to be replaced by the Sun within his “heliocentric theory”. Copernicus taught us that Earth is not the ringmaster after all, but a sideshow to the central actor, the Sun.
Galileo, born in 1564, came along behind Copernicus to refine science with a then-new innovation, the telescope. In 1610, he published the confirmation of it all, with the treatise that in 1633 got him busted for heresy by the Vatican’s Inquisition and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. The Vatican did finally apologize and rescind the verdict. Just 359 years later.
The second de-centering is Charles Darwin’s still-controversial insights that challenged the prevailing beliefs of the major religions about the origin of life. His theory of evolution remains the foundation of modern biology and genetics, yet is still denied by some 160 years after he published On the Origin of Species.
The “third de-centering” is thus the metaphor this book uses to describe what lies ahead as we come to terms with our occupation and rule of the planetary life zone. In their account, this third de-centering began in a popular way in 1968 when Stewart Brand, the polymath and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, badgered NASA in 1968 to release “Earthrise”, the famous photograph taken by the Apollo 8 crew that allowed us to look back on ourselves for the first time.
From the global to the “planetary”
This third de-centering, the authors argue, is certainly revolutionizing our understanding of the systems of life and geology as they combine into one, and as we humans figure out just how we adapt and adopt. Now, they continue in the second dimension of this book, our knowledge is compelling us to reexamine just how to run things. In short, they argue, we need a new “planetary OS” (my term not theirs.)
For starters, the governance model they advocate demands a shift in our perspective from global issues, still largely seen through the lens of national interests, to truly “planetary” issues that require a holistic approach. This includes redefining political representation to include non-human entities and systems, reflecting a deeper understanding of humanity’s embeddedness within the Earth’s systems.
Our system of nation states and national sovereignty is ultimately unworkable in a time of climate change, zoonotic disease, the greatest flows of migrants and refugees in history, the melting of the ice caps and glaciers, disappearing water aquifers, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and so many other challenges that simply ignore national borders and sentiments.
A thought-provoking example they cite is the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), founded in 1996 by Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru to manage the precarious Amazon rainforest so critical to planetary stability. If any region should be managed as a single unit, this would certainly be it. But the initiative is a failure.
“…its efforts at protecting the region’s ecology have rarely succeeded for the same reason multinational institutions rarely succeed: national resistance to delegating authority and resources, and claims to absolute sovereignty preventing integrated governance,” they write.
The moment when everything will be quantified
As I got to this part of the book, my mind started to wander back to Alaska, where Debra and I visited for the first time on vacation three years ago. As I took this photo on the beautiful Alaska Railroad, in awe of the postcard-perfect landscape in front of us, I started to think about how everything would soon be quantified and then what would be possible to know and act on in that type of world. Here we were as remote as we could be and yet everything would be known soon. And I knew data.world would play a role to that end as well. It was a beautiful realization in a spiritual moment.
The authors focus much of the book on the concept of “subsidiarity”, in their vision a hierarchy of governance organized on three scales: planetary, national, and local.
The principle of subsidiarity would guide which level of governance handles specific issues, ensuring that decisions are made at the most effective level — sometimes local, sometimes planetary. This approach contrasts with the current system tracing to the Treaty of Westphalia four centuries ago that prioritizes national sovereignty.
Instead of the current UN-centered system dominated by nation-states, this new governance structure would place experts in relevant fields at the center of decision-making processes. These experts would be accountable to newly envisioned democratic publics, ensuring that governance is informed by the best available knowledge and is responsive to the needs of all species, not just humans.
New institutions would be created to govern at the planetary level, such as a “Planetary Atmospheric Steward” to manage climate issues and a “Planetary Pandemic Agency” to handle global health crises. These institutions would set broad directions, while national and local governments would handle the specifics of implementation.
Pie in the sky? Certainly it seems that way today. And the authors readily concede they have no easy road map or blueprint to get to their envisioned model of worldwide governance, the “planetary OS” in my phrase.
But it is an admirable attempt to put a new intellectual ball into play, to spur our thinking in urgently needed new directions. I’ve got a hunch that Tisquantum encountered more than a few skeptics with ideas on organization and collaboration in a changed world and reality.
“The vision we put forth will no doubt be dismissed by some as madly ambitious, if not unhinged and perilous — thoughts we have at times shared,” Blake and Gilman write. But visions always begin with unique insights, whether they be those of Tisquantum or the entrepreneurs remaking the planet and improving life today — by those who break patterns of old ways of thinking and behaving, as my friend Mike Maples Jr. so effectively argued in his recent new book, Pattern Breakers, which I summarized at that link. Or as Steven Pinker has argued in another game-changing book, Enlightenment Now, innovation, driven by human ingenuity and rationality, has historically improved lives and will continue to do so. I share Pinker’s optimism about the future, and Blake and Gilman’s vision of what it might look like. It’s up to us to create it.
This book is not a blueprint. It’s not a roadmap. But it is a first rough draft of ideas and concepts we should all be pondering. This is hardly the end of this planetary discussion. But it is a modest beginning. We need to stretch our imaginations and Children of a Modest Star certainly does that.
That’s exactly what happened on that day in 1621 that we all emulate today. So let us summon our inner Tisquantum as we journey forward in a way not all that dissimilar to the journey of brave Pilgrims, resilient and welcoming Wampanoags (whose language is today being revived in an innovative project begun at MIT), and that thoughtful visionary four centuries ago.
Happy Thanksgiving to you, your family, and your friends!
