ü Busy making people healthier and happiest
ü Busy making communities safer and celebrating locally artistic opportunities to share in the diversity of human experiences that an abundant but diverse mother earth links us into
ü Busy exploring an age of trading discovery (back from future of collaboration worlds possible) that is unprecedented.
Around 1500 in Europe all sorts of tipping points opened up “the renaissance of what life could be spent doing”. Primarily these opportunities had 2 kinds of communications multipliers
ü Those related to the opportunity of the printing press to share learning
ü Those related to navigators setting forth from Europe - initially several countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea - and discovering new hemispheres to East and West and South and North.
Peoples connected by the Mediterranean Sea literally saw themselves as @MiddleofEarth. We do wish that every 21st C child could be trusted to be an amateur anthropologist- perhaps their teachers could help them find all the most massive god-believing cultures which either originated from Med Sea countries or interacted around them.
If you were one of those heroic souls of the 1500s who dared leave the certainty of your home shores to lead teams to explore the seven seas with no guarantee of return, you needed a strong belief in something, and trade was most peacefully sustained when all sides saw your spirit as multiplying goodwill
If you sailed out of the Mediterranean sea, you had a choice of 3 directions:
ü North and you would mainly discover the continent of Europe which eg Roman (and then segmented religious) empires had already mapped overground
ü West and you discovered the new world to be named the Americas
ü Perhaps most extraordinary of all : South and then East – initially South took you along the African coast a continent “known” to southern med peoples; but then if you turned east as you reached the Cape of Good Hope, you would discover the largest ocean of all the pacific (about double the discovery size of the atlantic ocean).
In terms of world trade something amazing converged; what was already the world’s greatest trading route- the silk road between west and east was mediated by people assumed you had to trek overland like marco polo did all the way from Italy to Hangzhou in China. NOW (from the 1500s) it became known you could also multiply this world trade by sea.
This might be a time to ask a childishly innocent question- was it natural that China was destined to become the world’s largest and most collaborative nation of peoples. In Marco Polos time around 1250, the answer may have been yes: because China ’s love of staging market spaces was bounded by the most inhabitable coastal areas at the Eastern End of the Eurasian continent – whose land belt to spain at the other end is a staggering one third of the planet’s circumference.
Now as the middle of the second millennium discovered China was the main country for maritime trade with the Eastern hemisphere- although half way along India was pretty big too! And to some extent, both China and India had a different view than celestial gods of the good that kept their peoples together as one place. Confucianism’s Tao is grounded exploring how much good is in your self-determination of how much you can contribute to your country’s people. Hidden in the artistic beauty and intellectual dexterity of the chinese language is another billion people bond.
Please note that both nature’s diversity and peoples cultural diversity are very deep things to explore if you wish to make the most of all sides- which youth of the millennial generation will need to be free to do if sustainability is to unite our human race.
What we do know (and as people who value SME markets have 45 years of research reporting @EntrepreneurialRevolution) is that as the 21st century comes of age those 1500s opportunities to explore are miniscule compared with what has been compounding since world war 2. Every 7 years since 1946, man has been doubling time and money on learning communications technologies of a borderless kind. Multiply that together and we are now spending over 1000 times more on such borderless connectivity of human interactions.
