The basic needs that we share with the majority of the animal world — to survive, to reproduce, and to have social contact is a fairly simple affair. Animals automatically satisfy these needs by exploiting the evolutionary niche for which they are ideally adapted. Birds are born with the wings and features needed for flight, the visual processing necessary to survey terrain to spot prey, the strong talons to secure prey, and a beak to dissect the prey and feed its young. Like birds, simply by virtue of their birth, most mature animals will have all of the attributes necessary to satisfy all of their needs.
Humans are distinctly different. Unable to fly in the air or swim for protracted periods under water, humans are primarily constrained to land. And even on land, compared to our fellow four-legged terrestrials, we are poorly designed for the rapid ambulation essential for hunting or fleeing from danger. Our skin provides us with only minimal thermal protection and offers hardly any resistance against sharp objects and animals threatening to rip through us. We lack any defensive/offensive equipment such as claws and fangs, and our overall natural strength is considerably less than that in other animals whose size is comparable to our own.
Compensating for our lack of evolutionary endowments are our uniquely advanced brains. But our brains alone would not have resulted in us having our distinct evolutionary advantage had we not invented the systems which enable our ideas and strategies to be easily communicated to others. Our human brain is most effective when it functions as a cross-computational device interacting with other humans and technology.
The mechanisms which facilitate our functioning with ever increasing efficiency include art, song, language, writing, mathematics, printing, electronic media, computing, and the internet. Without having developed these essential mechanisms which humans had to provide for themselves, we could never have functioned in any way remotely human.
Developing the tools we need to most effectively share, improve, and combine our ideas is an ongoing process still in an early stage. For humankind to achieve its potential to forgo brutality and become a society where an empowered, joyous, and satisfying life is a universal experience, we will require even further innovation.
In addition to promoting a new more accurate story about ourselves, we will need to develop increasingly effective ways to communicate. Imagine an ultra-high resolution total immersion virtual reality system which enables users to share the thoughts, feelings and experiences that they want to share with vivid clarity.
Satisfying our accelerative need has necessitated development of tools to extend our perceptual capacities such as microscopes, telescopes, interplanetary orbiters, and robotic landers. We have also needed to create increasingly effective tools which magnify our ability to manipulate the world around us like cranes, bulldozers, particle accelerators, microchips, and nanotechnology.
Our most important tool is the conceptual breakthrough of the scientific method which enables us to distinguish reality from illusion. The scientific method has been ever evolving – initially requiring precise measurement and reproducible results with eventual innovations such as random sampling, along with blind and double-blind studies and other innovations. The scientific method has made it possible for us to interact with the animate and inanimate world resulting in ever-more effective and significant ways of satisfying human needs. All of the tools, critical for satisfying our unique human needs, have been completely up to us to provide, and this tells us a great deal about our cooperative human nature. Creating such essential innovations requires a level of pro-social behavior far beyond that of any other living being. If healthy mature humans were not inclined toward being cooperative, constructive, creative, empathetic, intuitive, motivated to contribute, and keenly sensitive to the other beings and the world around them, they could never have accomplished those innovations.