Another approach to gaining a better understanding of our true human nature involves asking, “What do humans need?” Throughout the natural world, all living species have evolved so that healthy mature individuals will be well suited to meet their needs. By establishing what humans need, we can induce what characteristics they would require.
Humans have the same basic needs as most other creatures: the need to survive, to reproduce, and the need for social contact. But in addition, humans have needs with no equivalent. One of these is our intellectual need. Although other creatures demonstrate some curiosity, human curiosity is boundless; humans have the unique ability to think in abstract terms; and can contemplate circumstances unconstrained by time or space.
Our most definitive need has to do with the method by which we feel compelled to pursue the satisfaction of each of our other human needs. Whether trying to meet our survival needs, our need to reproduce, our need for social contact, or our need to quench our deep curiosity – over time our approach to satisfying all of them, involves an ever-accelerating scale, speed, and intensity. We can call this our accelerative need.
Our accelerative need results in the human experience being like no other— the manner in which we pursue our goals transcends the limits of space, involving the efforts of humans around the globe, and is unbounded by the limits of time, as our accomplishments are transgenerational and cumulative.
Instead of being satisfied with merely meeting our survival needs by knowing where to find food or hunt, humans have established a complex worldwide system of food production and distribution, enabling us to accumulate large reserves and deliver a stable food supply to the vast majority of humankind. Instead of just reproducing to replace ourselves humans have developed elaborate customs for finding a partner with whom to parent, educational institutions, and a wide range of other developmental experiences, all designed to produce replacements that will be superior to themselves. Rather than being fulfilled with socializing and communicating with those in proximity to us, humans have developed sophisticated methods of communication enabling any one person to connect with anyone else virtually anywhere, at any time. Instead of satisfying our intellectual curiosity by climbing to a mountain top to see what is beyond, humans are driven to send robotic vehicles to the surface of Mars and orbiters to the planet Saturn to send images and data back to Earth.