We didn’t. You and I did not develop cultures, writing, agriculture, the scientific method, mathematics, technology, or engineering. These arose one person at a time — the way a life unfolds one heartbeat at a time, or a thought sparks through a single electrical impulse. Humans participated, yes, but the accomplishments themselves occurred on a larger scale.
We are Sparkspheres living within a vast Sparksphere. The larger-scale Sparksphere is so immense we cannot see it. It surrounds us like an atmosphere — the Human Atmosphere.
The Human Atmosphere began when human culture began and will continue until human culture ends. It is one continuously operating entity with a past and a future of its own.
The Generative Terrain
The interior of a Sparksphere is a generative terrain. Nothing is created outside of one. If I want to bake a cake, I enter the Sparksphere called a kitchen. I bring ingredients and a recipe, combine them using existing tools — bowl, spoon, measuring cups. This is Fusion. I bake the cake in the oven — Action. Then I carry it out into the dining room and eat it — Fission.
The mind is a generative terrain for thought. A gymnasium is a generative terrain for sport. A road is a generative terrain for travel. The Human Atmosphere is a generative terrain for human innovation.
Within it, a person can study and become a professional. Products and services can be exchanged. Information can be shared digitally or in print. Music can be composed and performed. The Human Atmosphere is so encompassing that one rarely needs to exist outside it — yet it does have a perimeter.
The Human Atmosphere and Its Peers
At its larger-than-human scale, the Human Atmosphere interacts with other large-scale entities across the planet. When human activity destroys ecosystems — deforestation, pollution — this is the Human Atmosphere competing with and dominating the Atmospheres of our planetary peers: fish, whales, frogs, trees. Damage to their generative terrains impinges upon their regeneration.
Can individual humans join together to change the behavior of the Human Atmosphere? This belief is pervasive, but does it make sense?
Return to the heartbeat. Can the heart affect a human’s behavior? Yes, if a person “listens to their heart.” But is the Human Atmosphere capable of that kind of listening?
We know almost nothing about its nature. As long as individuals believe it is merely a collection of individuals, they will appeal to individuals for change. Yet the Human Atmosphere operates at a functionally different level — and one thing we can surmise is that it is not human.
Scale and Responsibility
My intent is not to say individuals are powerless, but to highlight the issue of scale. In the Fractal Universe, different scales embody different functions. Synergy is at work: the larger scale is not simply a group of smaller-scale things. It takes on new capacities that were not predicted by the smaller-scale individual.
At the human scale, we are not individually responsible for what happens between the Human Atmosphere and its peers. We are responsible for how we behave toward one another — and how we live our individual lives.
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