When I was a boy, I thought progress meant bigger buildings, faster trains, and smarter folks. Now that I’m older, I realize we just traded spears for stock options and chariots for Teslas. The packaging changed, sure—but the fine print of human nature hasn’t aged a day. We still envy, lie, love, fear, worship false idols, and pray for rain when we should’ve been planting seeds weeks ago. Civilization, it turns out, is just ancient foolishness dressed in Wi-Fi.
There is nothing new under the sun. Human vices, war, famine, invention, desire, and fear—they’ve all been with us since the beginning. We like to think we’re evolving, progressing, improving. But in truth, we’ve mostly just upgraded the tools. The instincts that drive us remain unchanged.
Take the Hyperloop, electric cars, rockets that land vertically, nuclear submarines, and airplanes. These things may sound like the pinnacle of modern genius, but most of them were functioning in some form over 100 years ago—just perhaps not as refined or marketable.
- Hyperloop? Pneumatic trains were tested in the 1860s in London and New York.
- Electric cars? Common in the 1800s, and outsold gas cars in the early 1900s.
- Submarines? sketched by Leonardo da Vinci, and built during the American Civil War. Jules Verne predicted Nuclear Submarines.
- Rockets and vertical landings? Robert Goddard launched liquid-fueled rockets in the 1920s.
- Airplanes? The Wright brothers flew in 1903—and others were trying before them. Designs go back centuries.
- Ships? The Egyptians were known for their large barges used for transportation and moving stone blocks and obelisks weighing hundreds of tons.
And what about computers and cryptocurrency?
Sure, we’ve got AI, quantum chips and Bitcoin. But the ancients had abacuses and tulip bubbles. One calculated your grain harvest, the other vaporized your fortune in a week. You could say we’ve replaced gold coins with digital tokens and spreadsheets with silicon minds—but behind it all, it’s still the same species gambling with its future and counting beans.
If you read the Bible not as a religious text, but as a psychological manual of human nature, you’ll find the Ten Commandments are just as valid today as they were 6,000 years ago. “Don’t kill.” “Don’t steal.” “Don’t covet.” These aren’t outdated moral rules—they’re timeless truths about the human condition.
So, are we smarter or more civilized?
Smarter?
Not really. Our brains haven’t evolved much. What we have now is accumulated knowledge, not increased intelligence.
More civilized?
We have laws and smartphones, sure. But we still go to war, exploit the weak, and divide ourselves by tribe. Ancient man painted on cave walls. We post on social media. Different medium, same message.
We’ve got satellites in the sky and savagery in the streets. We beam cat videos across the globe in milliseconds but can’t seem to learn from yesterday’s mistakes. Progress? Maybe. But before we call ourselves superior, we ought to ask: what would Socrates, Confucius, or Moses think of our “civilization” if they saw us now—yelling at machines, addicted to screens, and still stumbling over the same old sins?
BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: THE HYPERLOOP VICTORIAN STYLE
In the 1860s, deep beneath the streets of London, a forgotten slice of the future was already roaring to life. Before the Tube, before electric rails—there was the Pneumatic Despatch Company.
Using compressed air and airtight capsules, this Victorian-era marvel shuttled letters and parcels across the city at lightning speed—sometimes arriving in under a minute. Backed by the British Post Office and major investors, it promised to revolutionize urban logistics.
It was efficient. It was groundbreaking. It was decades ahead of its time. And then—just like that—it vanished. Abandoned, sealed off, and buried by history.
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