Embracing new ideas and new approaches is the vital force of innovation that drives progress and improves lives. Today, we see the surge of technological innovation merge with agriculture and witness the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence.
As we were preparing this annual Innovation Issue, I recalled my university classes when we learned of the ‘clock of communication’ that charts the one million years we’ve been on this planet together.
The clock sets out that time as if humans have lived one day, timed on a 24-hour clock: one hour of that day would equal 41,667 years; one minute of that day would be about 694 years; and one second would be about 12 years. As the theory book reads, “When we start this clock at midnight, it will be 1 million years ago. Twelve o’clock noon will be 500,000 years ago. When the instrument reaches midnight a second time, we are in the now, looking into the future.”1
Much of the first half — perhaps the first three quarters — of humankind’s day on earth must have been taken up largely with learning to live in the rough and challenging ice ages (yes, those glacial sheets that left all that lovely sediment of sand, gravel and soils that have transformed into medal-winning vineyard and orchard blocks.)
As early humanity huddled to keep warm, made fire and hunted, communication was mainly nonverbal, with a few grunts and cries. Then came the first great step in human communication: language. The innovation of language emerged at nearly 9:33 p.m. on our clock, 100,000 years ago. And yes, shortly after that, agriculture was born.
We moved out of the caves and found ways to grow food where we made our homes. Our ancestors discovered a hybrid of wheat they could carry with them and plant, and as those ice sheets melted, we headed north. Over new pathways we wandered around an unknown world, finding new places to settle.
Innovation always comes with challenges. It often requires substantial investment, and as these early ancestors knew, there is always a risk of failure.
Many more minutes (or tens of thousands of years) pass before the greatest intellectual achievement of humans: the invention of writing nearly 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. On our history clock, the hands have moved to almost seven minutes before now. And pow: an explosion of communications, from the printing press all the way to the microchip, and we move rapidly onward to today’s emergence of AI. No one living on the planet knows a time when communications technology and innovation do not abound.
Here in this issue, we’re sharing more stories of innovation. For without communication there is no innovation.
— Yvonne Turgeon, publisher
1 Wilbur Schramm, The Story of Human Communication: Cave Painting to Microchip, 1988