Verticality, Part I: The Context
The universal elements of our lives on planet earth
This chapter is part of a series that compose the main verticality narrative. The full series is located here.
In order to understand how and why humans have an innate need to escape the surface of the earth, we must first examine the context in which we have evolved and existed throughout our history. This context is unchanging, and has been true for every member of our species who has ever lived. I’ll approach the subject in two parts.
The first discusses the physical environment that we inhabit. This should not be confused with the physical landscape or other life within our environment, but rather the rules that govern existence within it. Life inhabits a wonderful variety of environments throughout the globe, and each species has adapted to its own surroundings, but we’ll jump into that later. Our interests here are the universal truths of all these environments, regardless of location.
The second discusses time. Our physical environment is experienced through the lens of time, and currently we’re unable to change this fact. Time is and always has been inescapable throughout our entire history. Related to time is the concept of evolution. Throughout time, lifeforms have constantly changed and adapted to respond to their environment, with the eternal goal of survival.
Together, these universal elements and ideas govern life on earth and provide the basis for our incessant need for verticality.
The Physical Context
The Blue Marble. This photo was taken by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972. It was the first time our species saw a photo of the entire earth in a single frame.
We live on a sphere.[1] A giant marble flying through space and orbiting around the sun at just the right distance to make carbon-based life possible. This blue marble is what we call earth, and it has been home to all life as we know it. It gets its round shape because of a singularity at its center, formed by the gravitational pull of its mass.
Gravity pulls all mass and life inwards, or down towards the center of the earth. This downward pull is the basis for the world-axis, or axis-mundi, which is an imaginary axis running perpendicular to the surface of the earth. All living beings have an axis-mundi. It is the basis for our existence on earth, and like gravity, it is always present regardless of our location. There is a sense that wherever we go, we are at the center of our own world, because these concepts are constant and unchanging throughout our lives. Gravity pulls us down along our axis-mundi and confines us to the surface of the earth. This pull downward is the root of all our angst over verticality and it governs most of our perceptions about this world.
Because of gravity, we are surface dwellers. The surface of the earth is an unattainable boundary that is always below us. We stand on it, walk on it, run on it, lay down on it, build on it and alter it to suit our needs, but we always remain above it. Think about it: we are never truly below the surface, because we’re always standing on something. Even when inside a cave or on the top floor of a skyscraper, we are still standing on a surface. It isn’t a physical boundary, but rather a change from one state (solid) to another (air).
This universal truth of surface existence establishes three basic concepts: the surface, the sky, and the underground. We exist at the surface, as nearly all life on earth does alongside us; it’s where all the action happens. We’re pulled down toward the underground, but this is an abstract place because we’re always at the surface. Everything above us in the sky is unknown for the same reason. The three concepts of the surface, the sky, and the underground form a natural vertical hierarchy, and we’ll be discussing the relationship between them throughout most of this work.
The surface is familiar and common. The sky and the underground are unknown and abstract. Since we’re surface dwellers, we occupy the surface and wonder about the sky and the underground. This curiosity for the unknown has ultimately driven our need for verticality. Take religion for example. Nearly all creation stories throughout human history have been based on the duality of the sky and the underground. These are most commonly referred to as heaven and hell, respectively, while life on earth, or the surface, exists in a place between the two. Verticality is so primal to our existence that it affects each of us at every moment of our lives, and the struggle to achieve it has been fought by every member of our species who has ever lived.
The Passage of Time
We exist in the universality of time. It is infinite. There is no beginning, no end, and we have no control over it with our current technology. For every living being that has ever existed on earth, at every moment of life, we are simultaneously the oldest we’ve ever been and the youngest we’ll ever be. We have memories of the past and ideas about the future, but we only ever have the present to act in. This linear progression of time is eternal to the human condition.
Our lives are defined by the passage of time and the inevitability of change. We are aware of this, and unlike time, our lives on this earth do have a beginning and an end. The finite nature of our existence here creates great amounts of anxiety, impatience, competitiveness and a sense that we can never truly be satisfied. This is because we all know we’re going to die one day. As such, our nature is to progress and evolve both as a species and as individuals. This is because we, like all life on earth, evolved within the framework of evolution by natural selection. All life on earth has evolved and adapted to its surroundings in order to out-compete other life forms around it. Charles Darwin said it best when he published his theory in 1859:
Battle within battle must ever be recurring with varying success; and yet in the long-run the forces are so nicely balanced that the face of Nature remains uniform for long periods of time, though assuredly the merest trifle would often give the victory to one organic being over another.[2]
As time marches on, living beings evolve and compete with each other, changing over time into the complex life forms that make up life on earth today. Human beings evolved within this system and out-competed all our competition. In a sense, we’ve escaped the natural order of things, but we still carry mental and physical baggage from our ancestors. This baggage and its sources are where we’ll begin our journey into the complex human story. It’s a history that began in the trees and has progressed to every end of the earth. As this work will demonstrate, our struggles with verticality are so closely woven into our history as a species that they can be seen as one and the same.
Keep reading: Verticality, Part II: The Seeds of Verticality.
[1]: More accurately, we live on an oblate spheroid. Its diameter at the equator is slightly larger than the diameter at the poles because of the rotation around the poles.
[2]: Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection. New York: Bantam Books, 1999. 63.