## Why do we care Ignoring its ugly facets the human civilization is a great civilization. During the millions of years, as the only intelligence species on this planet we have created paintings, poetry, literature; we have figured out numbers, forces, and atoms; we have looked into how money, power, and the human mind works. As a species we did so so much than any individual life could achieve. How did we do that? The secret lies in the strength of human memory — its continuity. As an individual, memory sustains our role and existence and provides the foundation for thinking. Being able to wake up in the morning while remembering who you are and what you did last year can help you make better decisions today. Memory is also the foundation of thinking — any intelligent being needs memory to do any sort of computation or thinking process. As a species, it is the continuity of our collective memory that enables our rapid evolution. The increating volume of our collective thoughts and memory and the increasing transmissability of knowledge — enabled by the improvement in informaiton technologies from paper to printing press to the interent — means that humans have to pass down exponentially more and more information and knowledge to their next generation, in order to sustain the evolution of our species. Human’s ability to process and transfer large amounts of information is what gave our species the absoulte advantage in the game of evolution. Rather than waiting for the genetic mutation that teaches the offspring to hunt in a particular way — transferring information through DNA, humans simply tell and teach their children by words. As a result, in ancient times where knowledge can be saily monopolized, either by the churches or libraries or academic insitutions, they began to take on the responsibility to pass down the knoweldge of previous generations to the next. Thus the birth of schools. As a result, the fundatmental goal of school is to ensure that the infomration and knowledge is passed down — to ensure the evolution of species and civilization; and the fundamental goal of learning is to first get yourself “atop the shoulders of those who came before you”, and second to make your contributions from there on — whether its advancing previous models or destroying them and creating new ones. That “contribution” part is what we call mutation or innovation. > The evolution of human civilizaiton = learning + innovation Two things to take note of here. First, learning is not for the sake of finish learning. Rather, learning all the previous knowledge (that is relevant to you and your field of interest) is not the destination — the ultimate goal is for you to further the boundary of human knowledge, continue our exploration into this universe, or start a new field entirely by desigining a new way to look at our world. *The inheritance of knowledge is crucial to the progress of a civilization.* Although individual life is limited, humanity as a species can achieve overall evolution through learning — the transmission of knowledge — and innovation / contribution.