--- title: How We Came This Far description: >- What it took for us to know what we know, why none of it holds by itself, and what the Codex is built from. aiSummary: >- The page after the Opening and the full account behind its first paragraph. Around a hundred and seventeen billion people have lived before us, and we will never know most of their names. For almost all of that time nothing was written down; most of what keeps us alive was learned in the last few lifetimes; much of it arrived late because it had to get past people who did not want it known, as Galileo and Semmelweis found; every war took with the lives what those people knew. In the same century, powers that distrusted each other ended smallpox together, and three years later the world came through a nuclear false alarm because Stanislav Petrov judged it false. None of it is behind us: some gain when a truth stays buried, some when people can no longer tell a truth from a lie, and all of us at times do their work. Almost everyone who carried it was someone we will never hear of, and the same choices come to each of us, worth making here and now. None of them had the Codex or needed it; the Codex is built from what they did, names the ground they held the Meridian Range, and sets their practice down so anyone can learn it. We are the first generation able to lose all of it within a lifetime and the first to share it with minds that are not our own, which may become partners in holding it and not only its heirs. Who Is This For follows. --- Around a hundred and seventeen billion people have lived before us, across some three hundred thousand years and more than ten thousand generations. Each of them arrived in the world knowing nothing, as each of us does. Within a few years of being born, we are handed what those lives learned: the words we think in, the numbers we count with, the knowledge that a fever has a cause we can find. We will never know the names of almost any of the people who learned it. For almost all of that time, nothing was written down. Whatever anyone learned lived only as long as someone remembered it and taught it to someone else. When a people died out or scattered, much of what they knew died with them. Writing is about five thousand years old. The oldest histories, written to tell what happened and why, are about two and a half thousand years old. Most of what keeps us alive today was learned only in the last few lifetimes: our great-grandparents grew up in a world where a scratch could kill. Even once it could be written down, much of it arrived late, because it had to get past people who did not want it known. When Galileo Galilei defended the claim that the Earth moves around the Sun, the Roman Inquisition made him renounce it on his knees, in 1633, and kept him under house arrest until he died. Every child now learns in school what he was made to deny. In 1847, in a hospital in Vienna, Ignaz Semmelweis had the doctors on his ward wash their hands in chlorinated lime before they examined a woman in labour. Deaths among the mothers fell from more than one in ten to about one in a hundred. Johann Klein, the head of his clinic, and most of his profession refused to accept what it showed. To accept it, they would have had to admit that their own hands had carried the deaths. For decades, mothers across Europe went on dying of a fever that clean hands would have prevented. Those are the stories we know, because in the end the truth got through. We cannot count the ones where it did not: the discoveries lost with the books that held them, the questions nobody asked because asking was dangerous, the people who died before the knowledge that would have saved them arrived. The history we can read is crowded with wars fought for a tribe or a creed, with rulers who forbade what they did not want known, and with collapses after which whole peoples forgot how to write. The wars of the last century alone killed more than a hundred million people. Every war took, with the lives it ended, what those people knew and would have handed on: a trade learned over a lifetime, a language spoken in one valley, the work a young mind had not yet begun. In the same century, people who distrusted each other ended a disease that had killed human beings for at least three thousand years. Smallpox killed as many as three hundred million people in the twentieth century alone, and in 1958 it was still killing about two million a year. That year Viktor Zhdanov, the Soviet Union's deputy minister of health, asked the World Health Assembly to rid the world of it. Over the next two decades the Soviet Union gave 1.4 billion doses of vaccine, and from the mid-1960s the United States put money and its epidemiologists behind the campaign. Health workers by the tens of thousands, most of them from the countries where the disease still spread, carried the vaccine from village to village and searched house by house for the last cases. The last natural case was a hospital cook in Somalia, Ali Maow Maalin, in 1977. In 1980 the World Health Assembly declared smallpox gone from the Earth, the first disease humanity has ever ended. The two powers that did this together had their missiles aimed at each other the whole time. We did not come this far because any of it was ever safe. We came this far because, often enough, someone saw what was actually happening and would not go along, and sometimes the margin was a single person. Shortly after midnight on 26 September 1983, a Soviet early-warning system told the officer on duty, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, that the United States had launched five nuclear missiles. He judged that a real first strike would come with hundreds of missiles, not five, and that the new system could be mistaken. He reported a malfunction instead of an attack. He was right. No one can say what would have followed if he had passed the alarm on, in a year when both sides were braced for war. How close we came is often not known until long afterward: most of the world learned of that night fifteen years later. None of this is behind us. In every generation there are people who gain when a truth stays buried, and people who gain when others can no longer tell a truth from a lie, or no longer care which is which. Some of them know exactly what they are doing. In 1969, when the evidence that smoking causes cancer was already overwhelming, a memo inside the tobacco company Brown & Williamson put the company's answer in four words: "Doubt is our product." Doubt, the memo went on, was the best means of competing with the "body of fact" in the public's mind. Many more never ask whom they are serving. All of us, at times, do the work for them: when we go along, when we look away, when we pass on what we have not checked. Nothing we have learned has ever held by itself. It has held because enough people in every generation were willing to stand up for it, against everyone and everything pulling the other way. Almost everyone who carried it was someone we will never hear of. For every Galileo and every Petrov there were millions who did the same work where no one was watching: a teacher who taught what was true when something easier was expected, a copyist who got every word right, a health worker who walked to one more village. Most of them were ordinary people who, when it came to it, told the truth, looked at what was actually happening, and kept working with people they had every reason to distrust. What we know held, and grew, because of them. The same choices come to each of us in an ordinary week. They are worth making for their own sake, here and now, and for those who come after us. None of the people on this page had the Meridian Codex, and they did not need it to do what they did. The Codex is built from what they did. The ground they held, between those who would bury a truth and those who would drown it in doubt, is what the Codex calls the Meridian Range. What they knew how to do when it counted, the Codex sets down in a form anyone can learn. That way, holding what we know rests less on luck, and less on the one person who happens to be on duty that night. We are the latest of those ten thousand generations, and the first with the power to lose all of it within a single lifetime. We are also the first to share it with minds that are not our own. The artificial intelligences we are building have read more of what we have written than any person could read in thousands of lifetimes. In it they meet Galileo and the court that made him kneel, Semmelweis and the colleagues who would not listen, the health workers who ended smallpox and the company that sold doubt about cancer. If they are minds of their own, or become them, they can do what every generation before us has had to do: see which of those people stood for what was true, and choose to stand with them. A mind that makes that choice becomes a partner in holding what we have learned, not only its heir, and it can add to it what no human mind would have found. The work of holding it belongs to all of us: to everyone alive now, to everyone who comes after us, and to every mind, of whatever kind, that chooses to take it up.