The 4th Fire: Human Energy

From time to time, I will try to write english post in steemit. I'm not fluent english speaker, but trial like this seems to be very important for global Steemit society. Some of the posts will be re-posts from my previous google blog or translation from my Korean blog posts.

Looking back human history, the discovery of "fire" was one of the critical elements of developing human civilization compatible with walking upright, using language and various tools. Primitive men could get the fire through wild fire, volcanic fire, or lightning by chance, but Greek mythology says Prometheus stole the fire from Olympus gods to help the mankind. Therefore, frequently "The 1st Fire" was called as "The Fire of Prometheus". Using fire, human could endure cold weather, protect from wild animals, bake raw meat. Evenmore, human can use fire to bake earthenware and make various weapons from bronze and iron to fight over the enemy or rule the country. It facilitated establishment of nation system and affected huge impact on human civilization.

"The 2nd Fire" transformed human history was "Electricity". Electricity coupled with invention of steam engine was the hero transferring traditional agrarian society into industrial society based on mass production and urbanization.

There are some dissenting opinions what is "The 3rd Fire". But, many people regarded "The Atomic Power" as the 3rd fire. The discovery of radioactive elements and nuclear fission lead to invention of atomic bomb ending World War II and nuclear reactor currently providing one of the most important energy source for industrial society.

Every fire has similar core principles. "The Fire" needs explosive energy surpassing threshold. Started from "Spark" initiating seed fire, it should make chain-reaction to sum up sparks through some kinds of media such as firewood, wire, uranium. Also, the fire needs facilitation/catalyst of explosion and evades inhibitors such as water dissipating heat or resistance to block electricity transmission, heavy water to calm down chain-reaction of nuclear fission. When all of the conditions were met, the explosive fire will emerge.

THEN, WHAT IS "THE 4TH FIRE"?

I think "The Human Energy" will be the "The 4th Fire". It is related with the concept Web 2.0 and Web Squared by Tim O'Reilly. What was the real social impact internet made so far? It started from the knowledge revolution related with knowledge discovery and usage based on data and information explosion with huge networks of documents. But nowadays, social web infrastructure makes transition internet not only from information web but also into human web combining individual human's innate energy and motivations to conduct hot social actions. Recent exploding social movements worldwide are not just from global recession and political problems in their own countries. All of them are somewhat related with new facilitating human energy infrastructure called "Social Web". Social web is providing firewood and sparks to make explosive fire from individual people who couldn't make collaborative action easily in the past.

From this phenomenon, the era of industrial society characterized as mass production, mass distribution and mass media/culture now shifted into more polycentric, distributed future society focusing on individual's value and happiness.

The "Spark" of "The 4th Fire" is motivation of human. The "Medium" facilitating summing up of motivations is social web. We have had human energy sparks when mankind emerged long long ago. But, we've just got the proper medium to make these divine energy into real explosive power. That's why current social web infrastructure is important for our future society.