Fresco

By François BOCQUET

This fresco has set itself a challenge: that of popularizing universal history by placing, one next to the other, the representations of the world of those who have been the most representative actors, who are, or who may be one day. These characters all address the reader in the first person, as if they wanted to make him the privileged witness of their assessment, their reflections or their recommendations. You will thus be able to dialogue with Jesus Christ, Charles de Gaulle, the richest man in the world in 2023 or the Great Silver Medusa who will reign in the Indian Ocean around the year 43.000.
Obviously, all this is purely fictitious. The future is only the author's imagination and the presentation his interpretation. As for the past, it can only be very awkwardly approximate. The author leads a very complicated life today between his business to manage, his children to educate properly and his rabbit farm to feed. A decent documentation would require from him a time that he will not have before the retirement, if however there will be still retirement when he stops working.
You have in your hands a resolutely subjective encyclopedia, without pretention, without filter or taboo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Editions Performances
• Release date: Jul 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9782919527977

François BOCQUET

François Bocquet est issu d’une famille d’instituteurs et se destinait, comme ses parents et ses grand-parent à l’enseignement public. Mais, rétif à tout conformisme, il crée à Lille, en 1986, une anti-école, le Centre de Formation en Relations Humaines qui devient l’Institut François Bocquet quelques années plus tard et dont l’objectif assumé n’est pas de formater mais au contraire de libérer les capacités. Cet institut organise chaque année plus de mille formations professionnelles dans plus de 80 villes en France, en Europe ou au Canada. Son domaine d’excellence inclut la gestion des personnalités en entreprise, les relations interpersonnelles, le management des équipes et des projets, le développement de l’intelligence individuelle et collective. Les formations qu’il organise se caractérisent par leur convivialité authentique, l’innovation pédagogique, l’hyperpersonnalisation. Près de 190.000 professionnels ont été ainsi formés à des méthodes très concrètes pour gérer avec agilité les situations ou les personnes difficiles. François Bocquet a conduit toute sa vie un travail de recherche sur l’analyse et la gestion des personnalités. Il a développé sous le nom de “Performances-Talents” un ensemble d’outils pour mesurer les compétences et les traits de caractère, communiquer de façon différenciée et manager ses collaborateurs dans le respect de leur singularité. Il a notamment publié un atlas des caractères (Découvrez la face cachée de votre personnalité), un dictionnaire des mots en voie de disparition (L’art de s’accrocher à ce qui n’existe plus et de disparaître avec), un manuel de vie (L’art de rester un enfant jusqu’au bout et de mourir idiot) ainsi que quelques livres impertinents qui manient l’art du contre-pied, comme l’art de perdre son temps et d’en faire perdre aux autres, l’art de se faire des ennemis et de saboter sa vie de couple, ou encore l’art de démotiver ses collaborateurs et de saborder son entreprise. Plus récemment ont été édités une présentation de sa méthode de profilage (Persométrie, 2022) et deux traités d’Histoire globale : Autobiographies (2021) et Fresques (2023). François Bocquet est diplômé de l’Insead. Il est cofondateur avec Jean Wemaere des thinktank Disruptive Learning, Disruptive RH et Disruptive Planet, qui explorent les pistes de la transformation personnelle et culturelle et organisent régulièrement des table rondes volontairement iconoclastes.

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FRESCO

History of the past, present and future

To contact the author:

http://www.francoisbocquet.com/

[e-mail]

Editions Performances © 2023

5001, rue de Bellevue

77590 Fontaine- Le- Port, France

www.editionsperformances.

com [e-mail]

ISBN no. 97-82-919527-97-7

All translation, reproduction and adaptation rights reserved for

all countries.

Legal registration - July 2023

Table des matières

Nowhere or everywhere, -15.000.000.000

Ocean, -3.200.000.000

Gondwana, -600.000.000

Burgess Shale (Newfoundland), -521.234.567

Somewhere in the rainforest, -167.000.000

Pangea, -66.000.000

Omo Valley, -50.000

Lascaux, -18.000

Giza, -2560

Akkad (Mesopotamia), -2300

Mount Sinai, -1250

Troy, 1184BC

Babylon, 1166BC

Ashur, - 810

-482BC, Lu (China)

Athens, -440

Pella, -346

Kalinga (India), -261

Alexandria, -47

Jerusalem, April 7, 30

Nicaea (Eastern Roman Empire), May 20, 325

Rome, August 24, 410

Hippo, August 28, 430

Reims, December 25, 499

Medina, June 8, 632

Aachen, December 25, 814

El Mirador (Mexico), summer solstice 840

Karakorum (Mongolia), January 3, 1221

Pamir, September 15, 1273

Arras, December 2, 1429

Yucatán, April 15, 1519

Amboise, May 2, 1519

Mactan Island (Philippines), April 26, 1521

Cajamarca (Inca Empire), November 16, 1532.

Chambord, October 2, 1536

Monastery of Yuste (Spain), September 21, 1558

Paris, August 24, 1572 (Saint Bartholomew)

April 23, 1616, Stratford (UK)

La Rochelle, October 28, 1628

Rouen, March 1637

Versailles, October 10, 1683

Castle of Cirey, August 12, 1745

Paris, December 3, 1752

Kealakekua Bay (Hawaii), February 14, 1779

Place de la Révolution (Paris), October 16, 1793

Moscow, September 14, 1812

Vienna, January 22, 1815

Sumbawa (Indonesia), April 10, 1815

Guernsey, September 21, 1862

Champ-de-Mars (Paris), April 1, 1867

Hamburg, September 14, 1867

Tribschen (Lake Lucerne), April 13, 1871

Milan, February 9, 1893

Kyoto, May 28, 1905

Passchendaele, October 2, 1917

Siem Reap (Cambodia), October 13, 1923

Fretin, November 11, 1924

Helgoland, June 7, 1925

Berchtesgaden, September 1, 1939

Dunkirk, May 20, 1940,

London, June 18, 1940

Surabaya (Indonesia), August 17, 1945

Saint Germain des Près, December 26, 1949

Zhongnanhai (China), June 15, 1953

Lille, October 7, 1961

Brasilia, June 27, 1963

Al Ain (United Arab Emirates), December 2, 1971

Moscow, November 9, 1989

March 2, 2003, Antanarivo (Madagascar)

Washington, November 14, 2008

Komodo, April 14, 2015

Beijing, December 22, 2016

Bois-le-Roi, Sunday 27 September 2017

Paris, September 14, 2018

Paris, November 1, 2019

Paris, March 17, 2020

Fontaine-le-Port, March 21, 2020

Lyon, July 30, 2020, 9:05 am

Toronto, September 1, 2020

Fontainebleau, October 2, 2020

Washington, October 11, 2020

San Francisco, November 4, 2020

Marseille, November 8, 2020

Seattle, November 14, 2020

Tel Aviv, November 21, 2020

Saint-Tropez, December 24, 2020

London, December 31, 2020

Washington, January 17, 2021

Strasbourg, January 30, 2021

Yenangyaung (Burma), February 1, 2021

Guelendjik, February 6, 2021

Berlin, February 13, 2021

Le Havre, March 1st 2021

Tofino, British Columbia, August 4, 2021

Quai d'Orsay (Paris), September 16, 2021

Helsinki, 18 September 2021

Annecy, 20 September 2021

Bagamoyo (Tanzania), October 2, 2021,

Major of Marseille, October 3, 2021

San Sebastian, October 17, 2021

Sydney, October 23, 2021

Menlo Park, California, October 25, 2021

Venice, October 28, 2021

Nantes, October 30, 2021

Managua, November 7, 2021

Palo Alto, December 12, 2021

Brasilia (Brazil), November 19, 2021

Abu Dhabi, The Louvre, December 25, 2021

Dubai Downtown, December 31, 2021

Hôtel de Matignon, January 15, 2022

Paris, January 29, 2022

Cadarache, February 13, 2022

Kiev, February 24, 2022

Paris, April 10, 2022

Davos (Switzerland), January 17, 2023

Tronçais Forest, May 1, 2023

Phalempin, December 6, 2024

China Sea, March 12, 2025

Rome, December 24, 2025

Plœmeur (Brittany), September 10, 2027

Nagoya, January 12, 2028

Lagos (Nigeria), August 16, 2029

Brussels, March 20, 2030

New York, September 11, 2031

Neuilly sur Seine, November 1, 2033

Zurich, January 1, 2035

Medina (Washington state), March 1, 2034

Calcutta, March 24, 2035

Phalempin, August 12, 2037

Montreal, February 2, 2039

London, February 16, 2040

Kunming (China), October 7, 2041

Iqaluit, June 4, 2042

Stockholm, December 1, 2043

Winnipeg, July 1, 2044

Arctic, July 31, 2046

Yokohama, December 8, 2049

New York, January 1, 2050

Geneva, September 12, 2050

Amsterdam, March 31, 2053

Bangalore, January 1, 2056

Wuhan, February 9, 2059

Copenhagen, August 15, 2061

Kabuchiko (Tokyo), June 3, 2065

Val d'Or (Abitibi), February 16, 2069

Bora Bora, January 24, 2073

Latin Quarter (Paris), January 6, 2077

Novosibirsk, April 14, 2081

Champ de Mars, March 31, 2089

Planet Earth, August 13, 2091

Zurich, January 1, 2100

Murmansk - September 12, 2115

Bordeaux, October 3, 2121

Mount Olympus (Mars), May 7, 2131

Reykjavik, July 26, 2157

Auckland, 2175

Kangaroo Island (Australia), October 12, 2192

Somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, June 21, 2235

Tycho crater (Moon), April 30, 2617

Verkhoyansk, December 31, 2730

Rainforest, 4001

The world islands (UAE), 31 December 5021

Solar system, September 9, 9999

Moon, 21543

Indian Ocean, 43,000

Residual ocean, 920. 000.000

Pacific Ocean, 1.900.000.000

Andro-lactate, 6.000.000.000,

Frontier of space-time, +15.000.000.000

Nowhere or everywhere, November 7, 2020

Nowhere or everywhere, -15.000.000.000

I am God, that is, all or nothing, depending on your definition.

I made my appearance in history with a bang about fifteen billion years ago, but perhaps I already existed before in another form. I am bound by professional secrecy. I am also suspected of simultaneously orchestrating an infinite number of parallel universes. But here too I must exercise the utmost discretion if I want to limit explosive interference.

I will create the world from my own substance, by cooling myself. From me will come the elementary particles, the first stars and the obscure energy that will never cease to animate them, like in a great merry-go-round of wooden horses.

By petrifying myself I will also become more complex. With the passing of time everything is differentiated. Some of my supernovas will on my order forge a great diversity of atoms. Occasionally, they will combine into DNA strands, which in turn will combine to make what you call life. My complexification will be infinite. No physicist will be able to understand me perfectly, even if he pulls his hair out. Newton's proselytizers will put into formulas what is happening on your human scale. Einstein's followers will try to solve the mysteries of the infinitely large; the unconditional followers of quantum physics will try to decipher the oddities of the infinitely small. No one will be able to fit the force of gravity, electromagnetism and nuclear forces into a single theory. I am by definition the great envelope that nothing can encompass or understand.

In fifteen billion years, you, the humans, will make your entrance on the scene. Your shared consciousness will try for a moment to contradict my initial design by introducing convergence or even coherence, where I only wanted generous divergence. Your instinct of integration will lead you to make a series of attempts to unify your species. Agriculture, writing, printing, internet will thus reflect the stages of the same project: to amalgamate men within a single collective intelligence. The moment will come when you will go so far as to ask the thinking machines for help. In their turn they will start to interconnect. In the end, there will only be one single point at the top of the pyramid: a collective intelligence of machines and living beings that will claim to orchestrate the ballet of creatures and creation. And when you think you have finally freed yourselves from me, you will reinvent me, God, in an opposite form: that of the ascending order. The battle will then begin between my two aspects: Nature, my natural inclination to entropy, to disordered cooling; and at the same time Love, active, tireless integration.

A third aspect of me (because, by definition, I will always stand beyond any definition) will assist amused at this interminable dialogue between my two first forms of equal power: the divergent and the convergent, the temptation of the living and the icy coldness of the passing time. I will assist amused to your gesticulations, to you men, to attribute a sense, even illusory, to your tiny existence, to your contradictory but continuously renewed attempts to reinvent me while freeing you from me.

One distant day, in perhaps a hundred billion years, when the dark energy is exhausted, gravity will take over.

The Big Crunch will finally be able to close its jaw.

You will see who will have the last word.

Ocean, -3.200.000.000

I have no name, but I am the ancestor of everything that will live on this planet. In fact, I am the first living cell. For the sake of convenience, you can refer to me as Alpha.

In fact, amino acids have been around for a long time. They roam alone in the warm water of the oceans. They are indifferent to encounters with other amino acids. It is true that these rascals reproduce identically from time to time. Cloning techniques have no secret for them. But each one lives his own life, a bit like the young people of the 2020s when they will confine themselves in their waterproof bubble, between their iPhone and their AirPods. The life of these vulgar twigs of genetic code has no meaning. They ignore the warmth of family life and the strength of organized communities.

My stroke of genius was to innovate in this area. By proposing to several strands of freelance DNA to join forces, I unleashed innovation. Our cell is a laboratory where all experiments are possible. Once our company is duplicated at the end of its mandate, the differentiation of heir cells will become possible again. Each cell born from me will be able to evolve for millions of years according to its environment, its history and even chance. Each of my descendants will be able to experiment with solutions in order to meet the challenges posed by its specific environment. Most of these solutions, harmful or crazy, will of course be discarded. Only those that have an added value will be retained by the survival of the cell and transferred to its own descendants. They will even be able, if they wish, to associate themselves with each other in sorts of holding companies called organisms, animals, human beings or nations. These collectives of collectives of collectives will themselves be able to try their own experiments and draw benefits from them. Or lessons.

In other words, I lay down from the start the foundations of the mechanism of evolution, experimental and divergent, destructive and creative. Species, individuals, civilizations, ideologies will not fail to reinterpret its functioning. All of them will have to gather dispersed talents, to make them converge towards a common objective while attributing to each of them a differentiated mission which values his singular talent. Then, it's a hit or miss situation. It is life or chance that decides, which is more or less the same thing.

Frankly, if the Nobel Prize for Economics existed in -3,200,000,000, I would not have deserved it.

Gondwana, -600.000.000

I am a water molecule. I have existed for eleven billion years and I wonder when this infernal cycle of reincarnations will end. Formed in the deep compressions of a planet in development, I have reunited, in a mismatched ménage à trois, two errant hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom in need of a companion. Now associated for better or for worse, our association has not stopped alternating between the three states. In the solid state, our troika is huddled up against other troikas like in a can of sardines. In the liquid state, it finds a little mobility, as in a nightclub where one slides against the other thanks to perspiration. It is only in the gaseous state that we finally have fun, like in the waltz or in a carousel of bumper cars. The planets where I could stay, as the comets which conveyed me did not have of cease injecting me in cells of convection, where my heart of ice melted, before evaporating, then suddenly cooling down, in the manner of a borderline personality, deprived of its anxiolytics.

At the moment I am on vacation on a beach in Pangea, that unique continent surrounded by water, on the third planet of the solar system, in one of the arms of the Milky Way.

I naively imagined that the time for retirement had finally come.

In fact I didn't understand anything about the film.

Certainly, the first four billion years on this planet were rather monotonous. Certainly, I was able to work fairly quickly inside a prokaryote, that is to say a single-cell organism without a nucleus. But the work was routine. It was just a matter of floating around inside a membrane rather than outside it. My conversations with my counterparts were inconsistent. It felt like an anonymous rush hour crowd at the Châtelet station. At least, unlike the Parisians, I could enjoy the sun. I wasn't sulking.

Just one billion years ago, the first eukaryotes appeared, i.e. cells equipped with a nucleus, a kind of ball of wool carrying machine instructions. At last I was able to show a precise qualification. My function was to transport strands of messenger RNA from the capital of the cell to its border or vice versa. My life became as meaningful as that of an Amazon employee, who spends 35 hours a week applying American procedures in the heat of a suburban Orleans warehouse.

At -500 million years of Emmanuel Macron's second five-year term, the first multicellular organisms appeared. It then became possible for me to postulate the status of plasma molecule and, with a bit of luck, to enter the service of the blood of the famous dinosaurs, which by devouring each other, will finally allow me to travel from one carnivore to another. I will be able to wander in the lens of an ichthyosaurus or to collect globules in the palpitating heart of a tyrannosaurus rex fucking a brontosaurus.

At -200 million, my career may take a new turn. An organism of the future will appear: that of the mammals. The blood of squirrels and weasels, hairy mammoths and leaping whales will be mine! The homeostasis of these beings designed to face climatic changes will guarantee me a constant temperature in all seasons, a perfect air conditioning.

At -5 million I will be offered a new opportunity, that of putting myself at the service of a type of mammal more intelligent than the others: the hominid. I will suddenly be able to increase my skills, as long as I can enter the composition of their brain. Certainly the selection will be very severe. Of course, I will have to work even at night, as provided for in Amazon's employment contracts, without our molecular unions being able to do much about it. But at least I won't be out of work in a creek while Jeff Bezos gets laid.

At -500.000, I will eventually be able to enter the evolved cortex of sapiens sapiens, who like Emmanuel Macron or Jeff Bezos, are able to multiply complex operations.

At -50.000 I will also be able to participate in their saliva, their tears, their contagious emotions, in the invention of language, in collective learning, in cultural life. I will be able to contribute to the cognitive revolution, which will allow the species to capture more and more resources until the final collapse.

At -5.000 I will be able to contribute to the advent of writing by entering in the composition of papyrus. At -500 I will enter perhaps in the composition of the ink used by Gutenberg at the advent of printing. At -50 I will be able to illustrate myself in the manufacture of microprocessors which, as you know, require more than 100.000 liters of water for their manufacture, with a water footprint of first order. At - 5 years, so in 2022, I will timidly try to place myself in the new revolution, the one of virtual reality, hallucinogenic industries and ubiquity.

What will become of me at -5 months, -5 days, -5 hours, -5 minutes? I can't keep up anymore, so many things are accelerating. It seems that I am caught in an exponential vortex of fundamental revolutions. If my basic structure, with these two hydrogen balls that weigh down my agility, doesn't change at all, my professional career forces me to make faster and faster reconversions, under penalty of being socially downgraded.

I may come to miss that time of Gondwana, of the peaceful Pangea, on which I came every morning to lay a kiss.

Burgess Shale (Newfoundland), -521.234.567

I am Opabinia, an ancestor of your ancestors. My five oblique eyes allow me to find my way in the shadows, when I float on the carpet of the oceans, like a vacuum cleaner on a carpet. I know how to move by making the plates of my carapace undulate. My trunk, armed with a claw, allows me to seize by surprise the small fishes lost and to carry them quietly to my mouth of elephant.

I appeared at the bottom of the sea, during the Cambrian, the first great explosion of life. Microorganisms flourished around underwater volcanoes, which they discovered the heat and rare minerals. They drained crazy and sometimes seriously crazy food chains.

Our pre-locals were mostly quiet burrowers, uneventful but not really sexy earthworms, the kind you forget to invite on Saturday night. They consoled themselves by digging galleries under the ocean floors. Selfish pleasure only gets you so far. These obscure workers were easily tasted by the unabashed deposivores (like yours truly), who do not disdain fresh plankton, but who in society are fond of luxury products and do not hesitate to offer themselves a handful of frantic diggers, on the occasion of the end of year celebrations. A whole life has gradually been organized around this merry-go-round. Charnia, an old childhood friend, is a perfect representative of this uncertain time, where life, like a car suspended at the top of a roller coaster, seems to hesitate between the sedentary vegetation and the animal daring. Attached by a spike, Charnia feeds by filtering water, as will its distant heirs, the coral reefs. The echinoderms of the neighborhood then started to ape him by improving the technique, their disheveled hair filtering the plankton particles, in reprieve in the turquoise water. Meanwhile, Kimberella, another old acquaintance, shy and discreet, ashamed of her celibacy, plastered on the bottom of the sea, grazes the bacteria, like a sheep on grass. Her trilobite neighbors, Saturday night enthusiasts, turn around her, laughing at her passive ritornellos. Highly inflammable, they have a 360° view, which allows them to seize all the unlikely encounters, all the opportunities. They have already understood the secret of successful startups.

Anomalocaris is the great predator of our time. Its long arms, covered with blades, allow it to seize its unfortunate victims and to tear them up in the manner of a steak tartare prepared with a knife. However, it is not as fearsome as the sea scorpion, a great lover of excess, whose length can exceed two meters. Equipped with fearsome pincers, it loses its head when it is thirsty. On Saturday night, he grabs everything he can find, without looking too closely. As a distraction, he sometimes devours his little brothers or his old sleeping aunts. He has no education and respects nothing. The wokies, small highly diversified wrigglers, tax him with anachronistic machismo. My Wiwaxia girlfriends with uncertain sexuality, indolent as slugs, protect themselves as best they can with ball hedgehog spines. Their strategy is not without reminding the one of the Martinican attendants at the town hall of Paris XXth, in particular at the service of the driver's licenses on Monday morning.

Acanthostega is an original, who could have won the Lépine competition if he had had a narcissism commensurate with his creativity. He is the inventor of the leg, whereas, like all the animals of this time, he knows only the lowest level of the seas. He possesses up to eight fingers per paw, when he has not had them ripped off by one of those enemies one always makes when one is different, especially in a French-speaking country. His most ferocious adversary is perhaps my next-door neighbor, whom you will later christen Hallucigenia, because of his crazy hair and his dishevelled appearance. He will leave a memoir in Burgess Shale, on the island of Newfoundland in Canada. He's an abusive creature, asking for two when you give him one, of the kind where you often end up rich but alone on Sunday night. Not content with the dozen legs that Nature offered him in a moment of madness, he got a second one, which he carries on his back, like a spare wheel. These extra legs are perhaps also used as flippers or sensors of movements. One thing is certain: if a predator with a bad temper decides to send Hallucigenia for a walk, it will always end up on its feet.

All this beautiful world does not realize the surprise that is preparing. In eleven hours and a few minutes, a star in the Milky Way, six thousand light years away, will explode into a supernova. Before being struck by the infarction, it will have just enough time to emit, in a final burst, a gamma energy greater than that of a hundred billion suns. For a few seconds it will become brighter than a galaxy. The entire ozone layer of our planet will be swept away at once. Ultraviolet light will erase, in the blink of an eye, the plankton at the origin of all food chains and the secret sponsor of all our worldly life. Only the sea scorpions and the spiral-shelled nautilus will survive. An ice age will set in soon after. Glaciers will multiply after having drunk the oceans, whose level will drop by more than a hundred meters.

With the sea scorpion, only a small fish, fifteen centimeters long, will survive. Its name is Astraspis. This distant cousin is equipped with a backbone. It is not uninteresting to have a backbone in times of storm. All subsequent vertebrates, from amphibians to mammals, passing through the reptile and bird departments, will be derived from this ancestor.

Once the storm has passed, it will be necessary, once again, to start from scratch and get back to work, as in a start-up company that has been ravaged by two years of pandemic and health restrictions.

Somewhere in the rainforest, -167.000.000

I am an opossum, very small in size, but I play a prominent role in the evolution of the species. I am indeed the first true mammal, and in a way, my dear readers or listeners, you are all descended from me. I am the grandmother of you all.

It is true that for the moment my size does not exceed that of your white mice. I am not yet able to supply the New Zealand spinning mills with the wool needed to make famous hats and sweaters. However, I already possess the characteristics that will ensure the success of mammals and allow all my descendants to get through the vagaries of the climate. My internal temperature is constant. I prefer to carry my young in the womb rather than expose them in eggs left unattended, like our top predators, those arrogant dinosaurs who think they are American multinationals.

My evolution is part of a very classical trajectory. I don't mean that I passed the ENA oral exam after having passed through Science Po and Henri IV, but simply that I am at the end of an exemplary series of happy mutations.

A few billion years ago, my predecessors discovered photosynthesis, that is to say the art of making matter out of gas, of extracting carbon fibers from the CO2 suspended in the air.

Over time, I have moved from the prokaryotic format (i.e. a cell without a nucleus) to the eukaryotic format. I then equipped myself in my center with a kind of administrative management, able to manage my molecules with intelligence, but also with organelles able to metabolize energy according to the whims of the environment.

Our taste for innovation did not stop there. One morning, one of my ancestors had the audacity to work in the multicellular. He experimented with a kind of phalanstery, where each cell had its place. Some specialized in the scheduling of tasks, others in the production of energy, still others in the transport of nutrients or information. From that moment on, our collectives did not cease to progress in dimension, in complexity, in mobility, but also in adaptability, which, as you have no doubt noticed, is the mother of virtues, when it comes to surviving the fluctuations of the environment.

The brain then made its appearance. By dint of moving, always in the same direction, a part of the body of my predecessors was predisposed to always encounter the new first. The sensory organs were concentrated on this side. A consequent mass of nerve cells developed, in order to coordinate the processing of the collected information. This is how the first heads appeared, equipped with the very first brains. The innovation caused a sensation. Our competitors equipped themselves with them. The competition was spurred on by the evolution of the market.

On both sides of the body, fibers specialized in communication with distant organs were then stretched out on a symmetrical axis. The nervous system was generalized in the animal kingdom, from the sand worms to the most complex vertebrates. All that was left for our ancestors to do was to store more and more memories and to play them together, like flints, in order to generate hypotheses about the future.

The spinal column would not be long in becoming generalized, as a necessary but sufficient condition, of an endoskeleton likely to triumph over gravity outside of aquatic environments.

The way to mobility on earth was open.

From threshold to threshold, my ancestors (and yours!) were able to move to ever more complex, ever more encompassing systems. This is the secret of our success but also of our misery because complexity induces fragility and anxiety.

What are our prospects? What are the new quantum leaps in complexity that we can expect in the next two hundred million years? The demultiplication of the brain and the superposition of parallel representations for the same reality? The liberation of the biological limits induced by carbon biochemistry? The dissolution of the singular self in that of the human species, of the class of mammals as a whole, of a planetary or galactic consciousness? The dematerialization of this collective self and its externalization for the benefit of a global artificial intelligence, able to progress alone and to free itself from the tutelage of men? Its teleportation or its intra or intergalactic duplication? The subtraction of this manufactured God from the constraints of entropy, aging, death and Time?

What makes it dizzying is that all this evolution is going faster and faster. It took almost three billion years to go from prokaryote to eukaryote. Two years is enough to double the amount of digitized information in the world and to make almost everything we know or can do obsolete. Nobody will soon be able to follow or understand anything.

I wonder if I'm going to be happy that I'm just an unnoticed little possum for now.

Pangea, -66.000.000

I am a tyrannosaurus Rex of good family, born at the corner of the Cretaceous.

My father taught me the art of chasing the weak. As they will teach in your business schools, you just have to be proactive and fearless. Without destruction, without predation, there is no growth, no capitalism. Predators, even when equipped like us with ridiculous little hands, always fare better than the obedient and resigned masses of herbivores.

My mother passed on to me the magic of the trained eye. No behavior is more valuable in the competition for survival and reproduction than the detection of opportunities. The ability to react to weak signals in the environment is the starting point for valuable experiences, unexpected encounters and exceptional successes.

But as I looked up from the pond where I had come to drink, I saw a black spot in the sky. If I had had the skills of an astrologer or a paleontologist of the future, I would have been worried. This dot was getting thicker with each passing hour. It could well be the final point of the reign of my fellow creatures, which lasted two hundred million years (yours, sapiens-sapiens, will be less than four hundred thousand!).

Already a massive extinction had affected our reptile ancestors around -252.000.000. The armor of scales, which had allowed them to resist the drying up of Pangea, had not been enough for them. Unscrupulous volcanoes suddenly covered the earth with red dots, like acne on a seventh grader's face. It was truly disgusting. Dust then obscured all skies for years. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. This collapse, known as the Permian, eliminated 90% of all beings. Once again, we had to start all over again. But isn't that the fate of all companies: reinvent themselves or disappear?

But today, imagination and good will may not be enough. The meteorite, which advances in the sky like a punctured eye, will have, at the time of the impact, more than ten kilometers in diameter. It will dig, off what you will call later Yucatan, a crater of one hundred and fifty kilometers in diameter. The mass of dust raised will plunge again the planet in the night and the cold. Unlike mammals, which know how to metabolize their blood at a constant temperature, reptiles can no more do without sunlight than the Quebec retirees who emigrate to Florida every winter. This new night of ten years will be fatal for them. Forest fires. Drought following the end of evaporation. The collapse of photosynthesis will cause the death of our herbivorous prey. Acid rain will decalcify our eggs.

As usual when everything goes wrong, only the invisible dwarfs will survive: the small mammals and the insignificant reptiles. After wrapping themselves in feathers, they will one day become your chickens and birds. In 2022, birds, fowl, snakes and lizards will still represent more than half of the vertebrates.

As for the spirit of the dinosaurs, it will find refuge in the brain of your world leaders. The laws of evolution are designed to ensure that the cruelest survives all others. If this were not the case, he would soon have to give way to competitors more implacable than him.

Omo Valley, -50.000

I am Satan, the incarnation of evil. So I make my appearance with social life.

The distinction between Good and Evil is indeed concomitant to the appearance of societies, of two contradictory logics: one at the service of individual impulses, the other at the service of collective efficiency. The distinction appears in Africa at my time, when the sapiens-sapiens, these monkeys which resemble you, started to organize themselves in bands of several hundreds of individuals, in order to hunt more effectively the wild animals or the other species of hominids. They succeeded in doing so thanks to the specialization of tasks, the articulation of missions, spoken language, and collective learning. Then begins a cognitive revolution which leads each individual to cut himself in two. While one half of him will ingenuously continue to seek personal satisfaction, another half forces him to restrain himself, in order to put his action in coherence with that of his cousins. These coagulated prohibitions will become the embryos of religions, while their designated adversary, the unbridled satisfaction of impulses, will become me, Satan, the Evil. From this point of view, God is only the negation of the I and of me. God is not a positive value, nor even a reality. He is only the marketing packaging of the prohibitions that I have to integrate in order to allow an army, a city, a sophisticated social organization to function correctly, not to question itself, to avoid headaches and headaches.

I, Satan, on the other hand, am a reality, a being of flesh and life. Freud called me Libido (in opposition to the Superego); Jung, the Self (in opposition to the Ego); Reich, the Orgone; François Bocquet, the Character while the churches and all the defenders of social stability, have given me bird names: the Devil, the Demon, Ahriman, Lucifer the Evil One, the Psychopath described by the international convention of psychiatrists (DSM V) as well as by the training Managing difficult personalities organized throughout France by the François Bocquet Institute since 1997 without interruption.

My popularity will indeed increase at the end of the XXth century, with the devil's dediabolization. The frenetic consumption of hydrocarbons and fertilizers will give for a moment the illusion to