The PBS documentary, Humanity from Space, gives the interconnectivity of our modern world context in a way that is visually stunning and incredibly informative. It does this with a generous amount of panning cinematic shots, captivating CGI renderings, and interviews with both historians and scientists. Although this documentary's main point of interest is the history of all the major technological advancements that have been critical to the development of human civilizations, it can be used to inform discussions on human resource use over time as well. The documentary starts off with the agricultural revolution, the advancement that was the foundation of the first human civilizations and goes all the way to the development of the internet, explaining how and where each major revolution in between came to be. It was apparent by watching that over time as the human population has grown, many of the technologies that were the most significant were those that connected people, either by physical proximity (agricultural revolution, railroad and other vehicles) or through the use of a device (telegraph/phone/internet). As the human population has grown, so too has our level of connectedness. In order to achieve this, however, there has been quite a large price to pay. The amount of resources needed to fuel global power grids, build the roads we drive over, construct our cities, and power our vehicles, is incomprehensibly large. The primary example given for this massive demand for a resource was oil which drives our global economy and is extracted at global rate of about 4 million barrels an hour. What's more is that in just 150 years human development has already demanded the extraction of one trillion barrels, and this is just one of the resources exploited for human growth. There was little mention of the glaring errors made along the path to global connectivity in this film, however, and as a result the theme was disproportionally cheery. For example, the discovery of the Americas was depicted only as an opportunity for increased global trade, with no emphasis on the exploitation that followed.
