There wasn’t really a material need to invent concepts such as agriculture, debt and other kinds of concepts we recognize as part of documented human history and development. There’s no need to farm if few humans there are can sustain themselves via farming and gathering, neither do you need wheels for transportation. Once there was a historical need due to higher populations or weather not allowing foraging, that’s when the concepts got invented and allowed us to build on that with other discoveries and concepts that led us here.
If there’s one hard lesson of history I keep relearning, it’s that almost nothing ever happens until it materially is required to happen. Language and agriculture waited until population density was high enough. The industrial revolution didn’t happen until the logistics and population sizes again necessitated massive changes, even though the steam engine was hundreds of years old. Revolutions don’t happen until the population is starving.
If anything in history is impressive it’s the rare individuals and societies that change before they’re forced to by material necessity (and those cases are often debatable). Really dampens the notion of idealism being viable.
Congrats anon, you just reinvented Historical Materialism.
There’s no need to farm if few humans there are can sustain themselves via farming
That is wisdom right there
Whoops, that’s what you get when you don’t read what you write
190k years of a classless society and modern leaders try to tell us capitalism works better than communism although its crumbling after 200 years
The secret to having an idyllic, utopian society is to not leave any records so that future people can just make shit up about you.
Ok, time to burn some books!
It makes more sense when you know there were only a few thousand humans and they were basically Sun readers.
Progress is exponential, anon.
That first spark is much harder to produce than the fire that follows.
no it must be aliens
shit good point
Yes, it took a really long time for people to start adding numbers.
Why didn’t they use a calculator then?
The CIA is hiding something
They lost it behind all the abacuses.
Every invention or discovery sped up our development. We wasted hundreds of thousands of years chasing prey and foraging for food with little to no time or energy to spare for anything else. Agriculture gave us excess time and energy to pursue other things than bare survival. Writing allowed us to better record and share ideas and knowledge. Mathematics allowed us to better understand the world. Fertilizer allowed us to boost our food production and population, leading to more people to help science and technology ahead. Computers allowed us to almost instantly solve problems that would have taken centuries to do by hand, further speeding up our technological development. All of it has been exponential so far.
Now if only our technology can speed up the biggest scientific problems of our day without politics getting in the way of progress.
Oh we’re speeding up the problems alright
Nooooo! Not like this :´(
The hunter-gatherer cultures we see today actually seem to have a lot of free time. Seems like technological and cultural progress has different mechanics.
I’d say agriculture’s influence is that it’s a big incentive for people to stay in one place and develop relative dense communities, that density is what is actually speeding up progress.
Take it back farther.
First cellular life 3,800,000,000 years ago. Then 3,300,000,000 years of just single cell organisms. Then in the last 15% of the history of life on Earth, everything else.
Agriculture is a Hell of a drug.
Also cooking before you eat matters a lot
We were cooking but now we’re cooked
We did that to quite s large degree even before we were modern humans, 2-400kya
Speaking of drugs, it probably just took 190k years for someone to work up the courage to eat the mushrooms growing out of the poop.
It also requires a shit ton of work compared to hunting and gathering.
We got from the first flight to the Moon landing in 66 years.
Less mind blowing but still shocking to me - it’s been 53 years since we last set foot on the moon, much less gone beyond that. Humanity has lost our ambition.
Yea, I remember a documentary when I was in 5th grade in 2007 talking about how we would have landed on mars by 2015. 2025 and not even any real progress by elon going towards mars.
Humanity lost its ambition like I lost mine, complete with self abuse
Werner von Braun, the primary architect of the Saturn V rocket that took us to the moon, had plans to get us to Mars by 1984. Not sure that was completely realistic, but it’s hard to believe that 40 years after that we don’t even have any serious plans.
I’m sorry to hear about your self abuse. This internet stranger is hoping that you’re in a better place.
We didnt lose our ambitions. The geopolitics have changed. The space race was ultimately was a big dick measuring contest between two super powers. When the soviets couldnt make it to the moon, there was no reason to push further.
Hmmmm… Makes you think, doesnt it? Pretty suspicious… /s
Technology grows exponentially. What doesn’t add up is OOP’s brainpower.
Technology grows exponentially.
There’s a compounding effect to advances in different fields. But I would posit it’s not exponential, but sigmoid.
Early in the study of a scientific field, discoveries are slow and difficult. But as the benefits of research are industrialized, you see a critical mass of research and human labor invested in applied sciences. You see a surge in development up until you hit a point of diminishing returns. Then the benefits of research diminish and the cost of maintaining the libraries of information and education grow beyond the perceived benefit of further academic work. Investments slow and labor product diminishes over time. Existing infrastructure cements itself as the norm and improvements become more expensive to impose. Finally, the advances in technology plateau for a period of time.
Eventually, you hit on another breakthrough and there’s a new surge in investment and novel infrastructure, until that well of new useful information is exhausted.
Periods of rapid and transformative growth may look meager and unimpressive in hindsight simply because you are standing on the shoulders of giants. But can anyone seriously argue that the steam engine (17th century) was less significant than the nuclear power plant (20th century), when a nuclear power plant has - at its core - a very high efficiency steam engine? We don’t seem to recognize 300 years of internal combustion as a period of relative technological stagnation.
Yup, it turns out it’s a lot easier to build on something than create something from scratch.
While that may be true for individual technologies; in aggregate across all technologies.
Technical growth seems exponential; maybe sometime in the future technical advancement itself will resemble the ‘S’ curve; but for now we are still growing our technical prowess extremely quickly.
It may also be correlated with the population, though. Specifically the working age population.
I imagine that, as populations decrease and you have fewer people available to actually do any research, technological advancement also stagnates and slows down. If populations ever start increasing again in the future, then I imagine technological development will grow as well
It’s almost as though we shouldn’t have made killbots 🤔
Technical growth seems exponential
I mean, what are you measuring that’s seeing exponential growth? Certainly not economic growth, as that’s plateaued globally in the prior decade. Not material productivity growth, as we’ve squeezed most of the juice out of agricultural and metallurgical gains of the early 20th century. Even Moore’s Law isn’t holding up anymore, with transistor density hitting a soft ceiling (just ask Intel).
What are you pointing to that’s still growing at an exponential rate? Other than AI botspam, I can’t find it.
Material Science, the decades of research with carbon are starting to become evident in real products. Superconductor research continues to move forward.
Medical Science, the advancements are crazy. Especially in the surgical space. Targeted treatments are Just on the cusp of being viable. mRNA vaccines are a whole other level, their utility over the next few decades will be immense.
Bioscience, the rate of progress in this field is so interesting. So many problems that are falling to custom microorganisms, it is great to see.
Agricultural gains, are not even close to finished. I agree to era of brute force agriculture is over, but intelligent targeted farming has huge potential.
The second space age is happening right now. We are watching in real time, the rapid advancement of aerospace technology.
I could go on and on. Just because computing tech has hit a temporary plateau, doesn’t mean that the rest of science has slowed down.
Many are saying we are beginning to see the top of the S right now. Our grandparents may have been alive for Kitty Hawk and the moon landing. Surely we would notice if science were advancing faster than that right now.
In my lifetime I went from a single button joystick playing a square shooting squares at other squares to a device that fits in my pocket and can access the entirety of collected knowledge in the blink of an eye, have a conversation with me that’s nearly indistinguishable from talking to another human, and store every photo and song I’ve ever collected. We have no idea what will come next.
Idk, compared to going to the moon, I’m underwhelmed.
Anon (plural) isn’t exactly famous for their intelligence
The notion of “human progress” is a narrative we tell ourselves that doesn’t really apply to reality.
they spent a large chunk of that 190k years hooting at each other because it took FOREVER to develop language
Several million not 200k
And the reason is that the species invented agriculture due to natural climate change (not to be confused with the current man-made climate change if anyone was worried) which allowed for a significantly larger portion of the population to not have to work on making food. Also the industrial revolution was its own similar thing.
If you count homo habilis and homo erectus, then yes. Homo sapiens are closer to 300K then 200k.
Something interesting occurred genetically around 60-65K years ago with sapiens that kicked cultural development into high gear, so really should start counting from there.
Big AFAIK: The anatomically correct human first appeared roughly 300.000 years ago. In the next 200.000 years they almost certainly genocided all their relatives. After a couple of behavioural changes here and there they had a mutation about 50.000 years ago which changed their brains, improved their communication skills immensely and they finally and truly became what humans are today. But they still wandered around until they finally started growing shit in the ground about 13.000 years ago. But it took about 7.000 additional years for some nerd to start writing roughly 5.000 years ago.
So yeah. The milestones are happening in ever shorter intervals.
Extrapolating from this, major milestones would happen faster and faster until 2023, where all remaining major milestones happened simultaneously with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4. For only $200/mo, you can experience this magical moment for yourself with unlimited access to our best ChatGPT models!
Source on that mutation? 50 000 years ago humans were already spread across Africa, Asia and Australia. That makes the idea of a critical mutation after that sound implausible
You forgot the part where we genocided 95% of males after we learned how to grow things.
How long do we have left before we are hitting a milestone per second?
There was no mutation, or at least there’s no evidence for it. The big change 50.000 years ago likely happened because population density finally became large enough to meaningfully transmit and preserve culture.
@grok draw me an exponential graph
fuck grok, by the way, it’s like the grox
More like gross
As in gross misuse of this planet’s resources
Oh that too.
For context, the Grox are a species in Spore, the evolution simulator from 2008, made by Maxis (which got bought by EA).
In there, the Grox are an aggressive species, which control a vast empire around the Milky Way’s core, and can only live on T-0 planets. In Spore, planets have a “terraforming score” of T0, T1, T2, up to T3.
A T0 is unlivable and is too hot, cold, humid, or dry, too thick or thing an atmosphere. It has no species.
T1 or T2 is what Earth has in the game. T3 is the “perfect” world. You can terraform a planet to T3 using the Staff of Life, which you get at the Milky Way’s Core.
So, by proxy, I’m already calling Musk’s Grok a ruination of the world.
You can terraform to t3 without staff of life.
Also T3 is closer to earth since it has more biodiversity
Yes but it’s a pain without the staff of life.
✅ spicy
They genocided each other too.
The skeletal remains that we find of males at dig sites have vast amounts of damage to them, and we find significantly less women and girl skeletal remains. Aeons later and the heterogeneity of the Y chromosome is suspiciously low in contrast to that shown in mtDNA. That’s a lot of killing and raping
Wait, I am stupid. Does that mean that many men died, and only few procreated? And assuming the birth rates are the same, why wouldn’t there be women skeletons? After all, everyone dies, whether in a fist fight over who gets to have sex at 14 or of cancer at like 70?
Does that mean that many men died, and only few procreated?
Actively bludgeoned by another tribe and then thrown in a pit. These are young men, I should add
why wouldn’t there be women skeletons?
They are not killed, but captured and carried away as spoils of war to the conquering tribe
They are not killed, but captured and carried away as spoils of war to the conquering tribe
So why aren’t there women skeletons at those conquering tribes? They had to die somewhere.
So why aren’t there women skeletons at those conquering tribes? They had to die somewhere.
There probably are, but we don’t stumble across them as easily as we do the mass grave dig sites I think
I believe you misread, they said a high number of males with evidence of trauma. Basically a very large percentage of male skeletons showed damage. The original comment didn’t say there were no female skeletons.
Also depending on the dig site mass graves of men killed in combat are common. Those would obviously lack women.
I wouldn’t say genocided per se. We have pretty significant percentages of non-homo sapien DNA. Which implies a decently high degree of inter-breeding.
My money is on a combination of inter-breeding leading to genetic extinction through dilution, resource competition (strained by changing environmental conditions), and of course inter-group conflict.
There’s good evidence that homo sapiens didn’t invent the shovel. That was technology almost certainly taken from another human species, which suggests a fairly integrated society. You could imagine different species of human all living together, it is certainly behaviour that has been observed in other primates so there is precedent.
Damn, imagine the levels of segregation, speciesm and genocide we would see if other human species had thrived and grown like us.
