Civilization is anomalous. Yes.
I would write some info. But I don’t want to trigger atheists roaming these parts.
Too late…
downvote
Where is your god now?
You don’t have to be an atheist to believe that the earth is more than 9000 years old. You just have to not be an idiot.
The fact that you thought I was implying a young earth creationist argument is hilarious.
Super external events can exist out of creation itself. External sources of knowledge that can be attributed with causing such a non-linear progress.
Such events is what an actual logical person (not faux logical, as most enthusiast atheists are) would seek to know about.
Yeah well. We kind of had to deal with bears the size of a fucking house for a while. At least until we wiped out their main food source. And rival hominids with at least spears.
And sloths almost as big!
Look out! It’s gradually coming this way!
A friend told me they were surprisingly fast, and you really wanted to stay away from big holes in the ground.
It’s mostly population density and specialization. You don’t have time to think when you’re doing everything yourself. The biggest advances come when we’re able to fund the best and brightest to basically do nothing but think.
After getting into writing some hard science fiction futurism, I find it much more interesting that we have so very little perspective about where we exist within the present. Our technology is crap, we’re poor as fuck, there is enormous wealth that dwarfs all the wealth on Earth and a whole lot of it is quite accessible if we tried, while we haven’t even scratched the surface of the technology available within biology. Our medicine and healthcare practices are primarily based on anecdotal or correlative nonsense, low sigma test results, and cherry picked terrible science. Many of us here, myself included, are outliers that the present healthcare system fails to help. We have it better than some people in history, but worse than others. It feels like our culture has this mindset like we are the end game; no vision of the future. The only stories told are those of dystopianism. We should change that.
Go solarpunk!
But isn’t that what genres like cyberpunk do? Technological progress (A(G)I, biotech, body modifications, true VR, you name it), but society is even shittier than now? Sure, it is to some degree a cautious tale, but I feel there are quite a lot of near-future hard-ish scifi visions around
What we need is near-future hard-ish sci-fi visions that view the world positively or at least as capable of change. A lot more Star Trek TNG than expanse.
You’re so right about healthcare. The only people who have faith in the healthcare industry have clearly never interacted with it. From the politicized researchers to the patient-facing morons it’s all mostly shit all the way down.
Yes, people forget that a bit over a hundred years ago, there were less than a billion people on the planet.
When I think about how long it took me to realize that you’re supposed to pour tetra packs with the spout on top, I find no fault in pre modern man
Crop domestication
Hey man, there are plenty of animals on this planet that have been around longer than human beings, and I don’t see any of them writing an award winning Netflix limited series…
Sharks are older than Polaris. The star…
They found the perfect design and just swim all day murdering instead of paying bills by doing bullshit for decades while wearing pants. Sharks and crocodiles have had it all figured out for hundreds of millions of years.
Sharks appeared around the same time (-200MY) the solar system was last on this side of the galaxy. Crocodiles evolved when the solar system was almost (-95MY) on the other side of the galaxy. Dinosaurs ruled for 3/4 (179MY) of an entire orbit.
The solar system orbits the galaxy once every 250MY.
That’s. Wack.
There was a period of 60MY where trees just kinda fell over and laid there because nothing had evolved to eat them.
The hormone monsters managed…
Exponential growth, thats about all there is to it. Advancing from clacking rocks to hunting deer is actually already a huge advancement.
Those 190k years in caves however werent non-advancing. A lot of advancements happened over those years.
Fires, wheels, knot tying, ceramics, pottery, grains, hunting, animal husbandry, medicine, language, art, music, rope…
Also, 10k years is after we gained writing of various forms to store information.
Keep in mind thats at the stage of shit like egypt, the great pyramids, etc. We were waaaaay beyond “cavemen” at that point. We already had trade routes, cities, nations, countless languages, doctors, etc.
The big issue was before that point, all our forms of storing information were just not able to stand the test of time very well, is all. We stopped being “cavemen” way before that mark though.
Woah there. The oldest pyramids we know of are about 5000 years old. That’s halfway to 10k.
Around 10k years before us, we developed from hunter-gatherer cavemen to neolithic city builders with irrigated farms, organized religion and and a feudal society in like 1000 years. That is also pretty quick. Sure, pyramids took a bit longer. But while pyramids are pretty damn impressive, no pyramids does not mean an “uncivilized” society.
Ooga booga no pyramids
Writing isn’t just storing information. It’s transmitting it across much greater distances, more times, with much less corruption.
Oral transmission is better than nothing, but written transmission inherently has better reach. Then the printing press allowing for mass reproduction of transmission, then the internet for rapid, much more democratized transmission. It’s the spread of ideas so they can intermingle that’s the super-accelerator.
Removed by mod
What appeal to authority do you mean?
Everything we do is built on top of something else. We needed to build a society capable of supporting industry and learning, then written language, mathematics etc.
Once you have the building blocks of society, everything else comes much faster.
start rolling down hill
going slow
go faster
hmm
language => written down language => widespread literacy => affordable information (printing press) => internet => hypertext websites => search engines.
we went from struggeling to keep our knowledge arround to having access to almost the entire sum of human knowledge in a mostly convenient manner.
search engines(accessible with giant, wired computers, slow as fuck) => search engines(often times literally more accesible than water. enshittified as hell)
anon assumes development of science and tech is linear
It’s exponential. The gap between 200k years ago and 10k years ago is pretty similar to the gap between 20k years ago and 1k years ago, or the difference between 2k years ago and 100 years ago. On a logarithmic scale, same distance, roughly the same delta in terms of the technology available
Which is why I think it’s wild people want to throw on the brakes now that we’re affecting the entire earth. I mean I understand that it seems like we’ve ended up in a bad spot ecologically if you only take the last 100 years into account. But why stop right on the most toxic version of humanity? Let’s push forward to our solarpunk future as soon as possible.
Pretty sure we had a triage stage during the whole prehistory to get to our point to randomly get an individual violent and cunning enough to survive the wilds and other competitors but helpful and sociable enough to survive within it’s tribe.
It was mostly agriculture and dense human settlements, I think. Once you have someone farming enough food for themself plus someone else, that “someone else” can do something else to progress technology. Sometimes with things that allow that farmer to produce enough food for three people, then five, so goes on.
guess what happens next
more food and more people who came to buy the food now you need people to help make the food and keep track of the sales and now you need houses for people to live in and people to make the houses, and now there’s more people and they invent things, which makes things better and more people come and there’s more farming and more people to make more things for more people and now there’s business, money, writing, laws, power
Society
coming soon to a dank river valley near you
Right, the history of human progress is literally the history of human cooperation. As the scale of human cooperation has expanded so has the scope of the problems we can solve.
We are actually quite close to having something resembling global consensus on a bunch of issues. It is only a handful of notable holdout states which are standing in the way of humanity effectively being able to draw down arms and focus on bigger issues.
coming soon to a dank river valley near you
Kurtzgesagt
Yup, aliens.
Raising cattle is more efficient when it has its own cattle! And crops.
