It is actually wild to think about the progress humanity has made in the last hundred years or so, we went from the Wright brothers to walking on the moon in a human lifetime.
And Bezos got to ride his penisrocket to the edge of space
Not even just the moon. Landing ships on other planets, landing craft on asteroids and returning to earth with samples, and having a craft beyond our solar system. That is nuts.
progress humanity has made
That word implies a positive growth. Technological advancement seems like a better fit. Although we did that, and many tinkering with productivity, our life standarts was not consistent with that.
What's even more of a mind-fuck is that on cosmological scales all that has happened in such a briefly miniscule time period that it might as well have not happened at all
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Exponential growth. That first 195,000 years was every tribe figuring out super basic stuff we take for granted, then gradually building upon that with other basic stuff we take for granted. Even before agriculture, pottery, metallurgy, herbal medicine, the basic knowledge these were built from took millennia to work out and pass down.
The real secret sauce was communication. Once tribes started sharing knowledge, suddenly the base of knowledge to built on got higher, and broader. Written language, better means of travel, this sped up the process. Electronic communication has made that knowledge base pretty much universally accessible and combinable.
Progress is faster when you're not limited to what your direct tribal ancestors figured out and passed down.
A lot of that knowledge was also either discovered by accident, or through trial and error. The scientific method is actually quite recent, plus we are now much better at sharing information.
Take metallurgy as an example. It's such a strange concept: There are these very specific rocks that you can put into an unusually hot fire to turn them into this hard, shiny stuff.
I have no idea how so many different people figured out bronze.
It's been updated to 300 000 years 5 years ago from this discovery: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebel_Irhoud Funny how in this science we can get +50% older from a single discovery.
Also a LOT of those people had PTSD from wars or from lion attacks or from simply losing a massive amount of their offspring to illness and accidents. They raised your ancestors anyway.
This cycle has only recently been broken and not everywhere.
And we're about to screw it all up.
Let's just end it with worldwide nuclear flames at the exact same time so we may for a second make the sun worry for its place as the brightest object in our solar system.
Aside from the little disagreement we had and still working on, we're doing OK I guess
Fire > Agriculture > Antibiotics > Rockets
Step 1: Ooga Booga Step 2: Fire Step 3: ???? Step 4: Rockets
I'd put the transistor in there, but yeah, basically that.
You forgot the "invention" of the solid state transistor that happened right after the 1947 Roswell UFO crash
Written language. No joke. It allowed us to grow collectively, logarithmically.
Exactly, knowledge retention across generations. It's probably one of the reasons ( and ability to make tools), dolphins didn't become an advanced civilization.
Aaaaagriculture
And balls of steel
But really it's agriculture that enables us to have time and space to create things like society and technology. A society with rule of law and intellectual property allows for a lucky few to spend most of their time understanding how to make nature work for us, leading to industrialization and the crazy growth we're able to experience in a human lifetime.
I would say we are still in the very beginning stages of planetary exploration. Once someone is making a profit in space without military or scientific money, the fun will really begin.
Laziness.
"Alright fellas, time to start walking to the next camp. They dont call us nomads for nothing."
Paleolithic me: "Alright hear me out. What if, and I know this is gonna sound crazy, what if we just stay here. Forever?"
Agriculture is the moment we were no longer animals and no longer part of the food chain
Ya, we've known for decades that
cavemencavepeople were so malnourished by today's standards that their brains simply didn't have the nutrients to grow smart, despite being genetically the same us contemporary 200kg scholarly gentlemen.Space travel will never be profitable because it's so expensive. We have plenty of minerals here on earth. The only benefit of asteroid mining is using it to build spaceships already in orbit.
If we have enough resources to actually explore other planets, we'll probably be post-scarcity. There's not going to be any profitable reason to go to space. It'll just be to have the experience. There's nothing special in space, it's just rocks with no air.
Not agriculture, industrialization allowed the time and thus specialization.
It really breaks my mind. And the actual biggest progress is in the last 150 years. And how things accelerated in the last 30..
We went from first powered flight to landing on the moon in just 66 years. Bananas!
Speaking of Bananas, the artificial Banana flavoring that tastes nothing like the bananas you get in the store actually tastes like Gros Michel bananas, which are functionally extinct. You can order a bunch from some special greenhouses, but they're something like $20 a pound.
We went from a room-sized machine that could compute 5,000 additions per second to pocket size supercomputers that run at nearly a million times that speed in a similar span of time.
Advancements in manufacturing processes and computers. And computers help store and send information, enabling more improvements.
Computers are just rocks that we tricked to think.
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Writing
It's also why I think a lot of people are underestimating just how far LLMs will be able to go as they improve at extracting patterns and models from written language.
What writing was able to encode was responsible for a massive leap in human intelligence.
Might sound crazy but a guess I have is encountering and consuming natural entheogens. Early cave paintings (7000-9000 years ago) depict psychedelic mushrooms.
The alterations in perception and perspective these substances cause could explain experimentation in other areas of life, leading to changes in how people lived. The modern era just built on top of past advances.
Just a thought from a guy who use to trip and had some life-altering times. Also worth noting Steve Jobs considered his experiences with LSD to be a profound experience, “one of the most important things in my life”. I wonder if we’d have Apple or many other modern era advances if he hadn’t had his encounters with psychedelics.
Terence McKenna called this the Stoned Ape Theory; eating psychedelic mushrooms gave us our first religious experiences and was an evolutionary catalyst that brought about language, arts, philosophy, etc. It's been widely disregarded as a viable theory but who knows, it's fun to think about at least.
There's no doubt in my mind psychedelics are responsible for the giant apple became. He saw the barriers in tech to. The layman and I bet that perspective helped.
I love the stoned ape theory.
An alien came down and knocked up a monkey. Or something like that.
So human. Trying to do everything in the last moment every time.
Invention of internet.
ITT: viral Civ VII marketing campaign
Maybe we're the most special humans ever who were the first in hundreds of thousands of years to figure out you can put seeds in the ground and grow crops. Or maybe the official story of our history is wrong.
You, anon, and your ancestors did not do anything. You were not cavemen. You did not build the pyramids, the great wall, or even the eiffel tower. Maybe someone’s great grandparent around here helped invent computers or machine language but that was someone else. The only thing WE have done historically is contribute to pollution and the fediverse.
Well, you might be the progeny of an insular line of worthless losers, but, as an example, basically every person with European ancestry is a direct descendant of Charlemagne. Most Americans will also find an ancestor who signed the Declaration of Independence, and that wasn't even that long ago, historically speaking, and with time everyone on the continent will be the descendant of practically all of the Founding Fathers.
If you'd bothered to think about the implications of the exponential growth of your ancestors, two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, etc, and the fact that the population of prehistoric Earth wasn't in the trillions and quadrillions you'd have figured this out on your own.
Plus, even if everyone else was like you, with a family tree with only a trunk, don't think about it too hard or you might hurt yourself, that would still leave you with caveman ancestors.
Fucking duh.
Speak for yourself, dickhole. I contribute every day to open source projects and help make the internet a better place as well as all the scholck I have to deal with at work. The agile projects I work on all day, ever day. The stuff I work on when I'm not getting paid. The art I make. The LED toys I like to make. Not everyone just sits around and consumes.
