this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 93 points 2 years ago (8 children)

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.

[–] ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 96 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The only thing separating modern man from caveman is education, and that explains an awful lot about the world.

[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 64 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Writing is hella OP. Please nerf.

[–] pragmakist@kbin.social 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The Secret Superpower of Civilization.

(Reading is also kinda neat!)

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[–] GrammatonCleric@lemmy.world 40 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Technological progress is exponential.

[–] Grayox@lemmy.ml 17 points 2 years ago

Law of adjacent possibilities

[–] sinkingship@mander.xyz 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I think that's true for only a planet with indefinite resources. We haven't really hit many caps yet, but I believe things will start to slow down within a lifetime.

[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 24 points 2 years ago (2 children)

We're also, in my view, hitting the limits of what certain technologies can do. Internal combustion engines, for example, are near the limit of what they can do as far as efficiency is concerned. We're also bumping into the limits as far as semiconductors are concerned.

There's also diminishing returns with trying to wring out the very last piece of efficiency from a system, so yes, I do think we're going to see a plateau in terms of technological progress, at least in some areas.

[–] sinkingship@mander.xyz 12 points 2 years ago

This is true for older technologies.

Like combustion as you said, we used it a lot and pretty much designed it the best we can with the materials we know and have. But there will be completely new technologies opening up, like maybe fusion. Or solar we know already since a while but made major improvements the last decade and will probably improve it even more.

I was more thinking about how we had this technology rush. I think it is mostly due to the use of fossil fuels and therefore "incredible cheap" energy which also led to humans reproduce a lot. (incredible cheap in quotation marks, because we will probably have to pay the real price which is environmental damage and a modified atmosphere)

When you have a world with 3 times (random number based on nothing) more people you also have 3 times more great artists, scientists, etc. Of course only, if society stays more or less the same. Imagine how many great works we could have if the majority of great minds wasn't preoccupied paying for food and a place to stay like in a hamster wheel.

[–] aniki@lemm.ee 8 points 2 years ago (5 children)

We already are. There's a reason you don't see intel and amd chips past 5ghz, for example.

Or how modern cars are still functionally the same from 10 years ago just with more spyware and bloat.

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[–] nonailsleft@lemm.ee 8 points 2 years ago

And Bezos got to ride his penisrocket to the edge of space

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[–] Sabre363@sh.itjust.works 67 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] AeroLemming@lemm.ee 7 points 2 years ago

Yeah. The idea of a Star Trek-like community of technologically similar alien races all developing in parallel and making alliances/wars with each other is not reflective of reality at all. If we ever encounter aliens, they will either have essentially no technology like animals or will be so far beyond us that they are effectively gods. The odds of us running into a civilization at an even remotely similar level of development are infinitesimal.

[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 60 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

[–] blazeknave@lemmy.world 21 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Hold up. You're saying diversity helps?!

[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Well, my main point was more about cumulative knowledge, but diversity definitely helps too.

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[–] oce@jlai.lu 42 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] Seraph@kbin.social 31 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] YarHarSuperstar@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

And we're about to screw it all up.

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[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 30 points 2 years ago

Aside from the little disagreement we had and still working on, we're doing OK I guess

A Brief Disagreement

[–] crsu@lemmy.world 29 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Fire > Agriculture > Antibiotics > Rockets

[–] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 14 points 2 years ago

Fire > agriculture > writing > mathematics > science > civilization gets painted as heretics, slaughtered, books burned and then you start all again from Agriculture level.

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[–] CoachDom@lemmy.blahaj.zone 28 points 2 years ago (5 children)

It really breaks my mind. And the actual biggest progress is in the last 150 years. And how things accelerated in the last 30..

[–] khannie@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago (9 children)

We went from first powered flight to landing on the moon in just 66 years. Bananas!

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[–] Reddfugee42@lemmy.world 28 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Written language. No joke. It allowed us to grow collectively, logarithmically.

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[–] mvirts@lemmy.world 28 points 2 years ago (5 children)

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.

[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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?"

[–] joostjakob@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Switching to agriculture was the opposite of lazy. It was much harder work for a poorer standard of living. The issue was population pressure simply did not allow the old way of life anymore.

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[–] workerONE@lemmy.world 24 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Advancements in manufacturing processes and computers. And computers help store and send information, enabling more improvements.

[–] Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Computers are just rocks that we tricked to think.

So there I was, just me and the lads chilling out in nature, when along come these cunts who dig us up and melt us down and taser us so we'll work for them. It's not right!

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[–] kromem@lemmy.world 13 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] OutrageousUmpire@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

[–] nomous@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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.

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[–] bobs_monkey@lemm.ee 5 points 2 years ago

An alien came down and knocked up a monkey. Or something like that.

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