Developing crops that are worth farming was a really hard technology to develop and took thousands of years of slowly getting better aged better crops.
once we had them, civilization began.
We got from the first flight to the Moon landing in 66 years.
Hmmmm… Makes you think, doesnt it? Pretty suspicious… /s
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.
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.
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.
Cavemen were really busy chasing various animals and running away from various animals. Then there’s whole exploring new lands and encountering other humans species. Progress could be slow and cataclysm were a many
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.
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
