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.
The only thing separating modern man from caveman is education, and that explains an awful lot about the world.
Writing is hella OP. Please nerf.
The Secret Superpower of Civilization.
(Reading is also kinda neat!)
Technological progress is exponential.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The ones that aren’t hybrid or EV, at least.
Mate, the first Prius came out in 2006. It’s 2024. That’s some stagnant ass growth if you ask me.
Actually the SECOND GEN prius came out in 2003. The first gen prius came out in 01 in Japan.
And? Look at the specs for a current gen prius, they’re bigger, faster, more efficient, plug in hybrid, and have better tech. They’ve come a long way.
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.
I would like you to look at the relative populations of slaves to free people, the rate of death by starvation, the rate of death by malaria, the rate of death in childbirth (both parent and child), and tell me we haven’t made significant positive growth.
It depends on if you watch one country or the world as the whole. I’m now in t-shirt, pants and throusers made somewhere in Asia or Africa. I don’t feel they have these rates just like ours. I’m a part of an elite to speak English language in my hole. These workers who produced everything in my house didn’t have that time to learn a foreign language, nor they have time to shitpost in it. I feel a little pity for when I despised to work with dangerous chemicals for a while in the past, and they did so for years, died from illneses caused by it, worked with bare hands and without respiratory protection, just to have a meal on the table. There are bad things happening we are isolated from, but it doesn’t mean theybdon’t happen.
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.
Hold up. You’re saying diversity helps?!
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.
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.
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