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.
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.
"something doesn't add up"
yes it does. that's exactly what it is you're describing. all of it adding up. as always people struggle with exponential growth because it's not very intuitive.
my favorite way to demonstrate the unintuitive nature of exponential growth is this question:
there's a pond, and a lily pad on it. the number of lily pads double every day on the pond. so on day 1 there's one, day 2 there's two, and on day 3 there's four... etc.
if it takes 120 days for the pond to get completely covered in lily pads, what day was only half of it covered?
!the answer is 119.!<
The standard story is "One Grain of Rice" https://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMT668/EMAT6680.F99/Martin/instructional unit/day4.exponential/excel/grainofrice.html
thanks, i love that story.
If it takes 120 days to be covered thats a huge fucking pond.
The pond is the Pacific Ocean.
Let's see...2^120 is 1.329•10^36 lily pads. Say 15cm diameter for a lily pad, that's got an area of 177cm^2. That's 10.3•10^38 cm^2.
The surface area of the Pacific Ocean is only 1.652•10^18 cm^2.
We're boned.
Nah just really small Lily pads
I don't disagree with your explanation of exponential growth or how it does answer for the speed at which we went from, say the magnifying glass to the hubble space telescope.
However, the exponential growth alone model does have a floor: it presumes that there was some kind of push, drive or want for progress. Like, as if there was a destination we're supposed to end up at and its just a case of how long it took to get there. It excludes the idea that people might not have wanted to.
People didn't want to toil all day in someone else's farm. In smaller numbers, on good land, people didn't have to do very much to get the food they needed. Its only when farming became developed and consistent enough that those living there had the numbers to go kill the people who lived on the good land.
Once we'd been, for all intense and purpose, domesticated by grain, "progress" was inevitable.
Another example would be the industrial revolution. People ask why it was so much faster here in the UK than France. It wasn't because of a desire for progress. Its that French people had a natural aversion to being worked for 12 hours a day in hell-like factories and workhouses. I mean, British people did too but they had mostly just been kicked off the common land they had lived on for centuries. So, they had no other place to go and begging and not having a job for more than three days was made illegal, punishable by being sent to to workhouses. At one points, they had more British soldiers fighting the riots at home than they had fighting napoleon.
my comment referred to knowledge more than anything. the more you know, the more you have to go from to learn new things. incredibly simplistic summary for very complex phenomena, but I wasn't going to go through the entire human history. there are breaking points and regression stages, but generally speaking it makes sense that the more you progress, the faster you can progress further. you have more tools.
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
start rolling down hill
going slow
go faster
hmm
That most people spend most of their time passively reading celebrity news on tiny black rectangle tells you everything you need to know about the rate of human progress.
But without eleytic rectangle humans are bored... so why no electric rectangle before?
What are TVs, Alex?
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
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.
Kurtzgesagt
Yup, aliens.
Raising cattle is more efficient when it has its own cattle! And crops.
Shit can get pretty wild when you start writing stuff down
The Pleistocene (2,580,000 - 11,700 years ago) was fucking crazy cold and had a hella unstable climate. Not a nice predictable environment.
That's the biggest reason why ~12,000 years ago was when modern humans really started taking off. The entire planet's climate changed in a way that made agriculture possible, and humans are really damn good at figuring out agriculture when we're able to
A lot of the comments are talking about writing being the game changer but it took generations of selective breeding crops and livestock to make them viable for domestication. We haven't found any evidence of domestication prior to about 12k years ago in archeology or genetics. There were many civilizations who built large cities and never needed a writing system.
I think it was A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry that pointed out, some of the oldest cities with any surviving architecture had stone walls ten feet thick. You don't start with ten-foot-thick walls. You work your way up to that.
A lot of what should be civilized history is just fuckin' gone.
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.
Yes, people forget that a bit over a hundred years ago, there were less than a billion people on the planet.
Go solarpunk!
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.
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 know how sometimes you're trying to solve a puzzle but you're stuck at the very beginning? You can spend hours looking at the puzzle and get nowhere. But then you spot it! the one step or the one logical conclusion you needed to advance, and you start blasting through the puzzle
it's that
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...
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.
Yep. For most of human history technological progress amounted to getting a little bit better at smashing slightly sharper rocks over the course of hundreds of years.
This is probably incorrect. Rocks preserve in the archaeological record so that's what we have the most evidence for.
Increasingly sophisticated knowledge of woodworking, textile science, plant and animal biology, mathematics and astronomy were no doubt developing alongside knapping techniques, that stuff just doesn't preserve well.
Because for most of it, we were living our lives, planting the trees that gave us food, protecting the animals we ate from other predators, and just living off the land. We spread over the entire world and shaped the land to better suit us
We weren't primitive, for millennia we turned most of the world into a paradise built for us, then tore it down in a few centuries and are now flirting with extinction
That is a lovely picture you are painting but there is certainly no evidence we "built a paradise" for ourselves. There would still be famine, struggle for resources, war and uncountable problems in the daily struggle for survival.
It's not as simple as "past good, present bad".
Also, elimination of most megafauna by overhunting, etc
There was always struggle over territory. Generally non lethal, just like predators facing off
There was no war. War requires agriculture - an army cannot march or camp without food constantly being shipped in
Famine also is usually due to agriculture - monocultures and short-sighted management of the environment.
There were hard times. Droughts happened, sickness happened, people were not always very cool to each other. These things weren't done on institutional scale, because the only institutions were meetings between groups occasionally sending representatives
The more I learn about ancient history, the more I realize we fucked everything up societally. Technology is great, and yes we have a lot less mothers dying in childbirth... Except we didn't for most of recorded history (and we're backsliding), because literal childbirth in the woods was better than delivery in a hospital until a century ago
We've never lived in paradise. It has always been a hard struggle not to die all this time. That struggle is easier than ever but still a struggle.
My own line of reasoning is that the speed of progress of technological advancement is dependent on the amount of people who can dedicate their lives to doing stuff other than trying to gather enough food and shelter to survive. So for the longest of times basically everyone had to just try to survive and maybe have an idea or two every now and then. Low human population and no-one able to dedicate themselves to innovation means extremely low innovation rate. But those rare times something really useful was developed and passed on to the next generation led to freeing more people to be able to dedicate themselves to innovation and thus increasing the amount of people one human can support with their work effort. This is a positive feedback loop so it has exponentially grown to today where one person's work can support multiple people making theoretically most of humanity free to advance technology.
Your don't need to only rely on reason for that.
It's quite obvious it's true when looking at history.
"Idle hands are the devil's playthings" is a really stupid saying, unless one truly does think of the devil as the Lightbringer.
Honestly the more one reads into history, the more one realises just how progress stifling Christianity has been. (Or Abrahamic monotheism in the first place.)
When the people around modern day Greece started having extra fish and wine so some of the ppl could take it easy and just chilax, they basically came up with the central ideas that are still central to our modern society. Democracy, morality, freedom, etc.
I think that's a generally accepted idea.
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
Oldest stone axes are like a million years.
We're not the first smart species.
I just looked this up because it sounds fake and guess what....
Looks like it is!
What is?
That there are tools older than a million years?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan
The Oldowan (or Mode I) was a widespread stone tool archaeological industry (style) in prehistory. These early tools were simple, usually made by chipping off one, or a few, flakes off using another stone. Oldowan tools were used during the Lower Paleolithic period, 2.9 million years ago up until at least 1.7 million years ago (Ma), by ancient Hominins (early humans) across much of Africa. This technological industry was followed by the more sophisticated Acheulean industry (two sites associated with Homo erectus at Gona in the Afar Region of Ethiopia dating from 1.5 and 1.26 million years ago have both Oldowan and Acheulean tools[2]).
I genuinely don't know what or how you "looked it up". Please, do enlighten me, I'm not trying to offend. Some sort of a misunderstanding?
It's not fake. @Dasus@lemmy.world is correct. Stone axes, fire control, language, carpentry, glue, ocean travel - heaps of smart things predate homo sapiens sapiens. We're not the first smart species.
Civilization is anomalous. Yes.
Crop domestication
We haven't even hit the steep bit of the curve yet, wait until you see where we are by the end of this century!
Its all about building ontop of the law of adjacent possibilities, which end up becoming an S tier for progress. Of course it started out slow.
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.
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.
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.
