Anon crunches some numbers

Comments

• Sanctus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Progress is exponential, anon.

  That first spark is much harder to produce than the fire that follows.

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  • umbrella@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    no it must be aliens

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    • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      shit good point

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• rustyfish@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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  • ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Extrapolating from this, major milestones would happen faster and faster until 2023, where all remaining major milestones happened simultaneously with thr release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4. For only $200/mo, you can experience this magical moment for yourself with unlimited access to our best ChatGPT models!

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  • Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    There was no mutation, or at least there’s no evidence for it. The big change 50.000 years ago likely happened because population density finally became large enough to meaningfully transmit and preserve culture.

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  • tetris11@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    They genocided each other too.

    The skeletal remains that we find of males at dig sites have vast amounts of damage to them, and we find significantly less women and girl skeletal remains. Aeons later and the heterogeneity of the Y chromosome is suspiciously low in contrast to that shown in mtDNA. That’s a lot of killing and raping

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    • LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Wait, I am stupid. Does that mean that many men died, and only few procreated? And assuming the birth rates are the same, why wouldn’t there be women skeletons? After all, everyone dies, whether in a fist fight over who gets to have sex or of cancer at like 70?

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  • arrow74@lemmy.zip ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I wouldn’t say genocided per se. We have pretty significant percentages of non-homo sapien DNA. Which implies a decently high degree of inter-breeding.

    My money is on a combination of inter-breeding leading to genetic extinction through dilution, resource competition (strained by changing environmental conditions), and of course inter-group conflict.

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    • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      There’s good evidence that homo sapiens didn’t invent the shovel. That was technology almost certainly taken from another human species, which suggests a fairly integrated society. You could imagine different species of human all living together, it is certainly behaviour that has been observed in other primates so there is precedent.

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  • lemmyknow@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    @grok draw me an exponential graph

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    • rustyfish@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      ✅ spicy

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    • Taalnazi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      fuck grok, by the way, it’s like the grox

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  • Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    You forgot the part where we genocided 95% of males after we learned how to grow things.

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• DaddleDew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Every invention or discovery sped up our development. Agriculture gave us excess time and energy to pursue other things than bare survival. Writing allowed us to better record and share ideas and knowledge. Mathematics allowed us to better understand the world. Fertilizer allowed us to boost our food production and population, leading to more people to help science and technology ahead. Computers allowed us to almost instantly solve problems that would have taken centuries to do by hand, further speeding up our technological development. All of it has been exponential so far.

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  • Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Now if only our technology can speed up the biggest scientific problems of our day without politics getting in the way of progress.

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    • porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Oh we’re speeding up the problems alright

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• bitjunkie@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Technology grows exponentially. What doesn’t add up is OOP’s brainpower.

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Technology grows exponentially.

    There’s a compounding effect to advances in different fields. But I would posit it’s not exponential, but sigmoid.

    Image

    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.

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yup, it turns out it’s a lot easier to build on something than create something from scratch.

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    • absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      While that may be true for individual technologies; in aggregate across all technologies.

      Technical growth seems exponential; maybe sometime in the future technical advancement itself will resemble the ‘S’ curve; but for now we are still growing our technical prowess extremely quickly.

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  • joyjoy@lemmy.zip ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Anon (plural) isn’t exactly famous for their intelligence

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• figjam@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  they spent a large chunk of that 190k years hooting at each other because it took FOREVER to develop language

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• Cattail@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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

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• echodot@feddit.uk ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  God these people are dumb.

  Imagine thinking like that. Does this guy not know how technology works, has he been alive for only 5 minutes.

  If you want to see the rapid progress of technology go look at video games, 20 years ago if you had 30 polygons on screen at the same time you were doing well, now we have photo realistic graphics.

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  • Vytle@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Solid point, yeah but 20 years ago was 2005.

    GTA: San Andreas released 21 years ago.

    Half-life 2 released 21 years ago.

    Morrowind released 23 years ago.

    Ocarina of Time released 27 years ago.

    Crash Bandicoot released 29 years ago.

    Star Fox released 32 years ago and had 500-600 tris on any given frame.

    DOOM also released the same year, but is not true 3D

    Obviously your point still stands, but full true 3D games were common by the late 90’s, and pseudo 3D games were prevelant as early as '92 with Wolfenstein 3D.

    Unfortunately, time flies.

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• grue@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Agriculture is a Hell of a drug.

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  • Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Also cooking before you eat matters a lot

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    • porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      We did that to quite s large degree even before we were modern humans, 2-400kya

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  • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It also requires a shit ton of work compared to hunting and gathering.

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• Sgt_choke_n_stroke@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Once humans started cooking food and writing stuff down. We progressed rapidly.

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  • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Actually the biggest factor was most likely the development of language, which probably required certain evolutionary traits in order to be possible. With language, collaboration and cooperation become much easier, which leads to fire and cooking and other ideas like that. You get to writing things down a lot later.

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• ch00f@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Take it back farther.

  First cellular life 3,800,000,000 years ago. Then 3,300,000,000 years of just single cell organisms. Then in the last 15% of the history of life on Earth, everything else.

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• steeznson@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Fake: Anon understands maths

  Gay: Anon thinks about hairy men

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• commiunism@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  There wasn’t really a material need to invent concepts such as agriculture, debt and other kinds of concepts we recognize as part of documented human history and development. There’s no need to farm if few humans there are can sustain themselves via farming and gathering, neither do you need wheels for transportation. Once there was a historical need due to higher populations or weather not allowing foraging, that’s when the concepts got invented and allowed us to build on that with other discoveries and concepts that led us here.

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  • codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    If there’s one hard lesson of history I keep relearning, it’s that almost nothing ever happens until it materially is required to happen. Language and agriculture waited until population density was high enough. The industrial revolution didn’t happen until the logistics and population sizes again necessitated massive changes, even though the steam engine was hundreds of years old. Revolutions don’t happen until the population is starving.

    If anything in history is impressive it’s the rare individuals and societies that change before they’re forced to by material necessity (and those cases are often debatable). Really dampens the notion of idealism being viable.

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    • LycoriseBelladonna@ani.social ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Congrats anon, you just reinvented Historical Materialism.

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  • skepller@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    There’s no need to farm if few humans there are can sustain themselves via farming

    That is wisdom right there

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    • commiunism@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Whoops, that’s what you get when you don’t read what you write

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• ThePyroPython@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Anon forgets that progression isn’t linear.

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• tflyghtz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  190k years of a classless society and modern leaders try to tell us capitalism works better than communism although its crumbling after 200 years

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  • WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The secret to having an idyllic, utopian society is to not leave any records so that future people can just make shit up about you.

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    • Honytawk@feddit.nl ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Ok, time to burn some books!

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• Unknown_0671@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  me when i arbritrarily define what progress means

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  • JasSmith@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Is this the anthropological equivalent of cultural relativism? “Yeah maybe we got to mars but Grog figured out how this berry makes him shit a lot and that’s an equivalent accomplishment!”

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    • tequinhu@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or not, but I believe that either:

      1. Yes, they are equivalent accomplishments
      2. The environments are so drastically different that even comparing doesn’t make any sense

      I believe we shouldn’t underplay the “over the shoulder of giants” effect, if you are able to engineer a rocket without worrying about starvation/diseases/etc it is because your ancestors have figured all of that out (and it is absolutely not simple to figure things out without someone holding your hand and teaching you)

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• marcos@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Yes, it took a really long time for people to start adding numbers.

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  • Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Why didn’t they use a calculator then?

    The CIA is hiding something

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      They lost it behind all the abacuses.

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• wesker@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Image

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  • Hobbes_Dent@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Image

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    • Deceptichum@quokk.au ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Image

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  • Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Probably

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• daggermoon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Y’all ever wish we were still cave people?

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  • Notyou@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Ehh…not really. I enjoy too many of the things that make life more comfortable. Plus I would have died already. If not by some hunting mishap then when my appendix tried to kill me about 10 years ago.

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    • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Plus floride and iodine anonymously save millions of lives, before we even get to penicillin and germ theory.

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  • LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    maaaan…

    Although, to be fair, without semi-modern medicine, I’d have died 2-3 times as a kid, and without semi-modern surgery, I’d at least be crippled as a result of being a stupid teenager.

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    • WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Pretty sure you would’ve only died once.

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  • irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    No.

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  • Honytawk@feddit.nl ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Absolutely not

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  • lost_faith@lemmy.ca ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I woulda been dead around 10 if not for the medical technology

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  • fading_person@lemmy.zip ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Metaphorically, I live in a came I’m sort of a caveman

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  • lessthanluigi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Would have choked myself to death in the womb, so no

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• LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Several million not 200k

  And the reason is that the species invented agriculture due to natural climate change (not to be confused with the current man-made climate change if anyone was worried) which allowed for a significantly larger portion of the population to not have to work on making food. Also the industrial revolution was its own similar thing.

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  • Simulation6@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    If you count homo habilis and homo erectus, then yes. Homo sapiens are closer to 300K then 200k.
    Something interesting occurred genetically around 60-65K years ago with sapiens that kicked cultural development into high gear, so really should start counting from there.

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• Prunebutt@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  The notion of “human progress” is a narrative we tell ourselves that doesn’t really apply to reality.

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• WanderWisley@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  What if our society is built on top of an older more advanced destroyed civilization?

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  • TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Didn’t know Graham Hancock was on Lemmy.

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    • WanderWisley@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Image

      Hello there 👋🏽

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  • Honytawk@feddit.nl ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    We would see evidence of that. Which we don’t.

    We do see evidence of gigantic monsters that roamed the Earth millions upon millions of years ago.

    If they invented some technology, it was either made from paper, or we would see fossils of it. But we don’t see fossils of it, nor is paper very capable as a technology.

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• lessthanluigi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Well yea anon, earth has existed for only 6,000 years when God created the earth. Duh!

  /s

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