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.
Anon crunches some numbers
Submitted 3 weeks ago by Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works to greentext@sh.itjust.works
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/4f7bcf6a-b3ba-41eb-8087-b09915995dae.jpeg
Comments
DaddleDew@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Now if only our technology can speed up the biggest scientific problems of our day without politics getting in the way of progress.
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Oh we’re speeding up the problems alright
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
The hunter-gatherer cultures we see today actually seem to have a lot of free time. Seems like technological and cultural progress has different mechanics.
I’d say agriculture’s influence is that it’s a big incentive for people to stay in one place and develop relative dense communities, that density is what is actually speeding up progress.
rustyfish@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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.
tetris11@feddit.uk 3 weeks 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
LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks 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?
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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.
arrow74@lemmy.zip 3 weeks 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.
echodot@feddit.uk 2 weeks 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.
ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 2 weeks 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!
lemmyknow@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
@grok draw me an exponential graph
rustyfish@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
✅ spicy
Taalnazi@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
fuck grok, by the way, it’s like the grox
ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
How long do we have left before we are hitting a milestone per second?
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You forgot the part where we genocided 95% of males after we learned how to grow things.
brisk@aussie.zone 2 weeks ago
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
grue@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Agriculture is a Hell of a drug.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Also cooking before you eat matters a lot
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
We did that to quite s large degree even before we were modern humans, 2-400kya
Glitterbomb@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Speaking of drugs, it probably just took 190k years for someone to work up the courage to eat the mushrooms growing out of the poop.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
Starving people are highly motivated.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It also requires a shit ton of work compared to hunting and gathering.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Technology grows exponentially. What doesn’t add up is OOP’s brainpower.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Yup, it turns out it’s a lot easier to build on something than create something from scratch.
absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz 2 weeks 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.
joyjoy@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Anon (plural) isn’t exactly famous for their intelligence
figjam@midwest.social 3 weeks ago
they spent a large chunk of that 190k years hooting at each other because it took FOREVER to develop language
ch00f@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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.
echodot@feddit.uk 2 weeks 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.
Vytle@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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.
Alloi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Solid point, yeah, but 20 years ago was 2005.
you SHUT YOUR SLUT WHORE MOUTH!!
prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Twenty years ago was and will always be 1992, due to the world ending in 2012.
You may see signs of continued world activities, but this is actually the post-world credits scene, which is expected to go on for 10 to the power of 97 years, and cost 10 to the power of 112 dollars when you account for inflation.
Psythik@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
As a 4090 owner, I can confidently say that we don’t have photorealistic graphics yet.
But I get your point.
Cattail@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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
steeznson@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Fake: Anon understands maths
Gay: Anon thinks about hairy men
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
Return to monkee
commiunism@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks 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.
codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks 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.
LycoriseBelladonna@ani.social 3 weeks ago
Congrats anon, you just reinvented Historical Materialism.
skepller@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
There’s no need to farm if few humans there are can sustain themselves via farming
That is wisdom right there
commiunism@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Whoops, that’s what you get when you don’t read what you write
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
ThePyroPython@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Anon forgets that progression isn’t linear.
Unknown_0671@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
me when i arbritrarily define what progress means
JasSmith@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks 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!”
tequinhu@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or not, but I believe that either:
- Yes, they are equivalent accomplishments
- 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)
Sgt_choke_n_stroke@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Once humans started cooking food and writing stuff down. We progressed rapidly.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks 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.
krunklom@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
The person before you is referencing the speed lf development. It is very likely that humans possessed relatively sophisticated language for the 190k years ebfore civilization happened. Exponential, or at least greatly accelerated, growth seems to really pick up after writtrn language happens in many cases.
theres evidence of cooking by honinid species stretching back well, WELL before homo sapiens arrived on the scene, and plenty of evidence suggesting people like had sophisticated language for that time as well.
KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
It’s about the communication of technology, not the technological advancement itself. Language is a relatively recent human adaptation.
marcos@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yes, it took a really long time for people to start adding numbers.
Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Why didn’t they use a calculator then?
The CIA is hiding something
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
They lost it behind all the abacuses.
tgirlschierke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
We got from the first flight to the Moon landing in 66 years.
greygore@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
piccolo@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
We didnt lose our ambitions. The geopolitics have changed. The space race was ultimately was a big dick measuring contest between to super powers. When the soviets couldnt make it to the moon, there was no reason to push further.
lessthanluigi@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Yea, I remember a documentary when I was in 5th grade in 2007 talking about how we would have landed on mars by 2015. 2025 and not even any real progress by elon going towards mars.
Humanity lost its ambition like I lost mine, complete with self abuse
lessthanluigi@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Hmmmm… Makes you think, doesnt it? Pretty suspicious… /s
tflyghtz@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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.
Honytawk@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
Ok, time to burn some books!
wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Probably
daggermoon@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Y’all ever wish we were still cave people?
Notyou@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks 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.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Plus floride and iodine anonymously save millions of lives, before we even get to penicillin and germ theory.
LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks 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.
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Pretty sure you would’ve only died once.
irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
No.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 3 weeks 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.
NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 2 weeks ago
It makes more sense when you know there were only a few thousand humans and they were basically Sun readers.
Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
The notion of “human progress” is a narrative we tell ourselves that doesn’t really apply to reality.
WanderWisley@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
What if our society is built on top of an older more advanced destroyed civilization?
lessthanluigi@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
Well yea anon, earth has existed for only 6,000 years when God created the earth. Duh!
/s
Sanctus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Progress is exponential, anon.
That first spark is much harder to produce than the fire that follows.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
shit good point