Anon thinks about human history

Comments

• Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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.

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  • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The only thing separating modern man from caveman is education, and that explains an awful lot about the world.

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    • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Writing is hella OP. Please nerf.

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  • GrammatonCleric@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Technological progress is exponential.

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    • sinkingship@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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  • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • starman2112@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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  • nonailsleft@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    And Bezos got to ride his penisrocket to the edge of space

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• agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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.

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  • blazeknave@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Hold up. You’re saying diversity helps?!

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    • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Well, my main point was more about cumulative knowledge, but diversity definitely helps too.

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  • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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  • bob_lemon@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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• Sabre363@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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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  • AeroLemming@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yeah. The idea of a Star Trek-like community of technologically similar alien races all developing in parallel and making alliances/wars with each other is not reflective of reality at all. If we ever encounter aliens, they will either have essentially no technology like animals or will be so far beyond us that they are effectively gods. The odds of us running into a civilization at an even remotely similar level of development are infinitesimal.

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• oce@jlai.lu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s been updated to 300 000 years 5 years ago from this discovery: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebel_Irhoud Funny how in this science we can get +50% older from a single discovery.

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• Seraph@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Also a LOT of those people had PTSD from wars or from lion attacks or from simply losing a massive amount of their offspring to illness and accidents. They raised your ancestors anyway.

  This cycle has only recently been broken and not everywhere.

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  • YarHarSuperstar@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    And we’re about to screw it all up.

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• ininewcrow@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Aside from the little disagreement we had and still working on, we’re doing OK I guess

  A Brief Disagreement

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• mvirts@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Aaaaagriculture

  And balls of steel

  But really it’s agriculture that enables us to have time and space to create things like society and technology. A society with rule of law and intellectual property allows for a lucky few to spend most of their time understanding how to make nature work for us, leading to industrialization and the crazy growth we’re able to experience in a human lifetime.

  I would say we are still in the very beginning stages of planetary exploration. Once someone is making a profit in space without military or scientific money, the fun will really begin.

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  • Agent641@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Laziness.

    “Alright fellas, time to start walking to the next camp. They dont call us nobads for nothing.”

    Paleolithic me: “Alright hear me out. What if, and I know rgis is gonna sound crazy, what if we just stay here. Forever?”

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    • joostjakob@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Switching to agriculture was the opposite of lazy. It was much harder work for a poorer standard of living. The issue was population pressure simply did not allow the old way of life anymore.

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  • rab@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Agriculture is the moment we were no longer animals and no longer part of the food chain

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  • exhaust_fan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Ya, we’ve known for decades that cavemen cavepeople were so malnourished by today’s standards that their brains simply didn’t have the nutrients to grow smart, despite being genetically the same us contemporary 200kg scholarly gentlemen.

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  • KevonLooney@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Space travel will never be profitable because it’s so expensive. We have plenty of minerals here on earth. The only benefit of asteroid mining is using it to build spaceships already in orbit.

    If we have enough resources to actually explore other planets, we’ll probably be post-scarcity. There’s not going to be any profitable reason to go to space. It’ll just be to have the experience. There’s nothing special in space, it’s just rocks with no air.

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• crsu@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Fire > Agriculture > Antibiotics > Rockets

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  • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Fire > agriculture > writing > mathematics > science > civilization gets painted as heretics, slaughtered, books burned and then you start all again from Agriculture level.

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    • Klear@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You could make a religion out of this.

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  • MareOfNights@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Step 1: Ooga Booga Step 2: Fire Step 3: ??? Step 4: Rockets

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  • RaoulDook@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You forgot the “invention” of the solid state transistor that happened right after the 1947 Roswell UFO crash

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  • Magnetar@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’d put the transistor in there, but yeah, basically that.

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• Reddfugee42@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Written language. No joke. It allowed us to grow collectively, logarithmically.

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  • Crashumbc@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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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• CoachDom@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It really breaks my mind. And the actual biggest progress is in the last 150 years. And how things accelerated in the last 30…

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  • khannie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    We went from first powered flight to landing on the moon in just 66 years. Bananas!

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    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Speaking of Bananas, the artificial Banana flavoring that tastes nothing like the bananas you get in the store actually tastes like Gros Michel bananas, which are functionally extinct. You can order a bunch from some special greenhouses, but they’re something like $20 a pound.

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    • aniki@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeah but then what? All we did was make the mhz smaller and more efficient and all we got were Teslas and self-driving suicide machines.

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  • stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    it is called exponential growth

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    • Rubanski@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      But why didn’t it start 20000 years ago

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    • CoachDom@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It trully is

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  • someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The last 30 have been cool technologically. But for real life changing things? You probably saw more in other 30 year periods.

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    • CoachDom@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Internet? AI? AIDS Cure? There is quite a lot recently

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• workerONE@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Advancements in manufacturing process and computers

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  • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Computers are just rocks that we tricked to think.

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    • ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      So there I was, just me and the lads chilling out in nature, when along come these cunts who dig us up and melt us down and taser us so we’ll work for them. It’s not right!

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• OutrageousUmpire@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Might sound crazy but a guess I have is encountering and consuming natural entheogens. Early cave paintings (7000-9000 years ago) depict psychedelic mushrooms.

  The alterations in perception and perspective these substances cause could explain experimentation in other areas of life, leading to changes in how people lived. The modern era just built on top of past advances.

  Just a thought from a guy who use to trip and had some life-altering times. Also worth noting Steve Jobs considered his experiences with LSD to be a profound experience, “one of the most important things in my life”. I wonder if we’d have Apple or many other modern era advances if he hadn’t had his encounters with psychedelics.

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  • nomous@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Terence McKenna called this the Stoned Ape Theory; eating psychedelic mushrooms gave us our first religious experiences and was an evolutionary catalyst that brought about language, arts, philosophy, etc.

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  • can@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    There’s no doubt in my mind psychedelics are responsible for the giant apple became. He saw the barriers in tech to. The layman and I bet that perspective helped.

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  • pozbo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I love the stoned ape theory.

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• kromem@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Writing

  It’s also why I think a lot of people are underestimating just how far LLMs will be able to go as they improve at extracting patterns and models from written language.

  What writing was able to encode was responsible for a massive leap in human intelligence.

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• JoShmoe@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  You, anon, and your ancestors did not do anything. You were not cavemen. You did not build the pyramids, the great wall, or even the eiffel tower. Maybe someone’s great grandparent around here helped invent computers or machine language but that was someone else. The only thing WE have done historically is contribute to pollution and the fediverse.

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  • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Well, you might be the progeny of an insular line of worthless losers, but, as an example, basically every person with European ancestry is a direct descendant of Charlemagne. Most Americans will also find an ancestor who signed the Declaration of Independence, and that wasn’t even that long ago, historically speaking, and with time everyone on the continent will be the descendant of practically all of the Founding Fathers.

    If you’d bothered to think about the implications of the exponential growth of your ancestors, two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, etc, and the fact that the population of prehistoric Earth wasn’t in the trillions and quadrillions you’d have figured this out on your own.

    Plus, even if everyone else was like you, with a family tree with only a trunk, don’t think about it too hard or you might hurt yourself, that would still leave you with caveman ancestors.

    Fucking duh.

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  • aniki@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Speak for yourself, dickhole. I contribute every day to open source projects and help make the internet a better place.

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• bobs_monkey@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  An alien came down and knocked up a monkey. Or something like that.

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• Pharmacokinetics@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Invention of internet.

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• Sibbo@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  So human. Trying to do everything in the last moment every time.

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• Nobody@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Maybe we’re the most special humans ever who were the first in hundreds of thousands of years to figure out you can put seeds in the ground and grow crops. Or maybe the official story of our history is wrong.

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• Hupf@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  ITT: viral Civ VII marketing campaign

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