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.
Technological progress is exponential.
Law of adjacent possibilities
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.
And Bezos got to ride his penisrocket to the edge of space
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.
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
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?!
Well, my main point was more about cumulative knowledge, but diversity definitely helps too.
It's been updated to 300 000 years 5 years ago from this discovery: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebel_Irhoud Funny how in this science we can get +50% older from a single discovery.
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.
Aside from the little disagreement we had and still working on, we're doing OK I guess
Written language. No joke. It allowed us to grow collectively, logarithmically.
Fire > Agriculture > Antibiotics > Rockets
Fire > agriculture > writing > mathematics > science > civilization gets painted as heretics, slaughtered, books burned and then you start all again from Agriculture level.
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.
Laziness.
"Alright fellas, time to start walking to the next camp. They dont call us nomads for nothing."
Paleolithic me: "Alright hear me out. What if, and I know this is gonna sound crazy, what if we just stay here. Forever?"
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.
It really breaks my mind. And the actual biggest progress is in the last 150 years. And how things accelerated in the last 30..
We went from first powered flight to landing on the moon in just 66 years. Bananas!
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.
Advancements in manufacturing processes and computers. And computers help store and send information, enabling more improvements.
Computers are just rocks that we tricked to think.
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!
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.
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.
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. It's been widely disregarded as a viable theory but who knows, it's fun to think about at least.
An alien came down and knocked up a monkey. Or something like that.
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
