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.
Ooga booga no pyramids
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.
that is purposeful. it wouldn’t make much of a point if it took 10 days.
I mean sure it would? That’s rhe whole point is that exponential growth quickly reaches massive quantities. Like literally after 120 days I doubt that many lilypads would fit on earth.
I’m not sure what lily pads so I went with the largest which have around 7.069m2 of surface area or 0.0000007069km2 surface area.
Earth has a surface area of 510,064,472km2
After 120 days of doubling we have
6.64614x1035 * 7.069x10-6 = 4.6982Ex1030
So you are correct but it’s also around 23x the surface area of the sun.
I love how their goof helped further show how humans suck with exponential numbers
I think the lilypads might need to be smaller than an atomic nucleus? Someone check my math. But still larger than a Planck length, so it is fine.
they wouldn’t, but it’s not a real pond, and not real lily pads. i was going to say 20 but went for 120 to make the ratio more extreme, not to make it realistic.
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?
Shit can get pretty wild when you start writing stuff down
Memes are pretty radical
And much older than writing.
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
coming soon to a dank river valley near you
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.
The answer is probably language. Before advanced language was developed, there wasn’t a good way to pass along any knowledge that was gained by an individual.
And storage / dissemination of that language.
Thats why the fediverse is the next step in evolution.
Brainrotmaxxing
Let’s carve our memes into stone and bury them for future archaeologists.
4chan knows how to destroy it but nobody had made the effort lol.
I thought it was because proper farming.
Like being able to support larger groups of people, where individuals could specialize in other things than hunting, gathering and whatever else was keeping the early humans busy.
On the other hand I’ve heard we’ve been possibly farming long before 10,000 BCE.
Language probably predates Homo Sapiens as our close relatives such as Homo Neandertalensis and Homo Denisova also had adaptations for articulated speech.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01391-6
Beside, populations today that have never had agriculture or traits we associate with civilization and who live secluded, like the North Sentinelese, all have languages.
I think it’s best explained by environmental factors, rather than something interior to humanity. After all, most of human’s existence was during the Pleistocene, but all recorded history is within the Holocene (except now we’re entering the Anthropocene). Many modern studies account for the climate shifts to explain the development of agriculture:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1113931109
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0959683611409775
Most traits we associate with civilization are linked to agriculture and sedentary.
Language is much older than just 10k years. There’s a few reasons to think that language might have developed with erectus, which could make language 10x older than the ‘human specie’, according to anon.
That’s why i said advanced language. Lots of animals have language. Crows have language
Usually the distinction is between “advanced communication” which some animals display, and “language”, which only humans have.
Whether you want to call it language or advanced language, what we do today is way older than 10k years. There are stories that have been dated to 100k and if the arguments about erectus are correct, then what you call advanced language is probably 2m+ years old.
As IoaExMachina correctly highlighted, language predates those 10k years.
For reference, Proto-Afro-Asiatic (ancestor of Egyptian, all Semitic languages, Amazigh, plus a lot others) is believed to have been spoken 12k~18k years ago. So… like, it was already old back then, and yet it has modern descendants.
And the role of language is probably not just communication, it’s also to formalise thought. It’s easier to think with language than without it, and you can reach more reliable conclusions.
The answer is agriculture, which lowered the standard of living and health of the individual, but sustained more people, allowed for specialization, permanent settlement and building large structures.
Yes there’s only one answer to how our species developed space flight
… wizards!
language => written down language => widespread literacy => affordable information (printing press) => internet => hypertext websites => search engines.
we went from struggeling to keep our knowledge arround to having access to almost the entire sum of human knowledge in a mostly convenient manner.
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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
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- first powered flight on a heavier than air craft. The first humans flew in 1783 on a hot air balloon.
This actually depends on your stance on oriental man-carrying kites, which have historical backing from the 6th century AD, but historians debate the exact standards of evidence.
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.
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
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.
We didn’t have writing for 190k years
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