It makes more sense when you know there were only a few thousand humans and they were basically Sun readers.
We got from the first flight to the Moon landing in 66 years.
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.
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
Hmmmm... Makes you think, doesnt it? Pretty suspicious... /s
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.
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
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.
As a 4090 owner, I can confidently say that we don't have photorealistic graphics yet.
But I get your point.
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.
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.
Solid point, yeah, but 20 years ago was 2005.
you SHUT YOUR SLUT WHORE MOUTH!!
Once humans started cooking food and writing stuff down. We progressed rapidly.
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.
It's about the communication of technology, not the technological advancement itself. Language is a relatively recent human adaptation.
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.
Technology grows exponentially. What doesn't add up is OOP's brainpower.
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.
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.
Many are saying we are beginning to see the top of the S right now. Our grandparents may have been alive for Kitty Hawk and the moon landing. Surely we would notice if science were advancing faster than that right now.
In my lifetime I went from a single button joystick playing a square shooting squares at other squares to a device that fits in my pocket and can access the entirety of collected knowledge in the blink of an eye, have a conversation with me that's nearly indistinguishable from talking to another human, and store every photo and song I've ever collected. We have no idea what will come next.
Idk, compared to going to the moon, I'm underwhelmed.
Technical growth seems exponential
I mean, what are you measuring that's seeing exponential growth? Certainly not economic growth, as that's plateaued globally in the prior decade. Not material productivity growth, as we've squeezed most of the juice out of agricultural and metallurgical gains of the early 20th century. Even Moore's Law isn't holding up anymore, with transistor density hitting a soft ceiling (just ask Intel).
What are you pointing to that's still growing at an exponential rate? Other than AI botspam, I can't find it.
Material Science, the decades of research with carbon are starting to become evident in real products. Superconductor research continues to move forward.
Medical Science, the advancements are crazy. Especially in the surgical space. Targeted treatments are Just on the cusp of being viable. mRNA vaccines are a whole other level, their utility over the next few decades will be immense.
Bioscience, the rate of progress in this field is so interesting. So many problems that are falling to custom microorganisms, it is great to see.
Agricultural gains, are not even close to finished. I agree to era of brute force agriculture is over, but intelligent targeted farming has huge potential.
The second space age is happening right now. We are watching in real time, the rapid advancement of aerospace technology.
I could go on and on. Just because computing tech has hit a temporary plateau, doesn't mean that the rest of science has slowed down.
I will spot you medical and bioscience, as that's been an undiscovered country until fairly recently.
But when you compare the advent of plastics or even paper to modern carbon fiber, the progression of the latter is glacial by comparison and of relatively marginal benefit. Same with agriculture, which enjoyed a surge in productivity with modern fertilizer that's never been matched. Or rocketry/telemetry, which began to plateau somewhere between Sputnik and Voyager.
That's not to say we're making no further progress. But every subsequent research step is taking more man-hours and materials than the last, while the benefits are comparatively slimmer. This is a second or first derivative decline, depending on how you want to measure things. But the promise that we're just around the corner from a better mousetrap declines as we begin to run into the hard material limits of our universe.
The speed of light, Planck's constant, the gravitational constant, the Boltsmann Constant - these are things we can know and apply. But they also represent a ceiling beyond which we can't exceed. Whether you're fabricating a microprocessor or launching a rocket ship, our material sciences are running into them all and forcing us to make economic trade-offs.
There's no exponential growth to be found. Nothing comparable to what we enjoyed from the 19th to 20th centuries.
Just because computing tech has hit a temporary plateau, doesn’t mean that the rest of science has slowed down.
Computing is a notable example because we reached it so quickly, despite a certain optimism in the industry that lead to some very bad long term economic choices.
And advances in computing, coupled with the advent of AI, were supposed to be what got us to "The Singularity" which Sci-Fi nerds fantasized over without deeply interrogating the math of their predictions. The magical point at which we'd be post-scarcity, because computers were so advanced they'd take care of everything for us, is vaporware. It's not real and never will be.
We aren't racing towards a technological infiniti. We are exhausting a finite curve of possible discovery.
Basically all of our technology it based on the manipulation of electromagnetism.
I doubt that possible discovery is exhausted at all, there are three other fundamental forces we don't know how to manipulate yet.
Hell there may be fundamental forces we are as yet unaware of.
Other than nuclear power and weapons; which liberate energy from the weak force. We don't use any other force directly.
At this stage, direct manipulation of the other fundamental forces, is science fiction. We don't know how..... yet.
Just to point out a, the first "modern" plastic, polystyrene, was discovered in 1839. The widespread use of plastics didn't occur till the 1950's....a full 110 years later. Carbon fibre was first developed in 1958, and is widely used today, less than 70 years later. I would say CF is more widely used today compared to plastics in the 1950's.
If you look at the very first thing that could be called a plastic, you'd need to go back around a thousand years.
Don't let perspective bias fool you, things are developing faster than ever.
Yup, it turns out it's a lot easier to build on something than create something from scratch.
Anon (plural) isn't exactly famous for their intelligence
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.
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
How long do we have left before we are hitting a milestone per second?
Extrapolating from this, major milestones would happen faster and faster until 2023, where all remaining major milestones happened simultaneously with the 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!
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.
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.
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.
Damn, imagine the levels of segregation, speciesm and genocide we would see if other human species had thrived and grown like us.
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
Progress is exponential, anon.
That first spark is much harder to produce than the fire that follows.
no it must be aliens
shit good point
they spent a large chunk of that 190k years hooting at each other because it took FOREVER to develop language
Every invention or discovery sped up our development. We wasted hundreds of thousands of years chasing prey and foraging for food with little to no time or energy to spare for anything else. 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, which meant more brains to figure things out. 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.
Agriculture is a Hell of a drug.
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.
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.
Fake: Anon understands maths
Gay: Anon thinks about hairy men
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 hunting 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.
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.
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.
