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Anon is an anthropologist (sh.itjust.works)
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[-] pixxelkick@lemmy.world 125 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] Norgur@fedia.io 27 points 11 months ago

Woah there. The oldest pyramids we know of are about 5000 years old. That's halfway to 10k.

[-] LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works 35 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 11 months ago

Ooga booga no pyramids

[-] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 8 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] pyre@lemmy.world 102 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

"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.!<

[-] emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 11 months ago

If it takes 120 days to be covered thats a huge fucking pond.

[-] pyre@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago

that is purposeful. it wouldn't make much of a point if it took 10 days.

[-] emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] Cypher@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

I’m not sure what lily pads so I went with the largest which have around 7.069m^2^ of surface area or 0.0000007069km^2^ surface area.

Earth has a surface area of 510,064,472km^2^

After 120 days of doubling we have

6.64614x10^35^ * 7.069x10^-6^ = 4.6982Ex10^30^

So you are correct but it’s also around 23x the surface area of the sun.

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[-] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[-] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 7 points 11 months ago

Nah just really small Lily pads

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[-] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 65 points 11 months ago

anon assumes development of science and tech is linear

[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 21 points 11 months ago

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

[-] Stern@lemmy.world 64 points 11 months ago

start rolling down hill

going slow

go faster

hmm

[-] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 47 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 11 points 11 months ago

But without eleytic rectangle humans are bored... so why no electric rectangle before?

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[-] lvxferre@mander.xyz 41 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] Klear@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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

[-] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 19 points 11 months ago
[-] Klear@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago

coming soon to a dank river valley near you

[-] Socsa@sh.itjust.works 7 points 11 months ago

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.

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[-] FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world 40 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Shit can get pretty wild when you start writing stuff down

[-] FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee 34 points 11 months ago

The Pleistocene (2,580,000 - 11,700 years ago) was fucking crazy cold and had a hella unstable climate. Not a nice predictable environment.

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[-] Kerb@discuss.tchncs.de 32 points 11 months ago

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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[-] bricklove@midwest.social 29 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 8 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] j4k3@lemmy.world 23 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[-] RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 11 months ago

Yes, people forget that a bit over a hundred years ago, there were less than a billion people on the planet.

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[-] shneancy@lemmy.world 22 points 11 months ago

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

[-] kemsat@lemmy.world 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

We didn’t have writing for 190k years

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[-] MrJameGumb@lemmy.world 17 points 11 months ago

Hey man, there are plenty of animals on this planet that have been around longer than human beings, and I don't see any of them writing an award winning Netflix limited series...

[-] Klear@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

Sharks are older than Polaris. The star...

[-] Death_Equity@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

They found the perfect design and just swim all day murdering instead of paying bills by doing bullshit for decades while wearing pants. Sharks and crocodiles have had it all figured out for hundreds of millions of years.

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[-] ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works 14 points 11 months ago

Yep. For most of human history technological progress amounted to getting a little bit better at smashing slightly sharper rocks over the course of hundreds of years.

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[-] SGforce@lemmy.ca 13 points 11 months ago

Yeah well. We kind of had to deal with bears the size of a fucking house for a while. At least until we wiped out their main food source. And rival hominids with at least spears.

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[-] general_kitten@sopuli.xyz 9 points 11 months ago

My own line of reasoning is that the speed of progress of technological advancement is dependent on the amount of people who can dedicate their lives to doing stuff other than trying to gather enough food and shelter to survive. So for the longest of times basically everyone had to just try to survive and maybe have an idea or two every now and then. Low human population and no-one able to dedicate themselves to innovation means extremely low innovation rate. But those rare times something really useful was developed and passed on to the next generation led to freeing more people to be able to dedicate themselves to innovation and thus increasing the amount of people one human can support with their work effort. This is a positive feedback loop so it has exponentially grown to today where one person's work can support multiple people making theoretically most of humanity free to advance technology.

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[-] theneverfox@pawb.social 9 points 11 months ago

Because for most of it, we were living our lives, planting the trees that gave us food, protecting the animals we ate from other predators, and just living off the land. We spread over the entire world and shaped the land to better suit us

We weren't primitive, for millennia we turned most of the world into a paradise built for us, then tore it down in a few centuries and are now flirting with extinction

[-] dildobaggins69@lemmy.world 17 points 11 months ago

That is a lovely picture you are painting but there is certainly no evidence we "built a paradise" for ourselves. There would still be famine, struggle for resources, war and uncountable problems in the daily struggle for survival.

It's not as simple as "past good, present bad".

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[-] nexguy@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

We've never lived in paradise. It has always been a hard struggle not to die all this time. That struggle is easier than ever but still a struggle.

[-] Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago

When I think about how long it took me to realize that you're supposed to pour tetra packs with the spout on top, I find no fault in pre modern man

[-] Dasus@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

Oldest stone axes are like a million years.

We're not the first smart species.

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[-] TootSweet@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

Civilization is anomalous. Yes.

[-] alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 6 points 11 months ago

Crop domestication

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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
409 points (100.0% liked)

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