this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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Greentext

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 128 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] LH0ezVT 36 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago

Ooga booga no pyramids

[–] conciselyverbose 8 points 4 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.

[–] [email protected] 107 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (8 children)

"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.!<

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (5 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 4 months ago (1 children)

anon assumes development of science and tech is linear

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 4 months ago

start rolling down hill

going slow

go faster

hmm

[–] [email protected] 47 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

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 20 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

coming soon to a dank river valley near you

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 43 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Shit can get pretty wild when you start writing stuff down

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 40 points 4 months ago (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 4 months ago (1 children)

And storage / dissemination of that language.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Thats why the fediverse is the next step in evolution.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago

Brainrotmaxxing

[–] LH0ezVT 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Let's carve our memes into stone and bury them for future archaeologists.

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[–] loaExMachina 24 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 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

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

We didn’t have writing for 190k years

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 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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[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (6 children)

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...

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[–] ThrowawayPermanente 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (3 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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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[–] VirtualOdour 8 points 4 months ago (5 children)

We haven't even hit the steep bit of the curve yet, wait until you see where we are by the end of this century!

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