/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.10902134]

Anatomically modern humans emerged somewhere around 50,000 years ago.

Why is that only in the past few hundreds years we have started making significant advancements in science and technology?

[Anonymous No.10902145]

>>10902134

Is this a serious question? Are you not familiar with how exponential technological advancements occur? Or how difficult it is to start from literally nothing? No fire, no wheel, no preknowledge of anything, no textbooks, no agriculture, no anything.

[Anonymous No.10902152]

>>10902134
To pass knowledge down from one generation to the next you need language. To make that knowledge more durable you need writing. To accelerate the creation of new knowledge you need education.

[Anonymous No.10902156]

Decrease in war and violence. Once we stop killing each other in massive numbers it gives us the stability we need to do things like build libraries and schools and write books.

[Anonymous No.10902159]

>>10902156
>Once we stop killing each other in massive numbers
Did this happen?

[Anonymous No.10902160]

>>10902156
haha gay!

[Anonymous No.10902166]

>>10902159
In places where there have been advances in science and technology, yes. ie, everywhere except Africa and the Middle East

[Anonymous No.10902173]

>>10902156
''Suddenly, after Grog stopped beating Cruc with a rock, he started to write books and build libraries instantly. Even though he didn't even know how to write, or how to build, or how to make paper, or how to fucking communicate''

[Anonymous No.10902174]

>>10902134
because for most of human history everybody was illiterate

There is no such thing as exponential technological advance, it's a myth. It's simply that we suddenly had billions of people and most of them are literate. Obviously that's going to make technology progress faster than having less than ten thousand literate people in the entire world.

[Anonymous No.10902175]

>>10902166
>I only studied math and science the post.
You really need to branch out more.

[Anonymous No.10902176]

>>10902160
>gay
Why the homophobia?

[Anonymous No.10902221]

The invention of agriculture allowed for the capturing and feeding of slaves which kicked off the first production revolution

[Anonymous No.10902224]

[Anonymous No.10902229]

>>10902134
Because they weren't neuroanatomically equivalent.
Read the 10,000 year explosion.

[Anonymous No.10902246]

>>10902174
This

[Anonymous No.10902255]

>>10902174
>There is no such thing as exponential technological advance, it's a myth.
>It's simply that we suddenly had billions of people and most of them are literate.
But what's the point of having literate people if books are so rare and expensive? Enter Gutenberg and the printing press: now many people can get books for relatively cheap and this will lead to many more inventions. Enter the internet: now even more people have access to even chepaer information than before, and this will lead to even more progress.

Looks like you believe in exponential technological advance after all.

[Anonymous No.10902264]

>>10902255
Exponential is a misleading term. Human civilization has advanced in leaps and bounds. Humans went from shitting in the woods to building houses and then went without progress for thousands of years repeat advancement and stagnation.

[Anonymous No.10902305]

>>10902264
"Exponential" is used in a very loose sense here since most people who use the word "exponential" don't even know exactly what an exponential function is. There is little doubt though that technological advancement has been accelerating, it doesn't matter whether truly exponentially or not.

>Humans went from shitting in the woods to building houses and then went without progress for thousands of years repeat advancement and stagnation.
The thing is that those dry spells of stagnation seem to be getting shorter and shorter. Egyptians lived about 4,000 years without any major advance, but then the Greeks came along and they started building gadgets with Archimedes and Heron. Then you get a period of (relative) stagnation towards the end of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages, but even during that time the Arabs made some minor improvements to Greek science and then you get an explosion of new science with the Renaissance. Galilei and Newton are the turning point and from then on you don't get any prolonged period of true stagnation. Learned societies start to spring up and the pursuit of science becomes autistically systematic. Barring catastrophic collapse (which might happen sooner or later, sicne nothing lasts forever) it's very unlikely that we will see any prolonged period of stagnation anymore. If anything, things will accelerate even more with memetic AI and increasing computational power.

[Anonymous No.10902308]

>>10902305
You're making a fallacy. There's no evidence that returns will [math]continue[/math] to be exponential. It's just as likely that we'll hit a wall and the human race will die on this planet jacking off in VR cubicles as the sun burns out.

[Anonymous No.10902314]

>>10902308
Its like you're predicting the future of what's already happening.

[Anonymous No.10902329]

>>10902308
There is no evidence that the Sun will rise tomorrow, Hume-senpai. We can all be radical skeptics if we want, but you can't deny that there IS a trend and that trend is acceleration. The trend may end sooner or later (it is very likely to end at some point) but it is disingenuous to pretend that there is no value in this analysis just because we can't achieve absolute certainty (we never can).

[Anonymous No.10902527]

>>10902134
Widespread increases in education and literacy, coupled with increased cross cultural trade and therefore resource availability

[Anonymous No.10904099]

We are only a little better at doing the same shit we could do 300 years ago. Transportation and communication contribute to monkey see, monkey do. War has probably done more than education. World domination gets everyone on the same page. It was probably a bitch to get a common language in a community, at first. Making ropes and finding water and shit. I don't think most modern people could make a successful wheel and axle. Cooking is an "invention" that is under appreciated. Now we do this.

[Anonymous No.10904101]

>>10902134
Geniuses cause scientific advancement, europe was the only place that gave geniuses freedom.

[Anonymous No.10904104]

>>10902156
Nonsense, the very first thing Homini invented was stone weapons to kill other homini. The very information network you use was originally based on a military information transfer network called ARPAnet so once again war can be correlated with technological advancement.

[Anonymous No.10904203]

>>10902156
war has always been a major driver of scientific discovery and technical innovation

[Anonymous No.10904227]

>>10904203
Name one scientific discovery driven by war.

[Anonymous No.10904238]

>>10904227
Just a few from WWI
>Synthetic Rubber
>Blood Banks
>Ultrasound
>Haber–Bosch Process
>Plastic Surgery

[Anonymous No.10904255]

>>10904238
Those are fine technical innovations, but I don't see any scientific discoveries there.

[Anonymous No.10904256]

>>10902166
How people get this delusional is beyond everything.

[Anonymous No.10904277]

Only recently has man been able to get off his tractor, due to time saving innovations, truly contemplate how the world might work.

[Anonymous No.10904327]

>>10902134
Breakout points.

[Anonymous No.10904381]

>>10904099
>We are only a little better at doing the same shit we could do 300 years ago
That is pretty fucking retarded.

[Anonymous No.10904444]

>>10904381
Care to elaborate? We had electricity and automation, medicine, surgery. Some forms of long distance communication, ideas for flight and submarines. How is it retarded if I'm not as easily impressed as you? It was the same old phone lines that ended up being the internet. And before that, they were telegraph lines.

[Anonymous No.10905310]

>>10902134
Anatomically modern humans 50,000 years ago.
Our Brians have gotten bigger in last 1000 years