/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.6482876]

How come humans with our intellectual capacity have existed for thousands of years but we made almost all of our technological advancement in the past 200-300 years?

Sometimes I think the history we learn in school is all a big lie, it simply doesn't make sense.

[Anonymous No.6482882]

>>6482876
the evolutionists will tell you its because our brain just evolved because we never needed technology before...which is BS. who didnt wish for iPhone 300 years ago?

[Anonymous No.6482890]

Because growth is exponential.

[Anonymous No.6482893]

>>6482876
singularity

[Anonymous No.6482897]

Because technological advancement is based on previous technological advancements and our "technological level" doesn't rise linear.

Neither does biological life, DNA based life is on earth for 4 billion years, but humans are around for only 200.000

[Anonymous No.6482894]

>>6482876
Because you need the necessary bases to work off, for one. Pyth's triangle or the sum[1, 100] shit is really easy to derive, even a kid the same age as the sum[1, 100] dude can easily do it. Why were these considered - and still are considered to this day - strokes of genius? Because 1- people are stupid; 2- they didn't have the bases current schoolkids get, making their job of figuring these out harder.
Same applies in general. Conversely, it makes it increasingly less likely that some non-PhD arrives at a useful result in anything, due to their not having the required bases to contribute to bleeding edge advancements.

[Anonymous No.6482895]

Capitalism

[Anonymous No.6482899]

>>6482882
I'm not sure if I understand you and I'm not sure if you understood me

what I'm saying is how do we know the time spans we are given are even remotely correct? Do we have any factual proof how long this technological advancement as taken us?

Maybe we're being lied to and we aren't advancing nearly as fast as you think we are, maybe it's almost like in 1984 and all the actual advancement is being kept from us

Or maybe we're absurdly wrong about our history

[Anonymous No.6482901]

>>6482876

We needed the printing press to facilitate the sharing of ideas.

[Anonymous No.6482903]

>>6482901
you cannot disprove the printing press hasn't existed for 50.000 years

[Anonymous No.6482906]

[Anonymous No.6482907]

>>6482903
prove*

[Anonymous No.6482910]

>>6482903
You cannot disprove that you're not a massive faggot.

[Anonymous No.6482912]

>>6482899
We have fossils and artifacts from everywhere on earth. It is extremely unlikely that we missed huge super robots from 1000 BC

[Anonymous No.6482916]

>>6482876
>How come humans with our intellectual capacity have existed for thousands of years but we made almost all of our technological advancement in the past 200-300 years?

Several reasons.

For one, because science and technology is a positive feedback loop. The more you know, the easier it is to learn things. The more advanced your tech, the more advanced tech you can build. Everything is interconnected. Even a relatively simple technological device involves thousands of different technologies and the efforts, direct and indirect, of millions of people from all over the planet. Hell, think of all the the things that had to happen so that your phone's plastic case could come into your possession, let alone the phone itself. Geology, chemistry, physics, manufacturing techs, information processing, and a vast global economy to support it all, with ships controlled by computers and navigating by satellites.

And second, it's just a matter of population. There are a whole lot more of us than ever before, and a much bigger percentage of us are educated. So you would expect the total intellectual output to be many times higher, even disregarding all other factors.

[Anonymous No.6482918]

>>6482876
How come anatomically modern humans have existed for 200 000 years, for 150 000 years used the same tools, never built anything proper, but 50 000 years ago suddenly started doing modern human things?

[Anonymous No.6482923]

>>6482912
you still didn't get me

I'm not necessarily arguing we've been further advanced than we are now, what I'm saying is we've been advancing at a much slower and much more constant rate than we're being led to believe

reality only exists through your eyes and in your memory, you cannot prove your eyes and your memory are lying to you. think about it for a second, it does NOT make any difference if something actually happened, or you only think it happened.

Maybe computers have existed for 10.000 years and the way you got to learn them has been a lie.

The thing is, that makes more sense to me than believing, "yea, so humans like us existed for hundreds of thousands of years but only 300 years ago somebody thought about you know, making an invention and abiding to the scientific method"

[Anonymous No.6482926]

>>6482876
Standing on The Shoulders of Giants OP.

We did just randomly start making things 200-300 years ago

[Anonymous No.6482927]

>>6482923
>aren't lying to you*

goddamn

[Anonymous No.6482931]

>>6482923

>A global conspiracy to falsify the entirety of human history makes more sense to me tahn exponential growth

[Anonymous No.6482933]

everything that took place before your birth could have happened an infinity ago and you would never know with absolute certainty

never

[Anonymous No.6482935]

>>6482876
Humans transfer knowledge better than any animal before us.

Major advancements were:

Actively showing/teaching and internalizing how much the learner understood.

Language so we could question and describe.

Written language so we could preserve and disseminate knowledge past the limitations of oral traditions.

Printing so a small group of people could inform the masses.

Telecommunications, and automated data retrieval.

The next leap is VR and ubiquitous telepresence.

We are collectively very powerful even if we are individually week, no one person knows all the systems in the space shuttle or cern but we can still build the thing.

[Anonymous No.6482937]

>>6482931
prove this growth is actually exponential, define what you mean by growth

all you do is spout buzzwords

[Anonymous No.6482940]

>>6482933
>everything that took place before your birth
Why before our birth? This universe could have burst into existence 5 minutes ago with everybody having implanted memories.

[Anonymous No.6482942]

>>6482918
Extraterrestrial beings

[Anonymous No.6482946]

>>6482940
exactly

and I'm being absolutely serious that it often unsettles me I will _never_ be able to tell apart memory from reality with absolute certainty

how do you cope with this?

[Anonymous No.6482947]

>>6482937
DO NOT RESPOND
This is very clearly a troll post.
I REPEAT: DO NOT RESPOND

[Anonymous No.6482948]

>>6482937
>all you do is spout buzzwords

Just because you don't know what they mean doesn't make them "buzzwords."

Exponential growth means that the rate of change of a quantity (in this case, technical knowledge) is proportional to that quantity. So basically, the more you know, the faster you learn.

[Anonymous No.6482949]

>>6482947
shill more

[Anonymous No.6482957]

>>6482946
You might not even be alive right now. You might just be a bubble in a dream of the universe.

[Anonymous No.6482960]

>>6482948
I study physics m8

you haven't defined what kind of growth you're talking about, when does it begin, what do you consider growth, prove this growth has actually been exponential

unless you take arbitrary starting points so to fit your argument I'm sure it won't actually come out exponential

it is impossible to prove something in the past happened, we can predict the future, but everything that happened in the past is unprovable

take a gun, shoot 100 people on the biggest square in your town in the face, nobody will be able to prove with 100% certainty you did this

[Anonymous No.6482964]

>>6482960

Exponential growth doesn't need a starting point you stupid fucking troll. Have fun in freshman physics.

[Anonymous No.6482963]

>>6482923
The scientific method is not all that old. Furthermore, think in terms of refining tools. I want to make a sharp rock, all I need is another, harder rock to chip bits off of the rock I want to make sharp. If I want to make an integrated circuit, I need the ability to grow high purity semiconductor crystals and lay down conducting leads onto it. That is significantly harder to do than smashing two rocks together. And since my crystal growth and lithography machines are rather intricate, they required a great deal of technology put into them. All the way down to making pointy rocks and rubbing sticks together to make fire. It all builds off of previous stuff and the current generation has a very wide base to build from and an accelerating rate of improvement as a result.

[Anonymous No.6482974]

>>6482964
if you want to prove the growth is exponential over its entire span of time, then yes

how is that low IQ of yours treating you?

>growth has been exponential for the past 300 years
>I conclude it has been this way for the past 30.000 years
retard

[Anonymous No.6482977]

>>6482946
>I will _never_ be able to tell apart memory from reality with absolute certainty

So what? Ultimately if there is some deceiver god trolling you by creating an entire false reality that is indistinguishable from a "real" one, there's nothing you can do about it anyway.

We have no choice but to trust that perception corresponds to reality. (And you do, whether you admit it or not.)

[Anonymous No.6482979]

>>6482960
>I study physics m8

epic

[Anonymous No.6482983]

>>6482977
do you think we will ever be able to find some way, I don't care how, to get rid of this problem?

some way to check reality, maybe there is some. then we cannot be deceived any longer.
maybe you could use one of the symmetries to check for reality.

>>6482979
I tipped my fedora twice

[Anonymous No.6482990]

>>6482895
the only post that makes sense

[Anonymous No.6483011]

>>6482960
>take a gun, shoot 100 people on the biggest square in your town in the face, nobody will be able to prove with 100% certainty you did this

are you being genuine right now?

[Anonymous No.6483014]

>>6482974
Honestly it probably has been but not in what we consider technology. But in metallurgy, masonry, and agriculture.

[Anonymous No.6483020]

>>6483011
Simulation theory bro

[Anonymous No.6483023]

>>6483011
are you stupid? of course

do you not know what 100% certainty means?

[Anonymous No.6483030]

>>6483011

Physics undergraduates are actually this autistic.

[Anonymous No.6483043]

>>6483030
>everybody on /sci/ has a physics degree or is a physics undergrad

[Anonymous No.6483372]

Well, let's think about it, shall we?

We started out as primitive, smelly beasts that could hardly use tools. No progress was made, BUT HOLD ON, some monkey found a way to use a tool, WOAH PROGRESS, SO MUCH PROGRESS HOW CAN THIS HAPPEN.

So now that tools have been found, they could actually develop on them. Make a spear instead of a club, a fishing rod instead of a net, so on and so forth.

After tons of development, we get led to discovery, and this is where lots of change happens, when humans had the TOOLS and RESOURCES to stop being nomads and live a life where they can farm and raise animals. The population grows and the extra population has to move out.

Eventually land runs out and people explore new areas. This has lasted for a while, lets fast forward a bit.

Most of the land has been discovered, we have maps of the world and transportation to move across it quicker. Every bit of land has been found and now, what's left for humans to do? Discover again, exactly.

After new materials have been found, economies, and all of the sudden, LOTS of people are born, what happens? Lots of those lots of people move over to jobs which leads to motivation of development.

More the population, the higher the progress.

[Anonymous No.6483427]

The black death killing off a bunch of peasants enabled feudalism to die, allowed urbanization to begin and the food surpluses that resulted from this initial disruption enabled constant population growth despite the occasional famine years. All this extra population meant that more people having specialised jobs became viable in society, which allowed more people to experiment and discover improvements to technology instead of being forced to think about nothing other than finding a source of food.

tl:dr More food = more people = denser living conditions = more people working on solving problems = more people teaching other people about the solutions that they discover.

Take away the surplus food and the whole thing collapses back to subsistence farming, which is exactly what global warming will already do regardless of wether or not we peak our carbon emissions now, 10 years from now or just keep on trucking until we wake up one day and have nothing but ashes to put on our plates.

[Anonymous No.6483463]

Because humanity loves to be stupid.
Just look at western civilization after rome fell to the arabs.

[Anonymous No.6483469]

>>6482876

Because giants and shoulders and sometimes standing on them isn't fun, and sometimes getting to stand on them takes time.

[Anonymous No.6483486]

The Ancient Greeks did a pretty good job at advancing human society, and that was much past 200-300 years ago.

[Anonymous No.6483497]

>>6482923
>reality only exists through your eyes and in your memory, you cannot prove your eyes and your memory are lying to you. think about it for a second, it does NOT make any difference if something actually happened, or you only think it happened.
This almost-solipsistic, metaphysical concept of "naive realism" is probably one of the most overused, obnoxious concepts in "philosophy".

[Anonymous No.6483502]

>>6483427
I think you got the whole Black death thing backwards, it killed off most of the feudal lords, priests and Papal patriarchy general allowing the free flow of information, in fact the survivors had to start thinking for themselves again and reject dogma as cawks started to fall off in the street. This in turn spawned the Reformation and Renaissance which in hindsight was obviously just a brief flicker of light in a 2000 year old dark age.

[Anonymous No.6483505]

>>6483486
You also have the middle ages when we pretty much didn't get any progress in anything since our ancestors were too busy fighting for religion and getting their asses kicked by barbarians. After that there was a steady increase in innovation and technology though.

[Anonymous No.6483515]

Considering it takes geniuses to push knowledge forward, progress obviously is slow.

[Anonymous No.6483578]

Protip: Modern humans are currently on their 6666.67th (30 years per generation) new game+.

It takes a lot of time to learn the ins and outs of the game of life and we are just now starting to finally master it at the advance levels...on earth that is.

You need to appreciate how many fuck ups it took us just to get to where we are now.

[Anonymous No.6483597]

>>6482903
>In the West, the invention of an improved movable type mechanical printing technology in Europe is credited to the German printer Johannes Gutenberg in 1450.[3]

I'd say 1450 is a wide way away from 1964

[Anonymous No.6483906]

I don't think you realize how unstable society used to be. Diseases would often wipe out 60% of a cities population, and some stupid Mongol hoards would burn half of a civilization. That means that the reset button was being hit many times throughout the centuries.

[Anonymous No.6485643]

So does anyone here actually believe that you will live forever and that humanity advances fast enough to the point of curing cancer/death?

look at the graph and see the trend. IF its a linear trend (inb4 its a parabola), i think the most scientifically probable scenario would play out as such:
>1994, average age of death is 80. (i am born)
>2014, average age of death is 85. (20 years old)
>2075, average age of death is 110 (80 years old)
>2125, average age of death is 135 (131 years old)
>2150, average age of death is 150 (156 years old)

FUCK...but if its a parabola i'm gonna live forever, fuckers.

[Anonymous No.6485650]

>>6482876

Because 200 years ago was the first time in history that we really funded physics research. The resulting singularity is what changed our world.

But such an event only happens once. The universe is not so badly designed as to have a loophole to solve every problem an ape could have.

[Anonymous No.6485696]

>>6483505
>You also have the middle ages when we pretty much didn't get any progress in anything since our ancestors were too busy fighting for religion and getting their asses kicked by barbarians. After that there was a steady increase in innovation and technology though.
This is a myth spread by atheists. Technology progressed steadily through the "dark" and middle ages. Just not many writings survived as compared to other times

[Anonymous No.6485704]

It's exponential increase. Observe the logarithmic scale on the chart.