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.
Woah there. The oldest pyramids we know of are about 5000 years old. That’s halfway to 10k.
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.
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.
“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.!<
The standard story is “One Grain of Rice” https://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMT668/EMAT6680.F99/Martin/instructional unit/day4.exponential/excel/grainofrice.html
I recognized that this user is willing to share information and provided the standard teaching method on exponential growth; in the event they need to explain it again. I suppose critical thinking and social skills are characteristics of bots these days…
You’ve deleted your response to me but it’s still in my inbox… and it’s hilariously pretentious and pedantic. I understand why you’ve deleted it.
that is purposeful. it wouldn’t make much of a point if it took 10 days.
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.
I don’t disagree with your explanation of exponential growth or how it does answer for the speed at which we went from, say the magnifying glass to the hubble space telescope.
However, the exponential growth alone model does have a floor: it presumes that there was some kind of push, drive or want for progress. Like, as if there was a destination we’re supposed to end up at and its just a case of how long it took to get there. It excludes the idea that people might not have wanted to.
People didn’t want to toil all day in someone else’s farm. In smaller numbers, on good land, people didn’t have to do very much to get the food they needed. Its only when farming became developed and consistent enough that those living there had the numbers to go kill the people who lived on the good land.
Once we’d been, for all intense and purpose, domesticated by grain, “progress” was inevitable.
Another example would be the industrial revolution. People ask why it was so much faster here in the UK than France. It wasn’t because of a desire for progress. Its that French people had a natural aversion to being worked for 12 hours a day in hell-like factories and workhouses. I mean, British people did too but they had mostly just been kicked off the common land they had lived on for centuries. So, they had no other place to go and begging and not having a job for more than three days was made illegal, punishable by being sent to to workhouses. At one points, they had more British soldiers fighting the riots at home than they had fighting napoleon.
my comment referred to knowledge more than anything. the more you know, the more you have to go from to learn new things. incredibly simplistic summary for very complex phenomena, but I wasn’t going to go through the entire human history. there are breaking points and regression stages, but generally speaking it makes sense that the more you progress, the faster you can progress further. you have more tools.
anon assumes development of science and tech is linear
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
start rolling down hill
going slow
go faster
hmm
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.
But without eleytic rectangle humans are bored… so why no electric rectangle before?