4 ms·
It's crazy to think of how our currently state of technology could have been reached five hundred years ago, or five hundred years from now. I can't offhand thi
by tunesmith 10y ago
It's crazy to think of how our currently state of technology could have been reached five hundred years ago, or five hundred years from now. I can't offhand think of anything truly external that has gated our technological advancements, like some event where aliens visit us and we advance quickly by analyzing their tech. Is there an argument that external events might have been real dependencies? I'm thinking of things like volcano eruptions, or certain astronomical patterns, etc.
- gonvaled 10y agoSure, if you consider the "lack of external event" to also be an external event: we have been not been thrown back to the stone age, or pushed to the brink of extinction, because no big asteroid has impacted the Earth in recent time, and hopefully next time it does we'll be ready to deal with it with modern technology.
- dredmorbius 10y agoWhy the Industrial Revolution occurred when and where it did, and not earlier (see Joseph Needham's question regarding China, which was vastly more technologically advanced) or afterward, or possibly not even at all, is one of the Great Questions.