3 ms·

Excellent comment. I would just add I think that the fact that so many lucky factors had to combine for the industrial revolution to happen gives us, alas, anot

• dredmorbius 10y ago
  That's one perspective. Another is that once the pieces line up, the capabilities are so overwhelming that the transition only happens once. It's a bit like mitochondria and ATP: an energy pathway for life which was so overwhelmingly beneficial that it happened once, and any previous (multicelluar) life simply couldn't compete. Fermi's Paradox is another fascinating element, and there are a number of other possible choke points and filter which could also come into play: the Cambrian explosion (complex multicellular life), sex, intelligence, ice ages, the Moon, fossil-fuel stores in the first place, arrangements of continents, etc., etc. But several changes seemed to have emerged fairly widely and across multiple regions. Agriculture in particular arose independently and at roughly the same time (perhaps a few centuries difference) in the Middle East (Mesopotamia), Yangtze River, Mayan civilisation (Yukatan Peninsula), and possibly a few others, within 500 - 1,000 years of each other. *This at a time when there was no communications between the Americas and the African-Eurasian continent.