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Related ideas that seem kind of obvious but haven't seen them mentioned anywhere yet: 1. We live in the most interesting 200 year period of Earth so far in its

Related ideas that seem kind of obvious but haven't seen them mentioned anywhere yet: 1. We live in the most interesting 200 year period of Earth so far in its 4.5B year history. The rate of progress has never been so high, one notable example of why this period is special and unprecedented is that it's the first time humans or any species has visited the Moon. It's quite a mind-blowing coincidence. 2. Human history will probably look like a sigmoid curve - long period of stagnation followed by rapid progress followed by a long period of stagnation. We were born into a very short period of something like 1000 years with the highest rate of progress. After that, we'll gradually enter an equilibrium in which things won't change much (or a period in which history will just repeat with minor variations). The year 300,000 will look similar to year 301,000 - despite being separated by a millennium - this is unthinkable at this point in time. You can't keep inventing novel technology and art at current pace for a million years. Has there been any debate about how this long period of equilibrium could look like?

jbay808 6y ago
This is the optimistic scenario! There's no shortage of reasons why there might not be humans at all in 300,000 AD.
Nux 6y ago
"You can't invent", AI might.
whatshisface 6y ago
>You can't keep inventing novel technology and art at current pace for a million years. Or can you?
qubex 6y ago
I don’t know what about “200 year period” is particularly exciting. For us humans, maybe... but the 4.5 billion year time-span suggests you’re taking a wider view. From the planet’s point of view there’s just a mass extinction going on whilst the anthropogenic climate change gets into full swing. It’s neither exciting nor unprecedented.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Koshkin 6y ago
For a more detailed description of the future, see Stapledon's Last and First Men.
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
Human history will probably look like a sudden, massive, and apparently-inexplicable upward spike in global atmospheric CO2 content accompanied by mass extinction.
7thaccount 6y ago
Progress is already winding down. Deisel engines, airplanes, splitting the atom, computing, antibiotics...all huge but not recent developments. With the exception of the internet, what have we done recently? Maybe human genome project? Renewable energy? Practical neural networks? Now, we've spent the last few decades refining these ideas, but we're hitting some peaks. How much more efficient can we make an engine? Can we really get off fossil fuels when they're used for everything ranging from fuels to plastics to fertilizers. We've been working on solving cancer for decades and haven't made much progress. We're still nowhere near widespread nuclear fusion and have abandoned nuclear technologies almost altogether outside of the US Navy. Computing is all about shrinking things, but we're starting to hit walls and practical quantum computing still appears to be a distant dream. AI is still nothing like we'd hoped it would be. We're no closer to understanding the brain in a way that would lead to an AGI. More physics research occurs in a matter of months than a decade at the turn of the century. Have we reconciled relativity and quantum mechanics yet? Are we any closer to GUT? I suppose there have been some advanced in our understanding of the universe due to the new instruments we've put into orbit. Nanotechnology is still essentially science fiction outside of some nanotube devices.
- lisper 6y ago
  > genome project? Renewable energy? Practical neural networks? Isn't that enough? (And you left out quantum computing. Smart phones. GPS. Composite materials. Autonomous vehicles. I could go on.)
  - throwaway8941 6y ago
    Not to mention a whole new JavaScript framework every other week.
    - tetris11 6y ago
      Humans: A short lived species that produced some interesting grammars.
      - 6y ago
fsflover 6y ago
> After that, we'll gradually enter an equilibrium in which things won't change much (or a period in which history will just repeat with minor variations). Not necessarily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
- kiba 6y ago
  Not even GAI can beat known physics unless new physics come into play.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    I do not see how physics prevents huge changes in our technology. We cannot say we know almost everything about nature at all. Examples: room temperature superconductivity, efficient solar cells, quantum computer and much more.
Koshkin 6y ago
Progress matters, but not as much as one would think. On the grand scheme of things, it's grossly overrated. When a human is brought to this world, everything is new to him or her, whether it's seeing a bird in the sky, meeting people, creating a family, growing crops or reading a story to a child. There is no reason to believe that in a lifetime a person would be able to enjoy all of the ever growing number of things that are available to experience in any meaningful way.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  The length of a lifetime itself is subject to progress, and with hope it'll eventually grow longer. And arguably, it's only due to progress that we now have more things to experience than we have time for; it wasn't true for vast majority of human history.
biddlesby 6y ago
Not being facetious, but how do you define progress?
- RivieraKid 6y ago
  I mostly mean technological progress, I don't have a precise definition.
kachnuv_ocasek 6y ago
As I understand your remarks, you basically believe what Fukuyama stated in The End of History and the Last Man. This has largely been proved to be wrong on many counts and even Fukuyama himself disavowed many of his earlier ideas. Humanity is currently facing, and is going to face in the near future, multiple very hard challenges, which are unlikely to be solved purely by technology, the most serious of which is the changing climate. The more likely future, in my opinion, looks like a regress to an earlier state of "progress" with long-term fluctuations as the changes manifest themselves with various degrees of severity.
throwphoton 6y ago
> The year 300,000 will look similar to year 301,000 - despite being separated by a millennium - this is unthinkable at this point in time. The Fermi Paradox is rooted in the idea that if alien intelligences were doing things that we could recognize, we should have seen them by now. Perhaps they do exist, but have progressed so deeply into the unthinkable that we can't even. Perhaps we will as well.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  There is a slim chance that we are the first ones with sentience ever. That would totally explain Fermi paradox. Why not? We are definitely the first on this planet, and we don't try to dispute this fact using probability measurements.
  - fsloth 6y ago
    We are hardly the first species with sentience on this planet. We may be the first to believe in impossible things like gods, and things that don't exist like money, and this also gives us our capabilities to invent things like science.
  - soulofmischief 6y ago
    The planet has an observable fossil record, whereas extra-solar heavenly bodies are still largely inscrutable.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      Of course. But if we didn't have this evidence, the logic of the Fermi paradox would lead to conclusions that we just can't be the first ones because the probability for it is so impossibly low.
      - AlanSE 6y ago
        Low probability compared to what though? This makes less sense to me on closer inspection. I agree that there may be some meaningful observation in there, but it's hard to even figure out what the paradox or observation is. An individual (or hive mind, whatever) living in the year 300,000 AD may very much dispute the claim that progress has stagnated. It's entirely possible that civilization has continued an exponential expansion (within limits) from now until then. As such, history is one continued exponential. Provided that this civilization still is not bumping against the thermodynamic computational limits of space by several orders of magnitude, then the Fermi paradox is still a paradox. That's how an exponential works, every point sees itself as a privileged point, right before it increases massively.
nromiun 6y ago
> We live in the most interesting 200 year period of Earth so far in its 4.5B year history. People have been saying this for centuries now. And they will probably continue to do so in the future. Our rate of progress looks so high because we are living in it. Cut to another two hundred years and 2000 will look just like 1800.
- pedrosorio 6y ago
  From where I am standing, 1800 doesn't look anything like 1600.
- Rerarom 6y ago
  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-was-cancelled/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...
- RivieraKid 6y ago
  For the last few centuries maybe. Your underestimating how utterly anomalous has been the last about 200 years. There's a clear contrast between that and all prior 200 year periods. The idea of progress is relatively recent, 2 thousands years ago it basically didn't exist (from the book Sapiens).
c1ccccc1 6y ago
Even the sigmoid is a somewhat optimistic picture. Another possibility is a bell curve, where due to resource depletion we eventually end up back near where we started. It's interesting to imagine how over time the scientific knowledge we've obtained with our particle accelerators and space telescopes and electron microscopes would decay in the absence of high technology. If it has been 800 years since anyone has directly observed a Higgs particle or a molecule of DNA, what reason would there be to remember accurately what it was, or even to remember it at all? People of the future might end up thinking that the Higgs was a deity worshipped by us people of the past, given all of our references to the "God particle".
- tetris11 6y ago
  You assume we will lose all record of our discoveries so far, which has some precedence with Roman sewage treatment being forgotten, but we are much better at keeping records and we have too many artefacts from this period that will naturally prompt curiosity to future generations. Even if some unforseen solar event disables our electronics for a millennia, and we devolve into infighting, the winners will still be those with the technological superiority, mechanically gas-powered or otherwise. The only threat I can envision is a wild asteroid, but then it's game over for all of us.
mellosouls 6y ago
We live in the most interesting 200 year period of Earth so far in its 4.5B year history Even granting you the anthropocentric premise, the idea that the last 200 years are more interesting than any other similar period is not at all obvious.
- RivieraKid 6y ago
  The progress in the last 200 years is completely incomparable with anything prior to that. Per the book Sapiens, the idea of progress is relatively new, people used to believe that things would stay the same or decline.
  - mellosouls 6y ago
    The progress in the last 200 years is completely incomparable with anything prior to that. Again, rather an unobvious claim. A greater leap than the Industrial Revolution, the Renaissance, the budding of Western Civilisation with the Greeks? Perhaps it is, but unless you have a link to proof of this, it's best not to speak in such dogmatic terms, and accept that this is just a view you hold.
tasuki 6y ago
> we'll gradually enter an equilibrium in which things won't change much Why? > The year 300,000 will look similar to year 301,000 Why? > You can't keep inventing novel technology and art at current pace for a million years. Will we run out of technologies to discover and art to create? Why? When?

jbay808 6y ago

This is the optimistic scenario! There's no shortage of reasons why there might not be humans at all in 300,000 AD.

Nux 6y ago

"You can't invent", AI might.

whatshisface 6y ago

>You can't keep inventing novel technology and art at current pace for a million years. Or can you?

qubex 6y ago

I don’t know what about “200 year period” is particularly exciting. For us humans, maybe... but the 4.5 billion year time-span suggests you’re taking a wider view. From the planet’s point of view there’s just a mass extinction going on whilst the anthropogenic climate change gets into full swing. It’s neither exciting nor unprecedented.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Koshkin 6y ago

For a more detailed description of the future, see Stapledon's Last and First Men.

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago

Human history will probably look like a sudden, massive, and apparently-inexplicable upward spike in global atmospheric CO2 content accompanied by mass extinction.

7thaccount 6y ago

Progress is already winding down. Deisel engines, airplanes, splitting the atom, computing, antibiotics...all huge but not recent developments. With the exception of the internet, what have we done recently? Maybe human genome project? Renewable energy? Practical neural networks? Now, we've spent the last few decades refining these ideas, but we're hitting some peaks. How much more efficient can we make an engine? Can we really get off fossil fuels when they're used for everything ranging from fuels to plastics to fertilizers. We've been working on solving cancer for decades and haven't made much progress. We're still nowhere near widespread nuclear fusion and have abandoned nuclear technologies almost altogether outside of the US Navy. Computing is all about shrinking things, but we're starting to hit walls and practical quantum computing still appears to be a distant dream. AI is still nothing like we'd hoped it would be. We're no closer to understanding the brain in a way that would lead to an AGI. More physics research occurs in a matter of months than a decade at the turn of the century. Have we reconciled relativity and quantum mechanics yet? Are we any closer to GUT? I suppose there have been some advanced in our understanding of the universe due to the new instruments we've put into orbit. Nanotechnology is still essentially science fiction outside of some nanotube devices.

lisper 6y ago
> genome project? Renewable energy? Practical neural networks? Isn't that enough? (And you left out quantum computing. Smart phones. GPS. Composite materials. Autonomous vehicles. I could go on.)
- throwaway8941 6y ago
  Not to mention a whole new JavaScript framework every other week.
  - tetris11 6y ago
    Humans: A short lived species that produced some interesting grammars.
    - 6y ago

fsflover 6y ago

> After that, we'll gradually enter an equilibrium in which things won't change much (or a period in which history will just repeat with minor variations). Not necessarily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

kiba 6y ago
Not even GAI can beat known physics unless new physics come into play.
- fsflover 6y ago
  I do not see how physics prevents huge changes in our technology. We cannot say we know almost everything about nature at all. Examples: room temperature superconductivity, efficient solar cells, quantum computer and much more.

Koshkin 6y ago

Progress matters, but not as much as one would think. On the grand scheme of things, it's grossly overrated. When a human is brought to this world, everything is new to him or her, whether it's seeing a bird in the sky, meeting people, creating a family, growing crops or reading a story to a child. There is no reason to believe that in a lifetime a person would be able to enjoy all of the ever growing number of things that are available to experience in any meaningful way.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
The length of a lifetime itself is subject to progress, and with hope it'll eventually grow longer. And arguably, it's only due to progress that we now have more things to experience than we have time for; it wasn't true for vast majority of human history.

biddlesby 6y ago

Not being facetious, but how do you define progress?

RivieraKid 6y ago
I mostly mean technological progress, I don't have a precise definition.

kachnuv_ocasek 6y ago

As I understand your remarks, you basically believe what Fukuyama stated in The End of History and the Last Man. This has largely been proved to be wrong on many counts and even Fukuyama himself disavowed many of his earlier ideas. Humanity is currently facing, and is going to face in the near future, multiple very hard challenges, which are unlikely to be solved purely by technology, the most serious of which is the changing climate. The more likely future, in my opinion, looks like a regress to an earlier state of "progress" with long-term fluctuations as the changes manifest themselves with various degrees of severity.

throwphoton 6y ago

> The year 300,000 will look similar to year 301,000 - despite being separated by a millennium - this is unthinkable at this point in time. The Fermi Paradox is rooted in the idea that if alien intelligences were doing things that we could recognize, we should have seen them by now. Perhaps they do exist, but have progressed so deeply into the unthinkable that we can't even. Perhaps we will as well.

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
There is a slim chance that we are the first ones with sentience ever. That would totally explain Fermi paradox. Why not? We are definitely the first on this planet, and we don't try to dispute this fact using probability measurements.
- fsloth 6y ago
  We are hardly the first species with sentience on this planet. We may be the first to believe in impossible things like gods, and things that don't exist like money, and this also gives us our capabilities to invent things like science.
- soulofmischief 6y ago
  The planet has an observable fossil record, whereas extra-solar heavenly bodies are still largely inscrutable.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
    Of course. But if we didn't have this evidence, the logic of the Fermi paradox would lead to conclusions that we just can't be the first ones because the probability for it is so impossibly low.
    - AlanSE 6y ago
      Low probability compared to what though? This makes less sense to me on closer inspection. I agree that there may be some meaningful observation in there, but it's hard to even figure out what the paradox or observation is. An individual (or hive mind, whatever) living in the year 300,000 AD may very much dispute the claim that progress has stagnated. It's entirely possible that civilization has continued an exponential expansion (within limits) from now until then. As such, history is one continued exponential. Provided that this civilization still is not bumping against the thermodynamic computational limits of space by several orders of magnitude, then the Fermi paradox is still a paradox. That's how an exponential works, every point sees itself as a privileged point, right before it increases massively.

nromiun 6y ago

> We live in the most interesting 200 year period of Earth so far in its 4.5B year history. People have been saying this for centuries now. And they will probably continue to do so in the future. Our rate of progress looks so high because we are living in it. Cut to another two hundred years and 2000 will look just like 1800.

pedrosorio 6y ago
From where I am standing, 1800 doesn't look anything like 1600.
Rerarom 6y ago
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-was-cancelled/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...
RivieraKid 6y ago
For the last few centuries maybe. Your underestimating how utterly anomalous has been the last about 200 years. There's a clear contrast between that and all prior 200 year periods. The idea of progress is relatively recent, 2 thousands years ago it basically didn't exist (from the book Sapiens).

c1ccccc1 6y ago

Even the sigmoid is a somewhat optimistic picture. Another possibility is a bell curve, where due to resource depletion we eventually end up back near where we started. It's interesting to imagine how over time the scientific knowledge we've obtained with our particle accelerators and space telescopes and electron microscopes would decay in the absence of high technology. If it has been 800 years since anyone has directly observed a Higgs particle or a molecule of DNA, what reason would there be to remember accurately what it was, or even to remember it at all? People of the future might end up thinking that the Higgs was a deity worshipped by us people of the past, given all of our references to the "God particle".

tetris11 6y ago
You assume we will lose all record of our discoveries so far, which has some precedence with Roman sewage treatment being forgotten, but we are much better at keeping records and we have too many artefacts from this period that will naturally prompt curiosity to future generations. Even if some unforseen solar event disables our electronics for a millennia, and we devolve into infighting, the winners will still be those with the technological superiority, mechanically gas-powered or otherwise. The only threat I can envision is a wild asteroid, but then it's game over for all of us.

mellosouls 6y ago

We live in the most interesting 200 year period of Earth so far in its 4.5B year history Even granting you the anthropocentric premise, the idea that the last 200 years are more interesting than any other similar period is not at all obvious.

RivieraKid 6y ago
The progress in the last 200 years is completely incomparable with anything prior to that. Per the book Sapiens, the idea of progress is relatively new, people used to believe that things would stay the same or decline.
- mellosouls 6y ago
  The progress in the last 200 years is completely incomparable with anything prior to that. Again, rather an unobvious claim. A greater leap than the Industrial Revolution, the Renaissance, the budding of Western Civilisation with the Greeks? Perhaps it is, but unless you have a link to proof of this, it's best not to speak in such dogmatic terms, and accept that this is just a view you hold.

tasuki 6y ago

> we'll gradually enter an equilibrium in which things won't change much Why? > The year 300,000 will look similar to year 301,000 Why? > You can't keep inventing novel technology and art at current pace for a million years. Will we run out of technologies to discover and art to create? Why? When?