16 ms·
45,000 years is relatively such a blink of an eye. At the same time it’s pretty impressive to have found this painting, it’s also pretty amazing that the vast m
by zaroth 6y ago
45,000 years is relatively such a blink of an eye. At the same time it’s pretty impressive to have found this painting, it’s also pretty amazing that the vast majority of human history is almost entirely unknown to us.
For scale, this reaches back in time roughly 10-15% of the way to when Homo Sapiens first emerged.
Then again, it took us 66 years to go from the first human flight to landing a person on the moon, and 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars, solved worldwide energy generation and storage, and invented AGI.
It’s just too bad we are unable to intellectually or socially progress at anywhere near the same rate as we scientifically progress.
- notsureaboutpg 6y agoNone of what you predict for 60 years from now is guaranteed. Scientific progress relies on stable societies and intellectual and social stasis. When intellectuals progress, revolutions are often the result, and the same is true for when societies en masse evolve their ways of thinking about society itself. There have been documented periods of technological stasis because humanity was engaged more in sociopolitical battles and problems and could not effectively support technological progress. Technological and scientific progress are always going to be intertwined with social and intellectual changes. This is why so many scientists worked on the Atomic bomb project, this is why eugenics was popular and then profoundly unpopular. This is why you have scientists trying in vain to find a "gay" gene, etc. Etc. Science informs sociopolitics and vice versa. If one falls apart the other goes with it
- paulryanrogers 6y ago> and 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars, solved worldwide energy generation and storage, and invented AGI. Even evolution cannot overcome the cold, hard limitations of physics. Unless by settled Mars you mean some transplanted bacteria survive there, and solved energy we consumed every reasonably reachable drop of fossil fuel.
- zaroth 6y agoI’d say it’s pretty well certain that between solar and wind there’s abundant energy to be harvested. It’s just a matter of storing it cheaply, and lithium supply is rather extensive. At this point it’s “simply” a matter of scaling up the manufacturing base, which is one thing humans are astoundingly good at. Just look at silicon production scale over the last 40 years and extrapolate for lithium ion. Likewise, there’s no boundary in physics, technology or human physiology to stop us from establishing a human colony on Mars.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago> there’s no boundary in physics, technology or human physiology to stop us from establishing a human colony on Mars. There's no self sustaining settlement in Antarctica. Mars is much further away and less habitable.
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoMars being farther away makes it a better candidate for a self sustaining settlement. Why try to make a self contained settlement on Antarctica when what you want the scientists there to spend their time on is research? I mean it would be cool but I can understand why it isn’t necessary there.
- tsimionescu 6y agoThat's true, but on the other hand, it's much, much, much simpler to have a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica than on Mars. And there's also nothing to be gained from Mars in any reasonable time frame other than research. I am extremely skeptical that we will even have a space station on Mars in the next 60 years. A self sustaining colony is laughably far off.
- ithkuil 6y agoNecessity is the mother of invention. Often this become necessary for no good reason, but once that are necessary they can be the only reason that matters.
- abecedarius 6y agoWhich physical limit specifically? I don't see any relevant one; 60 years is a long time.
- refactor_master 6y agoRadiation, temperature and the lack of oxygen and gravity, for example? Tell me how many underwater and arctic settlements we have today. They should be unclaimed territories just teeming with possibility, in our own backyard. Yet they’re... not? You’d think that after space flight we’d have 8 metro lines in the Arctic by now, if it was all just a matter of waiting around. And you want to fly how far for something that supposedly is full of some untapped potential?
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoIdk about others but Elon’s stated goal for settling Mars is to keep a second seed for humanity if Earth is somehow destroyed. Elon isn’t going to Mars for its appeal as a habitat directly, but because it can serve as a backup for humanity. It also makes other exploration of the solar system more likely as the ships needed to support Mars can also bring humans to the Jovian system etc.
- tsimionescu 6y agoWhat do you think could possibly happen to the Earth that would make it as un-inhabitable as Mars? Even an asteroid strike in the middle of a nuclear war wouldn't come anywhere close.
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoI’m not sure, but I don’t just mean physically destroyed but perhaps engaged in a new world war or ruled by autocrats. Either place could become that but if it happens to Earth it could set back human progress hundreds of years. It would be nice to have some more distant human thought, I think, with a broader view on existence than those of us here. I think there are benefits to an independent settlement beyond physical destruction. In any case I’m saying Musk isn’t going there because it’s full of resources as was suggested up thread. He’s going there for the long term benefits to humanity he believes it will achieve. If you want to get rich in space mine asteroids. Which will probably become more viable if Mars colony ships ever routinely travel between Earth and Mars.
- lrossi 6y ago> and 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars, solved worldwide energy generation and storage, and invented AGI Unless we self destruct by then, possibly wiping out most life on this planet with us.
- baybal2 6y agoFor most of homo sapiens history we didn't even knew stone tools.
- AlotOfReading 6y agoStone tools predate the evolution of H. sapiens. Key words to search are "Oldowan" and"Acheulean" tools.
- ndstephens 6y agoHomo habilis ("Handy man") largely gets its name b/c some of its fossils are associated with early stone tools. Homo habilis dates back to roughly 2 MYA (million years ago). Home sapiens only dates back to about 300,000 years ago.
- nsomaru 6y agoWhat’s the likelihood that the fantastical myths of old are the stories of an advanced civilisation which was destroyed (along with their knowledge), and the myths are the fragments of memories of that time which became distorted by the passage of huge amounts of time?
- tsimionescu 6y agoZero.
- ncmncm 6y agoOral traditions of Australian aborigines record events going back at least 7,000 years, and as much as 13,000 years, old. Sea level rise dating that far back displaced people living on what is now seabed, called Sahul, between New Guinea and Australia, obliging people who lived there to move to Australia, causing conflicts whose negotiated resolution is still passed down. 20,000 years ago, the sea level was 400 ft lower. People had already lived there for tens of thousands of years. Even 13,000 years ago there were still millions of square miles now inundated. If there were not legends reflecting such an event we would need to know why. As it is we do have such legends, everywhere. The flood did not recede; we call it the sea now. It happened gradually, but large flat areas would have been covered in a generation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater_pulse_1A#/media/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater_pulse_1A#/media/File... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundaland#/media/File:Map_of_Sunda_and_Sahul.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundaland#/media/File:Map_of_S... What was Sundaland is girded by what are now Indonesian islands. The Yellow Sea west of Korea and the northern South China Sea off Viet Nam to Taiwan were dry land. Territory stretching out hundreds of miles around India, particularly to the west, south of Pakistan, shows evidence of construction (visible right before the big tsunami). Britain was not an island; we call the land where the North Sea is now Doggerland. The whole Persian Gulf was dry land, south of Mesopotamia. The oldest cities there border the gulf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Doggerland3er_en.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Doggerland3er_en.png See orange areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathymetry#/media/File:Mid-ocean_ridge_system.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathymetry#/media/File:Mid-oce...
- tsimionescu 6y agoIt is absolutely obvious that in 60 years we will have neither AGI nor a colony on Mars. For AGI, we are so far from even having a clear idea how to even approach this problem (no, deep learning and backpropagation are not promising avenues). For Mars, there are no real incentives, and the problem of a self sustaining colony underground in an irradiated environment with little oxygen and grabity is absurdly difficult. We might at best have essentially a space station on Mars in 60 years, but a self sustaining colony that wouldn't die off 2 years after something catastrophic happening to the Earth is far beyond our current engineering, much farther than any advance in the last 60 years. Not to mention, for any plausible catastrophe happening to the Earth apart from a gamma ray burst, the Earth will still be much, much more habitable than Mars. So even if you are motivated by survival of the species, trying to build a colony on Mars before having a huge array of self-sustaining underground habitats on Earth is putting the cart way ahead of the horse. You'd even get the first-hand experience needed to actually have any hope of building something like this on Mars.
- peter303 6y ago"Progress" is a fairly recent philosophical concept. Up to a few hundred years ago there was no significant observable technological change between your life, your grandfathers and grandchildren. Some societies have ideas of utopias at the beginning or end of history, then some sort of ramp up or down hence.
- wayanon 6y agoHow about in warfare - weren’t weapons ‘improving’ through the centuries?
- jacquesm 6y agoAbout as fast as materials science. That was the limiting factor.
- notsureaboutpg 6y agoYes but the weapons "improving" didn't translate directly into armies winning, and it still doesn't today. The US is right now retreating from Afghanistan, where it spent 20 years losing to a much smaller, much less-funded, much lower-tech militia (the Taliban). So again, the idea of "progress" as a totality is very new (and you could argue, still wrong, it isn't absolutely clear that we are progressing as a species or even as a society).
- jacquesm 6y ago> 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars Bullshit.
- unphased 6y agoI think this is reasonable unless SpaceX runs into a wall at some point. Settle has a fairly wide range of interpretation, but yeah it may take longer than this before a "permanent" settlement can be established. I find AGI in 60 years to be more controversial than Mars. Not enough evidence yet. One can def hope though.
- jacquesm 6y agoAgreed, that too is a bullshit claim.
- satori99 6y agoIf I was alive in 1909 and someone made the claim that man would be walking on the moon in 60 years, I'd have called bullshit too.
- jacquesm 6y agoBut that's not the claim. The claim is that 60 years counting from the moonlanding we will have a settlement on Mars. I don't believe it for a moment. And even 60 years from today is a thing that I would not believe. We have a hard enough time keeping places much more hospitable to life on planet earth supplied. Maybe, just maybe, we will have made a manned round trip to Mars. And that would be quite an accomplishment. A much more likely chance is a one way trip with all hands lost, assuming they make it to the destination at all.
- jacobolus 6y ago> claim is that 60 years counting from the moonlanding To be fair, “hence” means counting from now, not counting from the moon landing.
- libraryofbabel 6y ago> For scale, this reaches back in time roughly 10-15% of the way to when Homo Sapiens first emerged. Ah! But only if we're talking about anatomically modern homo sapiens. Behaviorally modern humans emerged much later, and in fact one of the most definitive signs of behaviorally modern humans is the existence of cave paintings! Defining behavioral modernity is an endless debate, but a key part of it is symbolic thought - the ability to think with abstractions and manipulate concepts. Representing a group of pigs on a wall in pigment (or even considering doing so a meaningful activity) demands powers of abstraction that humans acquired only recently, in the last 50,000 years, most likely via the development of language. This is ultimately why finding the earliest cave painting is such a big deal. It shows that in this place there were people who had crossed that behavioral chasm and in some sense were more like us. For more on this subject, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins by Ian Tattersall (2012) is a wonderful read.
- WalterBright 6y ago> 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars Not as long as there is the popular notion that only researchers should go to Mars and anyone going there for profit is bad. See National Geographic's "Mars" miniseries. The only way people will settle the solar system is when: 1. there's money to be made 2. people get past the notion that terran life will "contaminate" the other worlds
- dr_dshiv 6y agoIn 60 years, moon sports leagues will have created the first sustainable extraterrestrial economy. Mostly below-ground moonball, of course, but the lowgrav dirtbiking also draws a fair share of advertising dollars.
- fian 6y agoThe progress from first man made flight to landing on the moon was largely driven by world encompassing wars. A huge amount of research and development went into aeroplane design as people quickly realised they could be used very effectively for reconnaissance, strafing infantry, bombing and resupply. This led to the development of air to air combat which led to faster planes and eventually jet engines. The German development of the V2 rockets for bombing London from a great distance led to a lot of work on rocketry which was then able to built on for the space race. The space race was two super powers pouring enormous resources into research and development to ensure there would be no military gap from lack of capability in near earth orbit. From a military perspective, colonising Mars is unlikely to have any major military benefit on Earth. I'd guess there are many other hot topics for the military to focus on (autonomous/semi-autonomous warfare, cyber warfare, biological warfare etc). Colonisation of Mars is (currently) more likely to be pursued by commercial or non-military scientific purposes. Perhaps some of the commercial entities now rival small countries in terms of economic might. I doubt though that a commercial entity (Space-X) will be able to get very large groups of people to unite (and sacrifice other interests) in pursuit of a common goal in the same way that they do during times of conflict.