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I disagree, there is something special about this moment in time. We're in an insane inflection point of human development. For millions of years things stayed

I disagree, there is something special about this moment in time. We're in an insane inflection point of human development. For millions of years things stayed roughly the same. It's really only in the last 10,000 years that stuff has really kicked off, and the last 300 where human development has gone absolutely crazy. There's several existential threats that might destroy civilization over the next few hundred years (eventually a nuke is going to fall into the wrong hands, not to mention climate change etc). There's a very good chance we're living the most comfortable lives that any creature on this planet will ever experience, past and future. It's truly mindblowing how lucky we are.

sgregnt 5y ago
Just wanted to share my opinion. I'm not sure if the number of existential threads for humanity is now larger than 200k years ago. My take would be it is probably much smallest than even 1k years ago. Nukes will not destroy civilization (it might be horrible disaster on the scale of WW2 but not civ. distruction.). Arguably we are now have better ways to adapt to climate changes and it or meteorite impact. And who knows, in another 100 years we might be an interplanetary species. AI might not be a thread like some suggests, and the up sides to productivity are enormous.
willcipriano 5y ago
> I disagree, there is something special about this moment in time. Your ancestors all felt the same way. So will your children.
- bspammer 5y ago
  It doesn't really matter what my ancestors felt, it's blatently obvious that there's more going on right now, and faster than 10,000 years ago. Back then, you'd be lucky to see a single revolutionary invention in a lifetime. Now we're seeing them every decade, if not annually. I don't disagree that my descendents will be justified in feeling the same way, as long as the exponential curve keeps on going and civilization doesn't end.
  - radicaldreamer 5y ago
    Is this really true? If someone from 1950s America time-travelled to the present day, is there anything at all that they conceptually couldn't fathom? Maybe if you transported someone from 1950s China to present-day China, they would be more shocked, but a present day suburban home in 2021 is not all that markedly different than a 1950s home -- and neither is the workplace, the commute, the cars. Mostly replaced paper with screens and tvs with bigger, flatter tvs. The most conceptually difficult thing would be understanding that wireless telegraphs with cameras are pocket-sized and everywhere.
    - bspammer 5y ago
      On the scales we're talking about, I would include the 1950s as "present-day". I would include the last 300 years as "particularly special"
    - adventured 5y ago
      > is there anything at all that they conceptually couldn't fathom? Well you set the bar artificially high with that phrasing. Is there ever anything people of the last couple thousand years would be literally unable to conceptually fathom? No. We know that from ancient texts, they would be able to grasp anything we have today (even if it might take more elaborate explanation). 1950s Americans, or any citizens around the world at the time, would be more than astounded by 3-4 billion people being essentially always connected on a gigantic, seemingly instantaneous global communications and commerce network. The modern smartphone would similarly astound, what they can do all-in-one and the quality of it (the audio, the video, the music, movies, news, communication, click-button services & purchasing, digitization of money, the quality of digital photographs and how many you can take with no regard for space, it would all astound). Someone from the 1980s would be just as astounded by a recent iPhone, they'd feel like a time traveler. People in 2007 were truly astounded by the iPhone. It almost felt like a product delivered from the future. It put all industry jaws on the floor and reset the grid for everyone in the tech industry, without exception. Maybe people have now widely forgotten the shock effect it had, I haven't forgotten. That said, the parent's claim was an exaggeration. We're not inventing/harnessing such extraordinary stuff every year. Maybe a few things of note per decade globally. CRISPR, cracking the human genome, modern antibiotics, Internet, Web, transistor and microprocessor, software, computers including personal, space flight, powered flight, various engines, electricity and electric light, fossil fuels, nuclear power and weapons, various green revolution outcomes (food production), solar and a few key renewable energy technologies, the commercial/industrial laser, and so on. There are several dozen things that can be added to that list from the last 100-150 years. A few per decade globally might be a reasonable peg.
- gumby 5y ago
  Well, that is unclear. Writing from Europe 100-1500 years ago suggests that most people felt quite different about time and did not have the impression the GP espoused. The overwhelming impression seems to be that things had fallen since the end of the (western) Roman Empire; there was a contrast in millenarian movements in the 10th century as the turn of the millennium approached. However people are not uniformly distributed and such belief does not seem to have been the case in, say, the contemporaneous Arab world. All that being said: I agree with you that claims that our era is somehow amazingly unique are way overblown.
- yesimahuman 5y ago
  It’s likely they will all look back at this particular period of a hundred or so years as one of the most pivotal times for at least one really big reason: that’s when we set the climate on a path of destruction
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    Why not when we invented nuclear weapons and set civilization on the path of destruction? Or when we invented fertilizer and set the wilderness on the path of destruction or when we started applying science and set traditional stabilizing religious cultures on the path of destruction? I know why. It's because you're overwhelmed with your own contemporary culture which has indoctrinated you to believe that particular doomsday prophecy. Other cultures have/had different ones and that will surely continue into the future.
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      Don't forget the pandemic. Plenty of people thought there would be some "new normal" we'd be living through for decades. Hell, I'm pretty sure plenty of people still cling to that particular doomsday scenario despite there being readily available, free vaccines. Look at all the dudes walking around outside wearing masks all along west coast cities..
    - yesimahuman 5y ago
      Thanks for the downvote because you disagree that completely disrupting climate norms isn’t a notable event that is very much happening _right now_ and will disrupt future generations significantly. Go read my comment again, I never said it was the _only_ notable event. It is objectively significant. So are nuclear weapons. So are hundreds of other things that make the last 100 years extremely significant in history.
      - exporectomy 5y ago
        I don't think I have a downvote button. You said "path of destruction". That's the speculation based on current popular opinion. Had you been saying this 50 years ago, you would have chosen whatever the popular path of destruction at that time was instead, having no awareness of climate change.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  I'm not so sure they felt that way. For the average person life was pretty stagnant before the industrial revolution. You lived roughly the same way that your parents did. You used the same tools and techniques in farming. You did mostly the same things socially. You dressed in roughly the same types of clothes (or at least clothing materials). Historical estimates for GDP per capita put it around $2 per day in 2011 prices. And that stayed fairly constant - it doubled in maybe a thousand years, if at all. Compare that to today: US GDP per capita has nearly tripled in my lifetime. Politically things might've been just as turbulent back then though. New overlords and all that would be more impactful back then than now.
- throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
  What major technological advancements like space travel, internet, computers, cell phones do you think the typical person 2000 years ago actually saw and knew about? The (lack of) inter-connectedness of the world would effect the way our ancestors felt about their moment in time.
- booleandilemma 5y ago
  So will your children We’ve been on a long upward curve of progress for awhile now, but this isn’t guaranteed to continue forever. The future could be a mad max / book of eli hellscape that may set us back two thousand years.
- cmod 5y ago
  i always come back to the fact that "time travel" wasn't a notion until relatively recently; simply by the fact that so little changed on a centuries-long scale, and traveling through time would essentially place you in precisely the same spot, with the same set of experiences and technologies. presently, we've the opposite problem: technology advances so quickly it's difficult / near impossible to accurately predict life in five hundred years. (making time travel VERY COMPELLING!)
  - vidarh 5y ago
    Stories of time travel in some form or other goes back thousands of years, e.g. Hindu mythology.
    - cmod 5y ago
      it's probably worth splitting the hair between spiritual and "literal" time travel
      - vidarh 5y ago
        The stories in question involves literal travel.
ugh123 5y ago
I think you could say that about the industrial revolution. However, the events in the past 20 years seem to indicate humanity is moving backwards >There's a very good chance we're living the most comfortable lives that any creature on this planet will ever experience, past and future. It's truly mindblowing how lucky we are. The disparity between the haves and the have-nots in this moment in time would truly bewilder anyone in ancient history if they could see whats happening today. There are likely more people living in poverty today than there were 200 years ago, in absolute numbers - not percentage.
- yostrovs 5y ago
  In percentage, poverty is probably at its lowest in history.
tshaddox 5y ago
Could it be that in the distant future if you at human history (or even the history of life on Earth) from far enough away to smooth out the little bumps, it turns out that we 20th and 21st century humans are in fact in a pretty unremarkable point along an exponential curve?
- katzgrau 5y ago
  Def, as far as we know, we're just a little slope upward. And I'm not sure what the Y axis is even measuring.
- bspammer 5y ago
  If that's true (and I hope it is, because it means things go very well for humanity), we're still one of the first generations to see major change _within_ our short lives. For millions of years, technology and tools stayed roughly the same from generation to generation. I'm 25, and the technological progress since I was born is mind-blowing.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    > we're still one of the first generations to see major change _within_ our short lives. One could argue that people were seeing major technological/scientific/philosophical/cultural changes within their lives at least as far back as the Enlightenment (and I'd argue much further back than that), and what has actually changed is just that the number of people affected by those changes has grown (perhaps exponentially). Likewise in the future the rate of change we're so impressed by now may look laughable, and that's even ignoring the possibility of significant lifespan extension in the future!
    - noir_lord 5y ago
      Lets accept that the rate of change of technology during the enlightenment was as rapid as the last 100 years (it wasn't but lets accept it) - that was two centuries ago, these prints are 200K years ago, that's 3 orders of magnitude older. There have been points in our history where technology/knowledge has advanced quicker than the baseline but the last two-three centuries (and particularly the last one) have been exceptional. Whether that rate of change is sustainable for another century I don't know, I'd like to hope so since it'd mean humans are doing pretty well. But if you took someone born in 1880 (a century before me) and they lived 90 years they'd have seen the invention of flight, the invention of the motorcar, the electrification of the world, the invention of wireless, the invention of TV, the invention of the internet, the invention of antibiotics, the invention of synthetic materials, the invention of the telephone, the first heart transplant, the invention of the nuclear bomb, the discovery of the structure of DNA and literally thousands of other technologies and discoveries in one human lifespan). At no other point in human history has a single life span seen so much*.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
In the face of accelerating change, every moment feels like an inflection point, and the past always looks stagnant in comparison. Measured from the baseline of where things are now, the past was so different. Measured from the baseline of how quickly things change now, the past was so slow. The catch is that it’s true no matter when you say it from, so long as change is accelerating. Exponential growth is my favorite example. Plot y=k^t for any k from t=long time ago to t=T. It will look like y is at an ‘insane inflection point,’ regardless of the T you choose.
- bspammer 5y ago
  Sure if you look at it from a purely mathematical point of view, but we can anchor ourselves to something which is (relatively) constant - the human lifespan. We're one of the first generations to feel the effects of the exponential curve within our lifetimes.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    If you plot anything exponential from t=T-60 years to t=T, it'll look just as dramatic now as ever. Try it. Plot Imagine you have some function like population or number of transistors per dollar or something that's exponential. You can model it as y(t) = a * b^(t+c). To look at how it feels when you look backwards, make it relative to what life is like today (aka divide by the "normal" value y(t) to get a function of how it seems looking backwards y(t)/y(T) = b^(t-T). Let's make a variable for `years from now:` dt = t-T. If we look at the last 60 years, this is just plotting b^dt from dt=-60 to dt=0. It doesn't matter when you look at it from. The last sixty years of exponential growth always looks the same. It's just b^dt from dt=-60 to dt=0, which (being the exact same function) looks equally dramatic from any point. tl;dr let's make it concrete and plot 1.1^t from 1960 to 2020, and then plot 1.1^t 1060 to 1120. They look exactly the same, even though each just spans a human life time: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+1.1%5Et+from+t%3D1960+to+t%3D2020 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+1.1%5Et+from+t%3D... https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+1.1%5Et+from+t%3D1060+to+t%3D1120 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+1.1%5Et+from+t%3D...
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/ https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/ has some interesting ideas that agree with you.
3grdlurker 5y ago
Even if it were true that societies today are more complex, why is that inherently more special than a time in the past when life was simple? How come so many people today long for a much simpler life, like in the past, as if the past was special? The point is, special is highly subjective and you really should be doubting your own notions of it. In any case, I think that the original commenter really referred to how there’s nothing so drastically different about the experience of being human in the present and in the past.
TriNetra 5y ago
Earth has been around at least for billions of years. Our modern existence is only of about few hundred years. It'd be over estimating ourselves to think that a civilization like us never existed on Earth let alone other planets. As the technology keeps on miniaturizing, there'll be a point at which the verbose existence of technology would largely be no longer there. In that state, if the civilization is reset due to some cosmic incident, a tech civilization like us in far future will think about themselves in the same way. We do read about Atlantis like legend and consider them a myth similarly, we'd be a myth for such future civilization.
- lucbocahut 5y ago
  I am rereading a novel from French author René Barjavel: “the ice people” on this exact theme. Scientists in the South Pole discover an ancient civilization 900k years old. Its also fun because he anticipates the near future quite accurately from 1968 when he wrote it. Well worth a read. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_People_(Barjavel_novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_People_(Barjavel_nov...
- sdfjksbdf 5y ago
  Plato made up Atlantis.
TriNetra 5y ago
Another interesting data point I'd like to share here is that of multiple stories found mentioned in ancient Hindu texts called puranas (which means historic). These stories talk about humans traveling to far away planets (lokas) wherein the wheel of time moves much slower than on Earth and thus is an indication of ancient Hindu knowledge of the phenomenon of time dilation. For instance, consider this story of King Kakudmi and his daughter [0]: > Kakudmi's daughter Revati was so beautiful and so accomplished that when she reached a marriageable age, Kakudmi, thinking no one upon earth was worthy of her, went to the Creator himself, Lord Brahma, to seek his advice about a suitable husband for his daughter. When they arrived, Brahma was listening to a musical performance by the Gandharvas, so they waited patiently until the performance was finished. Then, Kakudmi bowed humbly, made his request and presented his shortlist of candidates. Brahma laughed loudly and explained that time runs differently on different planes of existence, and that during the short time they had waited in Brahma-loka to see him, 27 chatur-yugas (a cycle of four yugas, totalling 108 yugas) had passed on earth. Brahma said to Kakudmi, "O King, all those whom you may have decided within the core of your heart to accept as your son-in-law has died in the course of time. Twenty-seven chatur-yugas have already passed. Those upon whom you may have already decided are now gone, and so are their sons, grandsons and other descendants. You cannot even hear about their names.[2] You must therefore bestow this virgin gem (i.e. Revati) upon some other husband, for you are now alone, and your friends, your ministers, servants, wives, kinsmen, armies, and treasures, have long since been swept away by the hand of time."[3]King Kakudmi was overcome with astonishment and alarm at hearing this news.[3] However, Brahma comforted him and added that Vishnu, the preserver, was currently incarnate on earth in the forms of Krishna and Balarama, and he recommended Balarama as a worthy husband for Revati.Kakudmi and Revati then returned to earth which they regarded as having left only just a short while ago. They were shocked by the changes that had taken place. Not only had the landscape and environment changed, but over the intervening 27 chatur-yugas, in the cycles of human spiritual and cultural evolution, mankind was at a lower level of development than in their own time (see Ages of Man). The Bhagavata Purana describes that they found the race of men had become "dwindled in stature, reduced in vigour, and enfeebled in intellect."The daughter and father found Balarama and proposed the marriage which was accepted. The marriage was then duly celebrated. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakudmi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakudmi
cenari0 5y ago
Thanks to Europeans? I wonder — what civilisation can we attribute all this progress to? Romans? British? Or Americans ?
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
> there is something special about this moment in time. You completely missed his point. This moment is special to you because you are living it. Not because of the latest i9 chip or flying cars.
npsomaratna 5y ago
I agree. If you look at, say, Ancient Egypt from the start of the old kingdom to the end of the middle kingdom (a 1000 year period), people's lifestyles changed very little. Compare the start of the 20th century to the start of the 21st (a mere hundred year period)—the differences are amazing. Air travel, radio and television, computers, cars being universal (in developed countries at least)—the list just goes on, both big and small.

sgregnt 5y ago

Just wanted to share my opinion. I'm not sure if the number of existential threads for humanity is now larger than 200k years ago. My take would be it is probably much smallest than even 1k years ago. Nukes will not destroy civilization (it might be horrible disaster on the scale of WW2 but not civ. distruction.). Arguably we are now have better ways to adapt to climate changes and it or meteorite impact. And who knows, in another 100 years we might be an interplanetary species. AI might not be a thread like some suggests, and the up sides to productivity are enormous.

willcipriano 5y ago

> I disagree, there is something special about this moment in time. Your ancestors all felt the same way. So will your children.

bspammer 5y ago
It doesn't really matter what my ancestors felt, it's blatently obvious that there's more going on right now, and faster than 10,000 years ago. Back then, you'd be lucky to see a single revolutionary invention in a lifetime. Now we're seeing them every decade, if not annually. I don't disagree that my descendents will be justified in feeling the same way, as long as the exponential curve keeps on going and civilization doesn't end.
- radicaldreamer 5y ago
  Is this really true? If someone from 1950s America time-travelled to the present day, is there anything at all that they conceptually couldn't fathom? Maybe if you transported someone from 1950s China to present-day China, they would be more shocked, but a present day suburban home in 2021 is not all that markedly different than a 1950s home -- and neither is the workplace, the commute, the cars. Mostly replaced paper with screens and tvs with bigger, flatter tvs. The most conceptually difficult thing would be understanding that wireless telegraphs with cameras are pocket-sized and everywhere.
  - bspammer 5y ago
    On the scales we're talking about, I would include the 1950s as "present-day". I would include the last 300 years as "particularly special"
  - adventured 5y ago
    > is there anything at all that they conceptually couldn't fathom? Well you set the bar artificially high with that phrasing. Is there ever anything people of the last couple thousand years would be literally unable to conceptually fathom? No. We know that from ancient texts, they would be able to grasp anything we have today (even if it might take more elaborate explanation). 1950s Americans, or any citizens around the world at the time, would be more than astounded by 3-4 billion people being essentially always connected on a gigantic, seemingly instantaneous global communications and commerce network. The modern smartphone would similarly astound, what they can do all-in-one and the quality of it (the audio, the video, the music, movies, news, communication, click-button services & purchasing, digitization of money, the quality of digital photographs and how many you can take with no regard for space, it would all astound). Someone from the 1980s would be just as astounded by a recent iPhone, they'd feel like a time traveler. People in 2007 were truly astounded by the iPhone. It almost felt like a product delivered from the future. It put all industry jaws on the floor and reset the grid for everyone in the tech industry, without exception. Maybe people have now widely forgotten the shock effect it had, I haven't forgotten. That said, the parent's claim was an exaggeration. We're not inventing/harnessing such extraordinary stuff every year. Maybe a few things of note per decade globally. CRISPR, cracking the human genome, modern antibiotics, Internet, Web, transistor and microprocessor, software, computers including personal, space flight, powered flight, various engines, electricity and electric light, fossil fuels, nuclear power and weapons, various green revolution outcomes (food production), solar and a few key renewable energy technologies, the commercial/industrial laser, and so on. There are several dozen things that can be added to that list from the last 100-150 years. A few per decade globally might be a reasonable peg.
gumby 5y ago
Well, that is unclear. Writing from Europe 100-1500 years ago suggests that most people felt quite different about time and did not have the impression the GP espoused. The overwhelming impression seems to be that things had fallen since the end of the (western) Roman Empire; there was a contrast in millenarian movements in the 10th century as the turn of the millennium approached. However people are not uniformly distributed and such belief does not seem to have been the case in, say, the contemporaneous Arab world. All that being said: I agree with you that claims that our era is somehow amazingly unique are way overblown.
yesimahuman 5y ago
It’s likely they will all look back at this particular period of a hundred or so years as one of the most pivotal times for at least one really big reason: that’s when we set the climate on a path of destruction
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Why not when we invented nuclear weapons and set civilization on the path of destruction? Or when we invented fertilizer and set the wilderness on the path of destruction or when we started applying science and set traditional stabilizing religious cultures on the path of destruction? I know why. It's because you're overwhelmed with your own contemporary culture which has indoctrinated you to believe that particular doomsday prophecy. Other cultures have/had different ones and that will surely continue into the future.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    Don't forget the pandemic. Plenty of people thought there would be some "new normal" we'd be living through for decades. Hell, I'm pretty sure plenty of people still cling to that particular doomsday scenario despite there being readily available, free vaccines. Look at all the dudes walking around outside wearing masks all along west coast cities..
  - yesimahuman 5y ago
    Thanks for the downvote because you disagree that completely disrupting climate norms isn’t a notable event that is very much happening _right now_ and will disrupt future generations significantly. Go read my comment again, I never said it was the _only_ notable event. It is objectively significant. So are nuclear weapons. So are hundreds of other things that make the last 100 years extremely significant in history.
    - exporectomy 5y ago
      I don't think I have a downvote button. You said "path of destruction". That's the speculation based on current popular opinion. Had you been saying this 50 years ago, you would have chosen whatever the popular path of destruction at that time was instead, having no awareness of climate change.
Aerroon 5y ago
I'm not so sure they felt that way. For the average person life was pretty stagnant before the industrial revolution. You lived roughly the same way that your parents did. You used the same tools and techniques in farming. You did mostly the same things socially. You dressed in roughly the same types of clothes (or at least clothing materials). Historical estimates for GDP per capita put it around $2 per day in 2011 prices. And that stayed fairly constant - it doubled in maybe a thousand years, if at all. Compare that to today: US GDP per capita has nearly tripled in my lifetime. Politically things might've been just as turbulent back then though. New overlords and all that would be more impactful back then than now.
throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
What major technological advancements like space travel, internet, computers, cell phones do you think the typical person 2000 years ago actually saw and knew about? The (lack of) inter-connectedness of the world would effect the way our ancestors felt about their moment in time.
booleandilemma 5y ago
So will your children We’ve been on a long upward curve of progress for awhile now, but this isn’t guaranteed to continue forever. The future could be a mad max / book of eli hellscape that may set us back two thousand years.
cmod 5y ago
i always come back to the fact that "time travel" wasn't a notion until relatively recently; simply by the fact that so little changed on a centuries-long scale, and traveling through time would essentially place you in precisely the same spot, with the same set of experiences and technologies. presently, we've the opposite problem: technology advances so quickly it's difficult / near impossible to accurately predict life in five hundred years. (making time travel VERY COMPELLING!)
- vidarh 5y ago
  Stories of time travel in some form or other goes back thousands of years, e.g. Hindu mythology.
  - cmod 5y ago
    it's probably worth splitting the hair between spiritual and "literal" time travel
    - vidarh 5y ago
      The stories in question involves literal travel.

ugh123 5y ago

I think you could say that about the industrial revolution. However, the events in the past 20 years seem to indicate humanity is moving backwards >There's a very good chance we're living the most comfortable lives that any creature on this planet will ever experience, past and future. It's truly mindblowing how lucky we are. The disparity between the haves and the have-nots in this moment in time would truly bewilder anyone in ancient history if they could see whats happening today. There are likely more people living in poverty today than there were 200 years ago, in absolute numbers - not percentage.

yostrovs 5y ago
In percentage, poverty is probably at its lowest in history.

tshaddox 5y ago

Could it be that in the distant future if you at human history (or even the history of life on Earth) from far enough away to smooth out the little bumps, it turns out that we 20th and 21st century humans are in fact in a pretty unremarkable point along an exponential curve?

katzgrau 5y ago
Def, as far as we know, we're just a little slope upward. And I'm not sure what the Y axis is even measuring.
bspammer 5y ago
If that's true (and I hope it is, because it means things go very well for humanity), we're still one of the first generations to see major change _within_ our short lives. For millions of years, technology and tools stayed roughly the same from generation to generation. I'm 25, and the technological progress since I was born is mind-blowing.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  > we're still one of the first generations to see major change _within_ our short lives. One could argue that people were seeing major technological/scientific/philosophical/cultural changes within their lives at least as far back as the Enlightenment (and I'd argue much further back than that), and what has actually changed is just that the number of people affected by those changes has grown (perhaps exponentially). Likewise in the future the rate of change we're so impressed by now may look laughable, and that's even ignoring the possibility of significant lifespan extension in the future!
  - noir_lord 5y ago
    Lets accept that the rate of change of technology during the enlightenment was as rapid as the last 100 years (it wasn't but lets accept it) - that was two centuries ago, these prints are 200K years ago, that's 3 orders of magnitude older. There have been points in our history where technology/knowledge has advanced quicker than the baseline but the last two-three centuries (and particularly the last one) have been exceptional. Whether that rate of change is sustainable for another century I don't know, I'd like to hope so since it'd mean humans are doing pretty well. But if you took someone born in 1880 (a century before me) and they lived 90 years they'd have seen the invention of flight, the invention of the motorcar, the electrification of the world, the invention of wireless, the invention of TV, the invention of the internet, the invention of antibiotics, the invention of synthetic materials, the invention of the telephone, the first heart transplant, the invention of the nuclear bomb, the discovery of the structure of DNA and literally thousands of other technologies and discoveries in one human lifespan). At no other point in human history has a single life span seen so much*.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

In the face of accelerating change, every moment feels like an inflection point, and the past always looks stagnant in comparison. Measured from the baseline of where things are now, the past was so different. Measured from the baseline of how quickly things change now, the past was so slow. The catch is that it’s true no matter when you say it from, so long as change is accelerating. Exponential growth is my favorite example. Plot y=k^t for any k from t=long time ago to t=T. It will look like y is at an ‘insane inflection point,’ regardless of the T you choose.

bspammer 5y ago
Sure if you look at it from a purely mathematical point of view, but we can anchor ourselves to something which is (relatively) constant - the human lifespan. We're one of the first generations to feel the effects of the exponential curve within our lifetimes.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  If you plot anything exponential from t=T-60 years to t=T, it'll look just as dramatic now as ever. Try it. Plot Imagine you have some function like population or number of transistors per dollar or something that's exponential. You can model it as y(t) = a * b^(t+c). To look at how it feels when you look backwards, make it relative to what life is like today (aka divide by the "normal" value y(t) to get a function of how it seems looking backwards y(t)/y(T) = b^(t-T). Let's make a variable for `years from now:` dt = t-T. If we look at the last 60 years, this is just plotting b^dt from dt=-60 to dt=0. It doesn't matter when you look at it from. The last sixty years of exponential growth always looks the same. It's just b^dt from dt=-60 to dt=0, which (being the exact same function) looks equally dramatic from any point. tl;dr let's make it concrete and plot 1.1^t from 1960 to 2020, and then plot 1.1^t 1060 to 1120. They look exactly the same, even though each just spans a human life time: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+1.1%5Et+from+t%3D1960+to+t%3D2020 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+1.1%5Et+from+t%3D... https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+1.1%5Et+from+t%3D1060+to+t%3D1120 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+1.1%5Et+from+t%3D...

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/ https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/ has some interesting ideas that agree with you.

3grdlurker 5y ago

Even if it were true that societies today are more complex, why is that inherently more special than a time in the past when life was simple? How come so many people today long for a much simpler life, like in the past, as if the past was special? The point is, special is highly subjective and you really should be doubting your own notions of it. In any case, I think that the original commenter really referred to how there’s nothing so drastically different about the experience of being human in the present and in the past.

TriNetra 5y ago

Earth has been around at least for billions of years. Our modern existence is only of about few hundred years. It'd be over estimating ourselves to think that a civilization like us never existed on Earth let alone other planets. As the technology keeps on miniaturizing, there'll be a point at which the verbose existence of technology would largely be no longer there. In that state, if the civilization is reset due to some cosmic incident, a tech civilization like us in far future will think about themselves in the same way. We do read about Atlantis like legend and consider them a myth similarly, we'd be a myth for such future civilization.

lucbocahut 5y ago
I am rereading a novel from French author René Barjavel: “the ice people” on this exact theme. Scientists in the South Pole discover an ancient civilization 900k years old. Its also fun because he anticipates the near future quite accurately from 1968 when he wrote it. Well worth a read. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_People_(Barjavel_novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_People_(Barjavel_nov...
sdfjksbdf 5y ago
Plato made up Atlantis.

TriNetra 5y ago

Another interesting data point I'd like to share here is that of multiple stories found mentioned in ancient Hindu texts called puranas (which means historic). These stories talk about humans traveling to far away planets (lokas) wherein the wheel of time moves much slower than on Earth and thus is an indication of ancient Hindu knowledge of the phenomenon of time dilation. For instance, consider this story of King Kakudmi and his daughter [0]: > Kakudmi's daughter Revati was so beautiful and so accomplished that when she reached a marriageable age, Kakudmi, thinking no one upon earth was worthy of her, went to the Creator himself, Lord Brahma, to seek his advice about a suitable husband for his daughter. When they arrived, Brahma was listening to a musical performance by the Gandharvas, so they waited patiently until the performance was finished. Then, Kakudmi bowed humbly, made his request and presented his shortlist of candidates. Brahma laughed loudly and explained that time runs differently on different planes of existence, and that during the short time they had waited in Brahma-loka to see him, 27 chatur-yugas (a cycle of four yugas, totalling 108 yugas) had passed on earth. Brahma said to Kakudmi, "O King, all those whom you may have decided within the core of your heart to accept as your son-in-law has died in the course of time. Twenty-seven chatur-yugas have already passed. Those upon whom you may have already decided are now gone, and so are their sons, grandsons and other descendants. You cannot even hear about their names.[2] You must therefore bestow this virgin gem (i.e. Revati) upon some other husband, for you are now alone, and your friends, your ministers, servants, wives, kinsmen, armies, and treasures, have long since been swept away by the hand of time."[3]King Kakudmi was overcome with astonishment and alarm at hearing this news.[3] However, Brahma comforted him and added that Vishnu, the preserver, was currently incarnate on earth in the forms of Krishna and Balarama, and he recommended Balarama as a worthy husband for Revati.Kakudmi and Revati then returned to earth which they regarded as having left only just a short while ago. They were shocked by the changes that had taken place. Not only had the landscape and environment changed, but over the intervening 27 chatur-yugas, in the cycles of human spiritual and cultural evolution, mankind was at a lower level of development than in their own time (see Ages of Man). The Bhagavata Purana describes that they found the race of men had become "dwindled in stature, reduced in vigour, and enfeebled in intellect."The daughter and father found Balarama and proposed the marriage which was accepted. The marriage was then duly celebrated. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakudmi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakudmi

cenari0 5y ago

Thanks to Europeans? I wonder — what civilisation can we attribute all this progress to? Romans? British? Or Americans ?

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago

> there is something special about this moment in time. You completely missed his point. This moment is special to you because you are living it. Not because of the latest i9 chip or flying cars.

npsomaratna 5y ago

I agree. If you look at, say, Ancient Egypt from the start of the old kingdom to the end of the middle kingdom (a 1000 year period), people's lifestyles changed very little. Compare the start of the 20th century to the start of the 21st (a mere hundred year period)—the differences are amazing. Air travel, radio and television, computers, cars being universal (in developed countries at least)—the list just goes on, both big and small.