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Zoom back a few billion years. You have some stars, planets, celestial bodies. There is no complexity. Nothing will change. Astrophysics is done mostly on Newto
by muzani 5y ago
Zoom back a few billion years. You have some stars, planets, celestial bodies. There is no complexity. Nothing will change. Astrophysics is done mostly on Newtonian physics, because it's so predictable.
Zoom forward to life. Life is more interesting. It tries to do things. You had early creatures that evolve arms and these arms were also their throats and mouths. You had creatures invent all kinds of weird senses, like being able to see electricity. There was the dinosaur era where creatures wanted big powerful bodies. Sharks were megasharks.
At this point the most complex thing in the Solar System was life. Not the sun or planets or some whirly space dust. Life was highly unpredictable and interesting.
Now fast forward to humans. Humans learned tools. They stat dumped claws, poison, and monkey muscle. They became really focused, eyes in front of their heads instead of the sides. Just became really good at making tools and using it as an extension of the body. Animals can make tools, but it doesn't meld into the brain like it does with humans.
Tools opened up a whole different layer of complexity. You get spears, then swords, hammers, houses, concrete, so on. You use tools to build more tools.
Somehow we became extremely complex creatures. And we've learned to deal with that complexity as well - statistics, systems, game theory, theology.
18th century, we invented economics. Simply put, wealth wasn't gold and silver, it was production. The idea that if humans were productive, they'd be wealthier. Wars slowed down a lot because you didn't have to kill each other for gold. Equality improved, because you'd have more productivity with willing employees than you would from slaves. And we got into this grand idea that we should just make everyone productive! Education, health care, free people in jobs, emancipation. This is the birth of modern civilization.
20th century, we got really good at tools making tools. Now you have programming. Punch cards, then Assembly, C, operating systems. You use an operating system and a programming language to make better operating systems and languages!
Then CAD. Build better processors. Build better software with these processors. Build better hardware with the better software! What is this wizardry?
And we've had these loops in every other field. We made humans last longer. Life expectancy was less than 50 in 1900. So humans grew older, became more experienced, became better doctors, better teachers and professors. We've had advancements in farming, so things were not as doomed as Malthus predicted.
While software and hardware is slowing down, this tools making more tools opens new doors. Genetic engineering is close. We're hitting advances in energy, efficient cars, rockets. That thing with creatures spending millions of years engineering themselves, we should be able to do that in a few years.
If we ever do figure out space colonization, we'll inflict all kinds of chaos. Stars are predictable over the span of billions of years. But give humans ten thousand more years and who knows what we could do to the stars?
tl;dr: We're always racing to become more complex and interesting, and humanity as a whole will continue to be unpredictable.