3 ms·

> Then again, it's always true that the world we'll die in will be different than the world we were born in, and we might not like it. Maybe that's how it goes.

• herval 3y ago
  There’s very few places in history that remained constant for more than a single generation. Technology-wise, things obviously move faster today than a thousand years ago, but if you take in consideration the constant cultural shifts, wars, plagues that lasted a decade etc, and life might feel like that since the dawn of man
  • mc32 3y ago
    I doubt this. After the war, people would go back to tilling land with the same oxen and plough and go fishing in the same kinds of boats their parents and grandparents did. The meals didn’t change, the beer didn’t change, the routine didn’t change. They didn’t get better ploughs or better boats, or better oxen. It was still about an acre per day before a war and after a war. Medicines and cures remained constant. That’s not to say occasional improvements didn’t happen, they did, but there were long breaks between improvements.
    • herval 3y ago
      It really depends on the pocket of people you choose to analyze, and their geographic location. That’s all true even today
    • hinkley 3y ago
      Not with the same oxen, not with the same wheat. We’ve only been domesticating animals and plants for maybe 25,000 years, and that’s if you assume Gobleki Tepe means we have missed the actual cradle of civilization this whole time. There are certainly going to be times when transportation improvements accelerate this process, from ships to Roman roads to steam power, but every generation will be different, and most of our livestock have fairly short childhoods. For a single human to witness twenty generations of goat or pig is not unreasonable. Or fifty generations of grains. Add in all of their neighbors, and the odds of seeing something special in their lifetime jump considerably. You would probably see several.
      • LeifCarrotson 3y ago
        Fifty generations of grains from 0AD to 50AD would have been an indiscernible difference. Those genetics were changing, mostly at random, by tiny percentage points. I don't think they'd have been able to tell without scientific equipment that the average yield per acre had gone up by 0.1% in their lifetime. But today, over my lifetime, genetically modified crops are everywhere. Yields are up by ~25% and pesticide use is down by 33%. Had exponential growth been happening at that rate for a thousand generations, then if our paleolithic ancestors got 1 bushel of grain, we'd harvest something like 10^18 times the mass of the entire observable universe. Technology accelerates the rate of change. That rate is not consistent.
        • hinkley 3y ago
          It feels like you are assuming that plant domestication was a process of collecting new gene mutations, instead of aggregating existing ones. You can do a lot with selective breeding, but whether you’re creating something new or something that has been done fifty times before depends on where you are in history. We don’t have a monopoly on innovation and the history of it is not uniformly distributed. We talk about innovation in terms of evolutionary versus revolutionary, but quality of life changes from a friendlier pig or a better hunting dog affect individual lives quite a bit. And if those are quiet lives, those changes may matter as much as the things historians tell us are important. If you weren’t there for the rise of Julius Caesar or the Fall of Rome then whether your son marries the neighbor girl and the family farm thereby gets access to a better water source, matters a lot more than what Galileo has been up to in his lab. Yes, introduction of corn and cassava to Africa had massive impacts to world politics and especially human rights (for the worse). But those same crops already revolutionized South America millennia before that.
          • mc32 3y ago
            An innovation in Wolvehamton would not be experienced in even Marathon and vice versa. Sometimes trade did import improvements, but it was not usually experienced by the majority of people. Things were expensive for 95% of the pop. In most instances change would have been slow. Occasionally you had major changes like a crossbow, or paper making. I think those changes were not the norm. Now, across the world, if you followed spots, you could retrospectively see changes, sure. But for a single person, no, not so much.
  • sethammons 3y ago
    aboriginal people of austraila stayed pretty much unchanged for over 50 _thousand_ years until quite recently.
  • sgu999 3y ago
    There is a bit of a margin in-between my "didn't change that much" and your "remained constant"