Ask Lemmy

I feel like the transfer of knowledge gets overlooked way too much when people look at big history or technological history. Every time a new way of storing or transferring knowledge arrives technological advancement start going up by like an order of magnitude.

The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture took several millennia to fully complete, but in the ice age at least the northern hemisphere had a rapid climate disruption every 1500 or so. Any progress would have been disrupted and then quickly forgotten. Once the interglacial begins the transition completes for the first time in human history (although I do wonder why nobody started farming in Australia). That leads to sedentarism, higher population density and hierarchy, which leads to the development of cities. In cities, like-minded people can meet and share, and it was only a couple of millennia more before you start seeing pottery, metalworking, writing and wheels. With the development of writing knowledge of abstract systems begins accumulating, although you see variation in literacy and library sizes based on how cheap and convenient writing materials were.

They exploded with the arrival of paper. At some point in that period advances start happening within generations, so the effect is harder to track. With the arrival of specifically wood pulp paper in the Victorian era everyone had access to education, and now, with the internet, we can have nerdy conversations like this one every day.

But sadly we can’t unite and that will be the undoing of the human race.

What makes you say that? I feel like we're 95% of the way to united, relative to where we were 50,000 years ago. Consider that Kim Jung Un has sometimes worn a suit that would be just as normal seen on Mark Rutta - that's pretty significant cultural overlap, even with the stark ideology gap. We have some big challenges coming up, so it's not guaranteed, but I don't have any reason that we're doomed to failure either.