It is actually wild to think about the progress humanity has made in the last hundred years or so, we went from the Wright brothers to walking on the moon in a human lifetime.

What's even more of a mind-fuck is that on cosmological scales all that has happened in such a briefly miniscule time period that it might as well have not happened at all

Exponential growth. That first 195,000 years was every tribe figuring out super basic stuff we take for granted, then gradually building upon that with other basic stuff we take for granted. Even before agriculture, pottery, metallurgy, herbal medicine, the basic knowledge these were built from took millennia to work out and pass down.

The real secret sauce was communication. Once tribes started sharing knowledge, suddenly the base of knowledge to built on got higher, and broader. Written language, better means of travel, this sped up the process. Electronic communication has made that knowledge base pretty much universally accessible and combinable.

Progress is faster when you're not limited to what your direct tribal ancestors figured out and passed down.

It's been updated to 300 000 years 5 years ago from this discovery: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebel_Irhoud Funny how in this science we can get +50% older from a single discovery.

Aside from the little disagreement we had and still working on, we're doing OK I guess

A Brief Disagreement

Also a LOT of those people had PTSD from wars or from lion attacks or from simply losing a massive amount of their offspring to illness and accidents. They raised your ancestors anyway.

This cycle has only recently been broken and not everywhere.

Fire > Agriculture > Antibiotics > Rockets

Written language. No joke. It allowed us to grow collectively, logarithmically.

Aaaaagriculture

And balls of steel

But really it's agriculture that enables us to have time and space to create things like society and technology. A society with rule of law and intellectual property allows for a lucky few to spend most of their time understanding how to make nature work for us, leading to industrialization and the crazy growth we're able to experience in a human lifetime.

I would say we are still in the very beginning stages of planetary exploration. Once someone is making a profit in space without military or scientific money, the fun will really begin.

It really breaks my mind. And the actual biggest progress is in the last 150 years. And how things accelerated in the last 30..

Advancements in manufacturing processes and computers. And computers help store and send information, enabling more improvements.

Writing

It's also why I think a lot of people are underestimating just how far LLMs will be able to go as they improve at extracting patterns and models from written language.

What writing was able to encode was responsible for a massive leap in human intelligence.

Might sound crazy but a guess I have is encountering and consuming natural entheogens. Early cave paintings (7000-9000 years ago) depict psychedelic mushrooms.

The alterations in perception and perspective these substances cause could explain experimentation in other areas of life, leading to changes in how people lived. The modern era just built on top of past advances.

Just a thought from a guy who use to trip and had some life-altering times. Also worth noting Steve Jobs considered his experiences with LSD to be a profound experience, “one of the most important things in my life”. I wonder if we’d have Apple or many other modern era advances if he hadn’t had his encounters with psychedelics.

An alien came down and knocked up a monkey. Or something like that.