Greentext

Less mind blowing but still shocking to me - it’s been 53 years since we last set foot on the moon, much less gone beyond that. Humanity has lost our ambition.

Hmmmm... Makes you think, doesnt it? Pretty suspicious... /s

Solid point, yeah, but 20 years ago was 2005.

GTA: San Andreas released 21 years ago.

Half-life 2 released 21 years ago.

Morrowind released 23 years ago.

Ocarina of Time released 27 years ago.

Crash Bandicoot released 29 years ago.

Star Fox released 32 years ago and had 500-600 tris on any given frame.

DOOM also released the same year, but is not true 3D

Obviously your point still stands, but full true 3D games were common by the late 90's, and pseudo 3D games were prevelant as early as '92 with Wolfenstein 3D.

Unfortunately, time flies.

As a 4090 owner, I can confidently say that we don't have photorealistic graphics yet.

But I get your point.

no it must be aliens

Source on that mutation? 50 000 years ago humans were already spread across Africa, Asia and Australia. That makes the idea of a critical mutation after that sound implausible

There was no mutation, or at least there's no evidence for it. The big change 50.000 years ago likely happened because population density finally became large enough to meaningfully transmit and preserve culture.

They genocided each other too.

The skeletal remains that we find of males at dig sites have vast amounts of damage to them, and we find significantly less women and girl skeletal remains. Aeons later and the heterogeneity of the Y chromosome is suspiciously low in contrast to that shown in mtDNA. That's a lot of killing and raping

I wouldn't say genocided per se. We have pretty significant percentages of non-homo sapien DNA. Which implies a decently high degree of inter-breeding.

My money is on a combination of inter-breeding leading to genetic extinction through dilution, resource competition (strained by changing environmental conditions), and of course inter-group conflict.

Extrapolating from this, major milestones would happen faster and faster until 2023, where all remaining major milestones happened simultaneously with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT 4. For only $200/mo, you can experience this magical moment for yourself with unlimited access to our best ChatGPT models!

Technology grows exponentially.

There's a compounding effect to advances in different fields. But I would posit it's not exponential, but sigmoid.

Early in the study of a scientific field, discoveries are slow and difficult. But as the benefits of research are industrialized, you see a critical mass of research and human labor invested in applied sciences. You see a surge in development up until you hit a point of diminishing returns. Then the benefits of research diminish and the cost of maintaining the libraries of information and education grow beyond the perceived benefit of further academic work. Investments slow and labor product diminishes over time. Existing infrastructure cements itself as the norm and improvements become more expensive to impose. Finally, the advances in technology plateau for a period of time.

Eventually, you hit on another breakthrough and there's a new surge in investment and novel infrastructure, until that well of new useful information is exhausted.

Periods of rapid and transformative growth may look meager and unimpressive in hindsight simply because you are standing on the shoulders of giants. But can anyone seriously argue that the steam engine (17th century) was less significant than the nuclear power plant (20th century), when a nuclear power plant has - at its core - a very high efficiency steam engine? We don't seem to recognize 300 years of internal combustion as a period of relative technological stagnation.

Anon (plural) isn't exactly famous for their intelligence

The hunter-gatherer cultures we see today actually seem to have a lot of free time. Seems like technological and cultural progress has different mechanics.

I'd say agriculture's influence is that it's a big incentive for people to stay in one place and develop relative dense communities, that density is what is actually speeding up progress.

Actually the biggest factor was most likely the development of language, which probably required certain evolutionary traits in order to be possible. With language, collaboration and cooperation become much easier, which leads to fire and cooking and other ideas like that. You get to writing things down a lot later.

Speaking of drugs, it probably just took 190k years for someone to work up the courage to eat the mushrooms growing out of the poop.

Also cooking before you eat matters a lot

If there's one hard lesson of history I keep relearning, it's that almost nothing ever happens until it materially is required to happen. Language and agriculture waited until population density was high enough. The industrial revolution didn't happen until the logistics and population sizes again necessitated massive changes, even though the steam engine was hundreds of years old. Revolutions don't happen until the population is starving.

If anything in history is impressive it's the rare individuals and societies that change before they're forced to by material necessity (and those cases are often debatable). Really dampens the notion of idealism being viable.