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Comment by euske | Hacker News Reader

As a side note, not only one's life is short, but the entire human history is short. I'm over 40 and it struck me that if I repeated my life 50 times it would already go back B.C.! We've invented and developed ALL the things in between. I don't think I could live 50 times and do that myself. That was some amazing achievement, humans.

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In 2016 I did a small project that visualizes time as a series of hypothetical cross generation conversations (such as a 5 year old listening to an 80 year old's stories) [0]. Really fascinating to see how recent seemingly ancient events such as the American civil war or the invention of the printing press are when examined in these terms.

[0]: http://mattbierner.github.io/forward-propagation/

I like the example of Kittyhawk to the moon - 66 years. I realize they are not commensurate, since rockets and balloons existed long before aircraft, and the Wright Flyer 1 is not really in the ancestral lineage of Apollo spacecraft. Those 67 years are still impressively short, even though the advances were mainly due to wars (hot and Cold).

This was awesome. Thank you! It’s incredible that it only takes ~70 people’s lives, end to end, to get back to the invention of cuneiform.

Imagine all those people in a room. You could fit them in a small banquet hall. And between the oldest and youngest is the difference between the invention of writing and the utterly complex, global economic flow that we’ve networked ourselves into today.

Just imagine the diversity and conversations you would have in that banquet hall... conversing alongside the evolution of common fashion and speech.

You (currently being working class in present day) would likely be the most sought after person of interest, even among some of the bigger names in history. Behind you lies empty space of generations yet to come, who will immediately become more interesting if the same banquet were to be repeated with their inclusion.

What topic would you approach them with? Current events? Medicine? Tech? What could they simply pull from their pocket that would blow our minds today?

Just imagine the increase in human lifespan that can occur in the next 100 years, given how much it has changed in just 50 ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#/media/File:Li...

Ehhh... We've made very little progress increasing the length of our later lives. Almost all the average life span increase has come from fixing infant mortality and things which kill us in our 20s and 30s.

We have not succeeded in slowing aging.

Not to denigrate the importance of what we have achieved.

We haven't slowed aging. We have however made progress in lowering overall cancer incidence and heart disease.

https://www.cancer.org/latest-news/facts-and-figures-2018-ra...

https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death

That is the sole reason companies calculate 'man hours.' You simply can't do exponential work just by living 50 times over. Other people in parallel matter a ton. Interesting point though

You appear trip be contradicting the parent's point -- I read them as saying that it's not merely the sum of hours but the interplay of minds. So in theory 10 people might do something on less man hours than 1 because the interactions create utility that speeds development.

Thank you for this perspective. This hit me in a really unique way and is an amazingly useful frame when focusing on dissecting a large, seemingly insurmountable problem.

But what is that ”amazing achievement” relative to? We have no frame of reference other than our imaginations. Could we have went to the moon much earlier? If the Cold War didn’t happen would we still have the achievement of landing on the moon or be in space at all like today?

Relative to all of previous history.

Sure, with all the money saved on military expenses, and countries not drawn into conflicts we'd be a lot farther ahead.

Or we would have more McMansions and reduced biodiversity. It certainly seems that's the typical route a welfare maximizing democracy allocates resources by default.

"Sure, with all the money saved on military expenses, and countries not drawn into conflicts we'd be a lot farther ahead."

I doubt that. Like it or not, military conflicts (and military confrontations such as the Cold War) have produced many of the technological advances that we enjoy today.

Really good comment. Remind us that 2 thousand years seems a lot, but isn’t that much.

If you let me, I advice you to study philisophy, and you shall realise that our history is much bigger than our calendary. And if you study “The republic” os Plato, you will see that our material achivements are improved a lot,for sure, but the humanity as a whole civilization is in decay. Plato’s dialogues explain how our civilization evolves and decays in cycles, and we are currently in decay. Democracy is the system that currently rules the world, and it is one step before tirany.

Why is democracy one step before tyranny?

To the modern understanding of tyranny, it certainly is strange, but Plato had a very particular view of politics (he was what you might call elitist).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes#Tyranny

Given 2,000 years of history, he'd likely have different views (I'd hope so anyway), but that's what the poster appears to be driving at. That doesn't seem to be the root cause of tyranny in Russia or China, but democracy can devolve into it.

The 2400-year-old opinion of a specific philosopher, brilliant though they may be, does not necessarily reflect reality. One of the harder mental blocks I had to get through with philosophy, though it seems incredibly obvious both in retrospect and to those who haven't yet encountered it, is that philosophers write with no authority on metaphysical matters; any time a philosopher says the nature of a thing is thus, they are surely wrong. This is contrasted with technical matters, where it's possible and indeed common for our intellectual giants to describe things precisely as they are. I mean this as no slight against philosophy, nor to denigrate its utility, but as a simple observation that your mode of engagement with the material must differ; see the common interpretation that reading the philosophical corpus is more like listening in on a conversation spanning the ages rather than learning a just-so list of facts about our world.

I don't study philosophy, but having spent a whole lot my life depressed and having it filled with long periods of solitude I do spend a lot of time thinking. What I find really interesting is how much philosophy I've rejected over the years for various reasons, only to later interdependently come to the conclusion that it was true.

The religions of the world are littered with actually very profound insight, for instance, but a lot of it is hidden behind parables and mythology, interwoven with narratives meant to maintain cultures and power structures, and generally favors the lies-to-children versions, but it's there.

I am reminded of a movie, Enemy Mine, wherein a human is learning an alien language in part via a religious text. After reading a passage bearing a remarkable similarity to "turn the other cheek", he looks up to his teacher and says "I've heard all this before", to which the alien's reply is "Of course. Truth is truth". One of the lessons of empiricism is that truths are repeatable --that we can both do the experiment, take them measurement, and produce the same result--, and even though much of philosophical thought is non-empirical that pattern seems to hold.

It seems to me, that one rejects a lot of these ideas because they seem wrong, are too simple, or even tautological, but once you've taken the long route and arrived at the same conclusion, you find that the universe had been screaming it at you your whole life and you just didn't really understand what it was saying because you lacked the context.

And they're difficult things to talk about because of that. Communication requires a shared context for mutual understanding, but often we lack that. Take any industry or specialization, which has developed its own language. Terms like "network", "database", or "stack" have meanings within the general public awareness, but within IT have much more specific definitions. When someone who uses this language daily tries to explain things to someone who doesn't, the other person's understanding will be different than what was intended because they don't understand the package of specifics that come with them, and likewise when they attempt to communicate back we sometimes have a different understanding than intended because we understand those terms in the context of that package of related concepts.

I think this is the cause of a lot of animosity between various communities. For instance, in academic feminism, the term "patriarchy" has a more nuanced meaning than it does to the general public, just like the terms "network" and "database". So when a feminist talks about the patriarchy they mean one thing, but what people often hear is something different. I think it is the same with a lot of academic, or religious, philosophy.

There's this term "karma" for which the lies-to-children version is "do good things and good things will happen to you". This is provably false, so a lot of people naturally reject it. However, if you do good things the world is actually slightly better for it, right? Even if not for you specifically. And if we all do good things, as a society, then those good things will happen to more people and you have a higher chance of having good things happen to you. If you live in a society where people tend to treat each other well, you'll all be better off than if you treat each other poorly. If you put in the work now to make the world a better place, your children will get to live in that better world, as you live in a better world made by the efforts of your parents and their parents before them. And of course the reverse is also true, if you insist on making the world a worse place through your actions. And in that context, "karma" doesn't seem so ridiculous anymore does it?

Of course, it's entirely possible that I am only seeing what I want to see. That I have, through my own lens of understanding, reinterpreted such things to fit reality as I see it.

A "2400 year old opinion", to me it is a proof of how good and unbreakable it is for surviving so many years. You are a very smart guy, more than me, for sure, you also should try it, fight against your mental blocks and give a try on philosophy, it can enlighten your life.

I often fall into ruminations of this kind. Currently in my late fifties, as a boy I have no doubt met people who in their turn have met someone born in the late seventeen hundreds. My own grandfather is a candidate. We had a couple of long generations - he was born in 1885, and could easily have known people in their nineties in his childhood.

And less than ten of my lifetimes take us back to Columbus. Less than twenty to my viking ancestors.

And oh yes, my teens were barely yesterday.

Just yesterday, I was having a similar thought. as a buddhist student, I realised I missed the Buddha(2500yrs ago) by around 50 generations, assuming life expectancy of 50.

That's more like 100 generations (assuming historically most people have kids at roughly 25).

Just thinking about how many simultaneous breakthroughs occur, and expertise in so many areas is mind boggling. In contrast there are slower periods/cultures too, ie hunter gatherer societies.

You could spend one life to become an expert doctor only to have all that knowledge made obsolete by time.

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