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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

I remember having read something similar a while ago about a cave in France which was used a sort of natural paint supply over a time of around 10,000 years.

Apart from how far back those things span, this also illustrates how enormously the rate of change in culture and living conditions has accellerated in our time.

Think about it: If you could time-travel back to somewhere within those 40,000 years, you might encounter a group of hunter-gatherers.

Their remote ancestors, as far back for them as ancient egypt is for us, were: hunter-gatherers.

Their descendants in the distant future, as far away from them as Star Treck is for us, will be: hunter-gatherers.

Compare this with our time life style and technology is radically different than it was 200 years ago and at least technological innovation seems to be accellerating even more.

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Yet, as far as I understand, if you took an infant and brought it forward to our time it could grow up to be a theoretical physics professor. That is, they were no different than us. Why the stagnation for so long?

I notice that you use the word "stagnation" here, which definitely has a negative subtext. Most people probably feel that same negativity towards the thought of that long period of slow change / stability. I wonder, however, whether that subtext is appropriate. Perhaps they were happy with their lives? Maybe there were no changes because we'd reached an equilibrium, and people were happy enough that no one did anything radical that would change their way of life.

Or, to take a middle ground between those two stances, maybe, well, it was just an equilibrium (sans value judgment about whether it was a 'good' one or a 'bad' one). What's wrong with a system at equilibrium?

> What's wrong with a system at equilibrium?

Depends on how are you satisfied with the state of things. For me, things will be wrong until we get rid of suffering, illness and death.

Still, I don't believe there ever was a real stagnation, or equilibrium. Things were always changing, just for most of the recorded history, those changes were very, very slow - unnoticeable to individuals living then. The beginning of an exponential curve is almost flat.

I'd love to live in one of the futures the bio/cyberpunk people dreamed up, where you could enhance your mind and body with all kinds of unimaginable technology, adapt to any kind of environment (instead of adapting the environment to you), colonice space, etc etc.

Ironically, I believe we're on a good way to develop the technologies that were needed for that - just, with how things are developing right now, I'm pessimistic that we have the sociological skills to to put them to any kind of positive use.

If we're already fighting increasingly agressive political battles about where we should steer the part of the world we are able to control, how would that look in a virtual reality wher we had control over absolutely everything?

If you're annoyed today that your programs, books, movies, games, phones and cars are tethered to their vendors over the internet, can be used to spy on you and can be updated with changed functionality on a whim - imagine if your own body or mind suddenly required a cloud backend owned by someone else.

I think before we get the technological transhumanist utopia, we have to realise a society that would be able to deal with it. Otherwise, it would be a rather grim irony if we defeated death only to replace it with biblical eternal damnation.

I completely agree with what you wrote here. I too fear this bad vision is quite likely to happen, and I strongly feel we're socially too immature for the technologies we already have. But I still feel it's better to risk it and fail, and hopefully get to try again, than to enter an "equilibrium" state, a stagnation phase right now (not that it's possible).

> The beginning of an exponential curve is almost flat

Not just almost, the tangent at t=0 is flat.

> For me, things will be wrong until we get rid of suffering, illness and death.

For me this doesn't make sense. I'm all for alleviating suffering, illness and death but can't see how total freedom from those things would be possible, or even desirable. I am aware that something called 'trans-humanism' exists, I'd just be interested to hear if anyone could argue for such a stance with reasonable integrity.

Lets flip the desirability question. Imagine we invent fast space travel and go out there and meet a smart alien species. Evolution for these aliens has given them an extremely robust bodies and, say, ten million years ago these aliens stopped dying or getting seriously ill. You say to them, "This is not the way to live. Its a much better life if after 100 years every individual self-destructs because XYZ?"

Can you fill that blank? I can't.

Edit: also read this https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

That's a very seductive argument for the individual, but most species do have a finite lifespan, and that in itself is actually an argument for its adaptive benefit. Consider that genetic code could become dated or fragile over long time periods: it's never going to be in the individual's benefit to die, but it's much better in the long term for the species to be adaptable. It's not entirely implausible, but I'm skeptical that this would change in the far future.

We've escaped the reign of biological evolution millennia ago. Ever since humans figured out how to learn and later write, we've been evolving society and technology orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution could ever hope to work. We are no longer bound by it. And given what's been done over the past couple decades, we're about to take control of our own genetic future as well. We will be able to repair, "update" and adapt our species' genetic makeup as we see fit, and this might actually be a prerequisite knowledge to achieving life extension.

So no, I don't think this argument for species holds either.

It must be a prerequisite for this kind of hyperbole that the technology it describes does not exist yet. Nothing is infinitely repairable or upgradeable, and neither of those things are ever free.

> Nothing is infinitely repairable or upgradeable, and neither of those things are ever free.

Well yes, there's heat death of the universe that we still have to contend with :P. But beyond that, what you wrote is not a problem. The biology itself works around it - it "repairs" by copying and checksumming, and does so using energy. It's not perfect (this is what enables evolution), but it's perfectable. We already know enough to realize that we can design systems which allow for reducing the probability of incorrectable errors to arbitrarily low amounts - that's practically infinite repairability. No one is saying maintenance is ever going to become free.

You're focusing on the error rate, which is not actually the concern. You could have a perfectly working VAX in front of you, and it would be essentially a museum piece, because technology has moved on. Suggesting that any physical process is perfectable is...subject to qualification and requiring of strong evidence, shall we say. However, if true, it would still be insufficient.

So what is the point? That we won't stay the same, because we'll want to be better? If that's it, then great, that's the goal!

Better is not universal nor uniformly distributed, therefore evolution occurs, therefore death has adaptive value even in otherwise ideal conditions, and there is no reason to believe in truly ideal conditions even assuming arbitrarily high technology.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. "Evolution" occurs, but we've already freed ourselves from the grasp of biological evolution, and are already employing a much more efficient and effective human-controlled evolution. There is no need for death of individuals to play a part in this any longer. Most of our adaptations can be freely removed and replaced without harming their user.

> Most of our adaptations can be freely removed and replaced without harming their user.

Magic does not exist, even in the future.

Glasses, winter jackets, cars, guns, etc. are not magic. But they are adaptations.

That's irrelevant. You're not going to "roll back" a brain replacement. Future technology does not allow arbitrary reversible manipulations of molecules. Creating new individuals is much less effort than rewriting old ones in any case.

Death is an adaptation. http://www.necsi.edu/research/evoeco/programmed.pdf

But I'm not talking about brain replacements. Just regular technology. My point is that the evolution of collective human civilization is orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution of individual humans, making the latter irrelevant. The only "death" that happens in that faster evolution is loss of mindshare, these days most often seen as failure on the market.

You do not get to hand-wave away the fact of evolution, regardless of the level of technology. Populations change genetically over long periods of time, because math, and the idea that gene editing will not occur in the future (near or far) is not credible.

You seem to be making the naturalistic fallacy in this thread of comments - that which is ought to be. That evolution adapts the species, therefore that is good and any "unnatural" modification of human body is bad.

Once evolution created the human species, a species that is smart and can debate ethics, there is no need to depend on evolution to improve either the species or the individual. Technology and our ethics can allows us and guide us to improve. Whether we like it or not, transhumanism is going to come in the next few centuries and then we will be able to systematically improve our bodies and brains as we chose to improve them, not by the random statistical process of evolution by natural selection.

No, that's not my argument.

Iain M Banks' Culture novels do a pretty good job of describing a tech-Utopian society that you'd actually want to live in.

There's a decent argument to be made that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was far better than most of civilized history, and we've only recently really dug ourselves out of that hole.

If you gloss over all the "nasty, brutish and short" bits of that lifestyle, sure.

Also, you need vast amounts of land to maintain that lifestyle. You can argue that there are too many humans, and I'd agree with you. But to have less humans we either need to have less babies, or live a lifestyle that involves lots of infant mortality.

Modern civilisation tends to have less babies - there's a strong inverse correlation between country development and family size.

Hunter-gatherers solved it the other way.

I get the argument for living in touch with nature, etc. It's all very romantic. But arguing that watching most of your babies die is "better" than this... no, sorry, that doesn't work for me.

It wasn't pretty. But the argument was made that people were happier and healthier then.

Also, child mortality (and general mortality) was probably much lower - a lot of diseases, and especially pandemics, are tied directly to agriculture making people live with animals, and urbanization making a lot of people live together with a lot of animals on a small piece of land.

Yeah I never got this argument.

We know that present-day hunter-gatherer peoples have high infant mortality.

We know that hunter-gatherers need a lot of land per person, and so therefore need to control their population, without birth control.

Yes, agriculture and high population density brings different problems and diseases, but to argue that somehow those are worse is to ignore basic statistics.

I do get the mental health argument, but only if you accept a bunch of stuff about human mental health that isn't fun. For exactly the same reasons that veterans don't get PSTD or depression until they stop fighting, we're going through a process of de-traumatising developed populations. We don't really know what lies the other side, because we've never been in a prolonged multi-generational period of peace and plenty.

How do we know that people who lived 10,000 years ago were happier and healthier than we are? That was pre-history.

It's not like the life of a medieval peasant was nice, friendly, and long. I don't doubt that we're better off now, but was the life of the average civilized person prior to a couple hundred years ago better than that of the average hunter-gatherer? It seems like you still have all of the same downsides, plus more like worse diseases and having to work nearly every waking moment.

If it takes thousands of years of worse conditions to get to a better lifestyle, is that progress?

Progress isn't a smooth line, for civilisations, startups or individuals. In Europe, the Roman Empire invented a whole bunch of stuff that we're only reinvented recently (and some things, like concrete, that we still aren't as good at). The Dark Ages were not a progression from that.

There were, however, more people living in medieval Europe than there were when Europe was populated by hunter-gatherers. So yes, I'd count that as progress. As for lifestyle, it's hard to say... the life of a medieval peasant in Europe wasn't that bad. They had a lot of security, a community around them to support them, rights that were guaranteed by that community. They worked hard, but at work that was meaningful to the community. Things might have been worse in the cities, but the vast majority of people in medieval Europe lived in rural farming villages. I wouldn't necessarily say that they had it worse than a hunter-gatherer. Or even than a modern tech worker...

You were just arguing that high rates of infant mortality made it crazy to think things were better. Now you're saying that the life of a medieval peasant, where infant mortality was 30-50%, wasn't any worse than the life of a modern tech worker?!

you're right, of course. I just always think the peasants get a bad rap as being oppressed and miserable.

> Why the stagnation for so long?

Exponential growth of technology. It's only in the past couple centuries that inventions started to add up and lead to further inventions within a single lifetime. Before that, the lives of people separated by 200 years were roughly identical, with maybe a single thing improving here or there.

But that doesn't explain why. For tens of thousands of years the people would have been as intelligent as any of us. Surely in all those years an Einstein would have been born who would push things forward much faster.

Knowledge builds on knowledge, and (so far as we know) there's no shortcut to the gradual acquisition of knowledge.

I think this is best exemplified by one particular episode of the YouTube "Primitive Technology" series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVV4xeWBIxE . In this video, the creator builds a forge blower from sticks, leaves, stones, and vines. All materials that would've been available to primitive man 40,000 years (or more) ago...

...but the forge blower wasn't known to human kind until the 1600s! In other words, the creator of the "Primitive Technology" videos was able to build a forge blower because he knew about the concept (and, presumably, the principles of pressure and centrifugal force that make it all work). Those had to be discovered through thousands of years of an arduous process of trial, error, analysis, and teaching.

So, the Einstein of 40,000 years ago likely existed, but he may have only been able to discover and convince others to, say, pre-burn wood to generate charcoal. In terms of an advancement over existing technology, I'd argue such an advance would be even more significant than General Relativity, and yet it's technology that we can run down to the corner store and procure for $5 a bag today.

Then there was economics that also complicated things.

Crude steam engines were already constructed in the ancient world. From what we know, those people couldn't figure much need for them, beyond spicing up your temple experience with magically moving statues. They lacked both the necessary knowledge to make good use of their invention, as well as an immediate practical use for it.

There weren’t the necessary economic conditions to allow for the development and use of steam engines in antiquity.

See Steve Theodore’s answer on Quora for more: https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-the-industrial-revolution-oc...

But that still doesn’t explain why. Hero of Alexandria created a rudimentary contraption that was an obvious predecessor to the steam engine nearly 2000 years before the invention of the steam engine. Why did it take two millennia to build upon his ideas?

Education levels were low and the population was much lower, essentially everybody lived in poverty, the scientific method hadn't been adopted and people in general did a very poor job separating religion/superstition with the workings of the natural world. Also information travelled slowly/not at all, and books were very expensive - so in the case of the steam engine, only very few people probably ever even heard about the engine after Hero's death for many hundreds of years.

There are tons of reasons. Really the past 250 years have been the extreme exception to the more "normal" state - it might be more appropriate to ask what we did in this time that changed things so much

James Watt was able to go around England installing steam pumps in coal mines. Why was Hero of Alexander not able to do the same thing?

Because even though he invented a basic steam engine they still didn't have nearly the material science we do. Their engines wasn't able to create and safely contain enough pressure to do anything useful.

"An Einstein" could not exist without first there being "a Newton", "a Leibniz", "a Pythagoras", "an Aristotle", etc. There are no geniuses that could single-handedly propel us from stone age to modern physics. It was all small steps, accumulated incrementally.

(My current belief is that most of those figures I mentioned, and other famous scientists, weren't that much smarter than average - they were just the first to familiarize themselves with existing knowledge and make the next small step. This explains why so many discoveries were made simultaneously, within months or years, by different people who weren't in contact - it's because when a critical mass of knowledge is accumulated, the next step is obvious for a sufficiently educated/equipped person.)

As for whether we could have had all the inventions add up a little bit quicker - maybe. Politics and economies in the past could look different. If Rome didn't fall, maybe we'd already be colonizing the moons of Saturn. Or maybe we'd only be witnessing the first "horseless carriage" now.

The prehistoric Einstein would not have access to pen or paper. Or mathematics (beyond simple counting). Or complex language to describe new concepts. There is a reason why both Leibniz and Newton came to calculus at around the same time - it was posssible only bu standing on the shoulders of others.

Writing. There’s only so much information that can be kept in one person’s head.

And it takes a long time for writing to catch on — classic network effects. If only a few people can read, it’s not that useful and nobody bothers writing stuff down other than personal notes or business records.

It only appears like stagnation when you look at history because the fruits of their civilization was systematically eradicated by conquerors.

See for example the Nagualism tradition which was equally as developed as Vedic philosophy. But its teachers were all slaughtered and its books burned by the Catholic Church. By the 20th century “nagual” has become a slur.

Now we look back and say memo-Americans were primitive and did nothing for tens of thousands of years:

No, they were far more advanced than Europeans, but their knowledge was dangerous to the colonial mission and therefore expunged from history.

Yes!

I always wonder about how far this goes... Humans from 100,000 years ago were basically like us. Our oldest history goes back maybe 15,000 of those years. Australian Aboriginal history, the longest I'm aware of, goes back less than half of that.

We know that humans travelled over the Pacific, traded between South America And North Africa, for example. But because we don't have any artifacts from those periods we assume that this was haphazard and random rather than deliberate and organised. But artifacts just don't survive this long. So we have no idea what kind of societies were around 75,000 years ago.

They could have discovered iron and made iron tools or weapons. But iron tools will completely disintegrate in 75,000 year, while stone ones won't. So we only see the stone tools, and assume they only had stone tools.

It's interesting to speculate, but as there's no evidence (nor can there be) it'll remain an interesting speculation until we invest time travel.

Well, I have realized there’s more evidence than I thought. Oral traditions are not that easy to stamp out. It is all underground now though. And certainly not readily accessible to the Academy, given that it is a fundamentally colonial institution.

Yeah, but "oral history" is only evidence that the history exists now. Not that it existed 10,000, 1,000 or even 10 years ago.

The poster child for this is the druids in the UK. The Romans went on a deliberate campaign to destroy the druids. They documented it in their written histories, culminating in the invasion of the holy island of Anglesea. They stamped the whole religion out thoroughly. They had ~400 years to do that. Then there was ~1000 years of Christianity, not at all tolerant of other faiths. Then there was the Victorians, who were really, really keen on the occult and ancient knowledge. And suddenly an ancient oral tradition of druidism pops up. Convenient.

I know there are oral histories that are sacred to Australian indigenous peoples, and I don't doubt for a second that they are true, but I'm always wary of trusting them.

Replying again (waaay past the edit window) with another thing.

Today I wanted to watch something while eating my breakfast, and recalled the 1978 "Connections" series[0], I've seen recommended on HN many times. I ended up binging first two episodes, and the second one[1] is quite relevant to your question. It tells a story of how discovery of a particular stone in ancient times, that allowed people to set a standard on precious metals, started a chain of discoveries and transformations that culminated in (spoiler, rot13) gur vairagvba bs enqne naq gur ngbzvp obzo. Of course, technologies have a dependency tree, not chain, but watching this episode you can get a feeling of how one invention enabled another, how all the pieces for a new breakthrough might be there, but the economics are not right yet to have them used, and how the accumulation of knowledge accelerated over time.

I highly recommend the episode, and judging by the first two, the whole series.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connec...

[1] - you can find it on dailymotion dot com slash video slash x2gohd2

Inventing new things is really, really hard. Just think about how you would invent bow and arrow. You would first have to come across the concept of hurling pointy objects. You'd need strings. You'd have to notice that a taut string can be used to shoot pointy objects. And then you'd have to refine the concept until it works better than just throwing a spear yourself. Especially the last step is really difficult. Spears are very effective weapons, especially if you use a spear-thrower.

And if you haven't invented writing yet, more likely than not anything you invent will be lost when you or perhaps your clan die. Even if you have writing, without the printing press and general education, more likely than not the person who could use your invention to build something better will never have heard about your work. Communication and trade was extremely slow until the invention of the telegraph basically, and regional disasters like drought could wipe out a lot of knowledge. Think how much progress was lost when the library in Alexandria burnt down.

Mostly, it was probably climate: the last (current) Ice Age, the "Quaternary glaciation" took a breather about 15kya. Things warmed nicely for about two millennia, then the Younger Dryas, a cold spell of about a millennium, ended about 11-12 kya. Before this, the "Last Glacial Maximum" (just what it sounds like) was glacier city. Ice was maxed ~26,500 years ago, ending 16-13kya, depending on whom you talk to. Even far from the ice, the climate was radically different from today.

Along with the serious climate swings, our culture changed. How much is straight-up the result of less ice is debatable, (I don't want to sound like Jared Diamond), but the fact remains: glaciers went, we developed agriculture. And we've been on the treadmill ever since.

Moreover, there were no jobs for theoretical physics professors back then either. ;-)

> Why the stagnation for so long?

Because it tooks us a long time to understand and harness energy. To go from primarily human energy only to external energy. For example, the ability to turn a barrel of oil into work changed the game. People say the industrial revolution was the game changer. It wasn't. It was oil.

Human civilization and progress seems to be directly related to energy use. What separated the US from britain and europe was our endless supply of oil. It isn't an accident that the wealthiest man and the most valuable company of the 19th century was Rockefeller of Standard Oil.

Oil unleashed an enormous amount of energy that facilitated pretty much all of modern civilization - including the stupendous rise in population.

> People say the industrial revolution was the game changer. It wasn't. It was oil.

Oil gave us a lot of qualitative improvements, but the game-changer was still the steam engine. A way of turning external energy into work, be it wood, coal or oil. With that figured out, we've quickly moved through increasingly energy-dense fuels.

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