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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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