Comment by pyrrhotech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pyrrhotech | Hacker News Reader

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> Honestly our rate of increased knowledge is unreal, basically humanity had very little tech/science improvements for most of our history and then just world changing improvements in the last 2 generations/lifetimes.

I feel like this is more a modern misconception than reality. Play a game of Civilization and you'll start to appreciate just how deep human technology really is. In Roman times, they probably said similar things thinking about how advanced they were compared to the Macedonians a couple hundred years back.

Yea we lost some progress or at least the rate of change greatly slowed from 400 - 1600, but other than that blip I think the progress has actually been fairly linear from 4000 BC to 2021 CE. It just seems like it's not because of the cognitive bias to take for granted all the things that seem so basic compared to computers or nuclear reactors, but in reality, those things actually were very difficult to develop with the knowledge and production techniques available at the time.

> In Roman times, they probably said similar things thinking about how advanced they were compared to the Macedonians a couple hundred years back.

The fall of the Roman Empire, and actually really even the decline from when the city stood at more than a million people during the time of Augustus and Tiberius until the far, saw massive declines in technological knowledge and even scientific knowledge. Much of that information was not rediscovered until the Renaissance when the last remaining archives of the Roman Empire were evacuated from Constantinople to nobles and merchants across Europe during the Turkish invasion. Even today we're still rediscovering material science knowledge that the Romans and ancient Chinese had. In fact, much of our rapid advancement in technology was not even due to knew ideas, it was due to ideas that had be theorized by Greek and Roman philosophers and alchemists, and which were recorded and stored in the archives.

There was real stagnation in most knowledge and technology throughout the world. In the West because of the decline of the Roman Empire (most likely caused in part due to lead poisoning and decreasing fertility of North Africa and Judea) and in the East due to constant infighting and political strife preventing unification of India or China under stable rulers for long enough to see real advancement.

We'll have to disagree on the shape of the curve I guess, it's just my personal take.

For what it's worth...

I've been to Ephesus (which is amazing, I'd like to check out Pompeii as well) the armory in Venice is one of my favorite repos of old cutting edge tech and having spent time in Rome, truly their achievements are amazing and the Pantheon absolutely blows my mind, it's no wonder the village dwellers believed the God's lived in Rome, I would have.

But harnessing the power of the atom, understanding fundamental physics, biology and sound/light speed global communication... and the technology that these things have enabled (including my own living past 3 years of age due to modern medicine) is truly a leap, in my opinion the Roman's and those brilliant technologists and logistics civilizations of the past were still closer to living in caves by modern comparison.

I would not have wanted to live back then and I literally couldn't have. Our recent exponential explosion certainly depends on their hard fought knowledge, but in my reckoning even their best tech and logistics are deep in the early part of the curve.

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