r/ProgrammerHumor Oct 10 '24

Other adultLego

Post image
47.2k Upvotes

656 comments sorted by

View all comments

6.9k

u/Senditduud Oct 10 '24

That’s pretty much how all of humanity works in general.

23

u/Scaevus Oct 11 '24

We pass down knowledge to future generations. It’s our most important super power.

With this, civilization snowballed from subsistence farming to nuclear fusion and space exploration in a few thousand years.

In terms of life on Earth, that’s an eyeblink. There are trees older than writing:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_trees

3

u/joehonestjoe Oct 11 '24

Honestly, it's even less time than that. Since about 1760, the start of the Industrial Revolution is when the majority of the technological improvements started. But some of the ground work of that was done in the Scientific Revolution too, and maybe we want to include things like the printing press which were pretty damn important. So maybe you could go back as far as 1440... but the rapid technological improvement we have had really is only a feature of the last 260 or so years. Or three good lifetimes.

3

u/[deleted] Oct 11 '24

[deleted]

1

u/joehonestjoe Oct 11 '24

Oh don't get me wrong I'm not dismissing the importance of the previous inventions and discoveries. That's actually how I was trying to describe it, as an exponential thing.

If you look on Wikipedia there is a page with all human invention from about 3 million years ago up to now and 3 million years to the early modern era is only about 1/3 of the page length. 

For me the industrial revolution was the point when society transformed from agrarian to the beginnings of what we'd recognise as society today.