We went from no human flight to landing on the moon in under 100 years. I’m personally overwhelmed at how fast technology is moving, it’s hard to keep up. However for 240,000+ years we just rolled around in the dirt hunting and gathering without even figuring out the wheel?
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What happened was exponential growth. Humans had to figure out how to make wooden tools, then stone tools, then copper, then bronze, then iron, and then on to everything else we’ve developed. Wooden tools are very ineffective, stone tools are better, but are still awful. Copper has a huge advantage in that you can reshape it, but even early copper tools were made from naturally formed metallic copper. Being able to make bronze was a huge step forward because we could forge metal and add other things to it and share it much easier. Once you have good tools, it’s much easier to make more complex things. (The way we use energy is also a very similar progression that could be it’s own discussion, but we start with man power, then animal power, fire, hotter fire, water, steam, petroleum, and now nuclear)
Another thing to consider is that in the last 200 years we have made it a lot easier to get food. The most common profession throughout the history of civilization is farming because every society had to produce enough food for everyone every year. You couldn’t get it from far away, you couldn’t store it for very long. Once everyone didn’t have to worry about food all the time, they had a chance to actually spend time working on things that aren’t food, like airplanes.
The sharing of ideas also got much easier as time went on. We don’t know which civilization invented farming, or writing, or mathematics first because they were all invented independently by different groups of people. We do have evidence and theories about who and where they were developed first, but we can never be quite sure. It’s a lot easier to build an airplane if you can learn mathematics from someone who already did the hard part of discovering it. There’s a reason we say science is built on the shoulders of giants, and that’s because it really is. Without Newton’s Laws, now is Einstein supposed to notice that things traveling near the speed of light don’t follow those laws?
Fun fact, it took longer for humanity to switch from bronze tools to iron tools than it took for humanity to switch from iron tools to nuclear power.
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