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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There were, broadly, roughly eight major turning points in that time. Most of them didn’t involve any fundamentally new idea – they just used the advancements going on in the background to make a new thing work. And since those advancements became more and more enabled by each progressive step, so too were we able to make more and more things work.
The first was language, around 60,000 to 100,000 years ago. Language allowed humans to begin preserving knowledge from generation to generation, meaning that each generation didn’t have to relearn everything. Some other animals can pass on a few things – other primates teach their children how to use tools, for example – but not with the speed or detail allowed by human language. It’s very possible that many people independently invented the idea of language, but – well, if you have an idea of language and other people don’t, how do you tell them about it?
The second was agriculture, around 10,000 years ago. Before the rise of agriculture, humans spent most of their activity just getting enough food to live. After it, you could spare enough resources to have people start to become experts in things. One person could become an expert at computing things, another could become an expert tailor, and so on. And those experts pushed the boundaries of their fields forward (and shared what they learned through language). Agriculture was developed simultaneously around the world at about the same time, which suggests there was some underlying reason it happened then – the most obvious explanation is that this coincides with Earth’s climate warming up after the last glacial period. The idea of planting things probably wasn’t new, but this is the point where you could actually settle down with a field of crops.
The third was writing, around 5,500 years ago (possibly earlier, but cuneiform is the oldest we know of). Writing was a *huge* step forward. Now you could pass information on without having to have an expert sit down and tell you. You could keep track of things for generations, and find patterns in what you kept track of. (For example, a lot of early mathematics was worked out to predict celestial events like eclipses, which you could only do if you had reliable records of when eclipses had occurred in the past.) Writing also arose independently in many different places, but only in places that had settled civilizations, suggesting that settling down was probably a necessary prerequisite to figure it out (or at least to keep documents that survived long enough to be discovered). Marking things wasn’t new, but someone had to figure out a system that could be learned and shared.
<There’s a long gap here, during which there were many smaller pieces of progress – the development of money, of alphabets, of a great deal of materials science, of agriculture, of medicine, etc. But none of them are individually huge, so I’m skipping ahead a bit. But – as we’ll see in a sec – the lack of *individually* huge ideas turns out to disguise a lot of progress.>
The fourth was the printing press, around 600 years ago. This kicked writing into high gear and made information orders of magnitude more available (the printing press could produce copies of text around 100x faster than previous printing methods). While I didn’t include metallurgy in my list here, it was a very important field throughout ancient and pre-modern history, and between the previous bullet and this one, you went through the Bronze and Iron ages. And it was knowledge of metallurgy that made the printing press possible. Gutenberg was a metal-smith and one of his big innovations was using a new alloy of metals that made the physical mechanics of the printing press work. The idea wasn’t new, but Gutenberg built one that actually worked.
The fifth was the Scientific Method, around 400 years ago. While earlier scientists (as we’d call them today) had existed, the scientific method turns out to be a much more effective way to test ideas than most previous frameworks, which tended to *start* with logic and try to *explain* observations, rather than *observing* observations and trying to design theories that fit them. Again, the *idea* of studying the world wasn’t new, but a *particular approach* that happened to work better than previous ones allowed progress.
The sixth was the factory and mass production, around 150 years ago, which was made possible by massive advances in chemistry, engineering, and materials science enabled by the scientific method. This made the tools and apparatus for experiments, data collection, and observation far more available, not just things that could be afforded by a few very wealthy researchers (or those funded by wealthy benefactors). Automation wasn’t new, but advancements in things like metallurgy, steam power, and later electricity made automation *work* in a way the machines of the ancient world didn’t.
The seventh was electronics, which was spread throughout the 20th century. The rise of electronic machinery allowed a whole new range of observations and a new level of precision. Again, this was only possible because factories permitted the mass-production of electronic components and because materials-science had advanced to the point that things like the transistor – a key component of all modern electronics that makes logical circuits possible – could be produced.
And the eighth was networking, currently in the form of the Internet on which we are having this conversation. The idea of a network, of course, was not new. Networks of information date back to the ancient world. But advancements in speed and precision via electronics, and the creation of vast networks of infrastructure through mass production, made it possible to *automatically* shoot vast amounts of information around the world on demand.
In general, it’s best not to think of things in terms of “one big idea”. Big ideas are enabled by a million small advancements, and many big ideas have been had a million times before someone turns the big idea into a working thing. And the pace gets set by those small advancements, not by how many big ideas get had.
EDIT: Guys, you don’t really have to list out every technological advancement that has ever happened in the comments. Yes, this list leaves tons of stuff out. It’s a Reddit post written in ten minutes to sum up ten thousand years of human history. The point is to demonstrate to OP the way that these advancements follow on from previous ones, and the ways in which they depend on underlying small advancements.
It’s like the old “I’ll give you a penny today and double it tomorrow, then double that the next day”, and so on puzzle. A penny isn’t a lot of money now, but over time it grows exponentially larger. Doubling a penny can grow to $5,368,709.12 in just 30 days.
Now imagine the those pennies are human knowledge and you can see how we started off slowly but as time went on we essentially “doubled” our knowledge. Then at one point the knowledge doubling was bigger and happened more quickly.
It’s easy to advance when you are standing on top of information and technology that others have built up for you the past several millennia.
We don’t have to re-discover bacterial infections so we can now focus on fighting it
We don’t have to re-discover how to invent a circuit board, so now we can focus on optimizing it
We don’t have to re-discover human biology, so now we can focus on treating issues that plagued our ancestors
…And so on and so forth. Just like how our grandchildren won’t have to re-discover the trajectory of other planets, they can focus on how to get there.
Information builds on information the previous generation figured out
We weren’t “just rolling around in the dirt hunting and gathering.” People were getting shit done all the time in the ice age. Most of the speedy technological developments just can’t happen without the modern scale and population of the world.
The things we take for granted now were miracles back when they were discovered/invented.
250000 years ppl will ask the same question about us.
It’s easy to advance when you are standing on top of information and technology that others have built up for you the past several millennia.
We don’t have to re-discover bacterial infections so we can now focus on fighting it
We don’t have to re-discover how to invent a circuit board, so now we can focus on optimizing it
We don’t have to re-discover human biology, so now we can focus on treating issues that plagued our ancestors
…And so on and so forth. Just like how our grandchildren won’t have to re-discover the trajectory of other planets, they can focus on how to get there.
Information builds on information the previous generation figured out
I often wondered the same thing. Then I had a child. I can 100% say that pre modern times with houses and steady food supplies etc, keeping a child alive must have been absolutely brutal back then. Add in the fact that a lot of women and children died during and after birth, and that’s one piece of the puzzle
My great-grandmother told me stories of crossing the Mississippi on a raft in a covered wagon pulled by mules. They came from Tennessee to pick cotton in Arkansas. They had no electricity at home, only kerosene lanterns. She lived 103 years and saw autos replace wagons, home electricity, indoor plumbing, two world wars, the telephone, radio, and TV. She was alive when men landed on the moon. I should be so lucky to live a life like that.
It’s easy to advance when you are standing on top of information and technology that others have built up for you the past several millennia.
We don’t have to re-discover bacterial infections so we can now focus on fighting it
We don’t have to re-discover how to invent a circuit board, so now we can focus on optimizing it
We don’t have to re-discover human biology, so now we can focus on treating issues that plagued our ancestors
…And so on and so forth. Just like how our grandchildren won’t have to re-discover the trajectory of other planets, they can focus on how to get there.
Information builds on information the previous generation figured out
Lots of talk about technology in the comments but I think a major aspect was population and climate which limited the biggest game changing technology, agriculture. Simply put there wasn’t many of us for a lot of those 250k or so years and we had multiple periods of brutal climate conditions over a great deal of the planet. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the technological growth of the last 12k years occurred right after the last glacial maximum. Obviously there was growth periods before then but the climate conditions after the glaciers retreated allowed us to move from surviving to thriving. We went from nomadic hunter gatherers that spent all waking hours trying to survive to stationary agrarian populations that could specialise and had a lot more time to experiment as well as the labour resources to put towards civil projects. Agrarianism is the key. It’s also something that can’t just be “invented”. It takes so many little advancements and a lot of chance.
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