why didn’t humanity advance technologically for thousands of years when it comes to things like electricity and other electrical power devices like WIFI, but now humanity is advancing rather rapidly?

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why didn’t humanity advance technologically for thousands of years when it comes to things like electricity and other electrical power devices like WIFI, but now humanity is advancing rather rapidly?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

It took thousands of years to figure out that there was such a thing as magnetism and electricity. The ancient Chinese used naturally magnetic stones as the first compass, but they didn’t know what magnetism was or why those stones worked. Ancient people knew about lightning and electric eels, but didn’t know what electricity was. It’s just not readily apparent. It took many, many scientists performing many experiments to figure out that electricity and magnetism are linked. Once they tied those 2 phenomena together they also figured out that changing an electromagnetic field produces electromagnetic waves. No one knew that electromagnetic waves existed until that was accomplished (visible light was thought of as a different phenomena, not tied to electricity or magnetism). Heinrich Hertz was the first to produce electromagnetic waves, but even he didn’t see any use for them. It took many more scientists and engineers after him to better understand electromagnetic radiation and it’s uses. Our lives today wouldn’t be remotely the same without that understanding (Wifi uses electromagnetic radiation. So does radar, microwaves, radio, etc). There were many more scientists and engineers working to figure out how to harness electricity and make use of it. The real catalyst for all that we have today was to gain a good enough understanding of the underlying scientific principles so that future generations of scientist and engineers were able to make use of them. Things blew up from there, but it took a long, long time and many years of research and experimentation to get there. Add to that the invention of the printing press, so that information could be distributed to a much wider audience, and therefore involved far more people in the research, and the industrial revolution kicking off giving people access to more equipment and more time, and you get the kind of exponential growth that we’ve seen in the last 100 years or so. That growth has a whole lot to do with humanity building a deep enough understanding in one thing to be able to harness it’s potential: the electron. 100 years ago no one could guessed what would come of that. Try to imagine what the future holds if we can harness the power of the nucleus (in a non-harmful way that is), or the Graviton.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I forgot which of the founding fathers said something to the likes to: I’ll study military tactics so my children can study law and engineering, and their kids art and music (very very rough paraphrase).

So society has advanced enough to outsource “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” to intuitions and away from individuals. They somewhat automated processes like shelter and safety so that the individual doesn’t have allocate processing power for those tasks. They are free to study other things outside of capturing food, defending their territory, etc.

As populations increased the more people can fill those institutions and thus the more people are freed from those tasks and can ponder about innovations and such.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Two words.
Global communication
Established in the early 20th century if you look at a graph of technology advancement prior and after it just sorta takes off from there

Anonymous 0 Comments

An abundance of fuel, first coal and then oil. Hard to make electricity when all you know about is wood.

Anonymous 0 Comments

We started making technology that made it easier to make more technology. And that kept happening

Anonymous 0 Comments

Most new pieces of technology or discoveries enablenew discoveries and advancements to take place, often in a 1 to many ratio, causing accelerating advancements over time. Inventing A leads to B, C and D, which in turn lead to 9 other technologies etc.

However the biggest single collection of advancements that has facilitated the recent technology explosion is by far the ability to harness and use electricity(and internal combustion) to do useful “work” facilitated historically primarily by fossil fuels.

I am referring to thermodynamic work. “Work” in this sense has many definitions and forms, but fundamentally they are all the same thing. Wattage, horsepower, heat, a calorie, accelerating or lifting a mass, or whatever else…

Before we figured out how to convert fossil fuels, and more recently renewables, into work, all the work had to be done (primarily) by human or animal power (yes we used wind and gravity to some extent but this was proportionally insignificant except for a few limited cases)

To give an example to better Eli5 the point, imagine I want to cut wood, perhaps to build a house or a boat.
Before the advancements in electricity that we can use today to do this, the work had to be done by humans with a hand saw, today I can buy an electrical saw to do it.
A cheap entry level saw may have a power rating of 1000 watts, this means (in a loose eli5 way) that my electric saw can do the work of 5-10 average people from a couple hundred years ago, non stop “forever” and I don’t have to feed or house it, and it doesn’t need to sleep.

This loosely means I can build a house today, alone, that would’ve required 10 people just a couple of hundred years ago.

Due to the way these things scale, at an industrial level the differences are much larger, a farmer with a basic tractor can grow more food than entire villages (or a slave owner with many slaves) could historically.

Again these feats are a direct result of the ability to produce work in a thermodynamic sense via electricity or fossil fuels.
This is a fundamental property of the world we live in, it doesn’t matter how many technological advancements we ever achieve, if you want to lift , move or heat something you have to put in the energy/work somehow, and the amount of work we can produce directly via electricity(and internal combustion) is many orders of magnitude higher than ever before.

Current estimates put global energy consumption at about 160,000 TWh per year, (up from less than 20,000 TWh 100 years ago, which was manly just achieved by making fire for cooking/heating and not actually developing or building anything)

If we assume an average human can output 100W of work sustainably, and works every single day for 8 hours, or roughly 300kWh a year, we can approximate that through the use of electricity/ fossil fuels/renewables, globally, we realise the work of ~550 billion extra people.
(Obviously impossible to accurately guess this number)

In a sense, compared to just 100 years ago, it’s like every single person on the planet today has 100 unpaid workers worth of extra thermodynamic work that that they can use to develop, research, travel, transport, or build whatever they like.

Obviously there are a million run on effects to this that would take forever to list or even think of, like the fact that if less people are required to grow food or build houses then more people can do other things etc.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Here’s a big factor that I don’t think anybody has mentioned yet. The invention of the printing press in 1440 by Johannes Gutenberg. Prior to the Gutenberg printing press, books had to be made by copying the whole thing by hand. This made books extremely expensive and hard to access.

After the printing press a scientist could read about the work done by the people who came before them and build on it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In the industrial revolution it was the ability of mechanisation to increase productivity. That led to excess goods which made them available to people with lower incomes, and removed the need for almost literally everyone to be a farmer of some sort.

More recently, as you mention WiFi, it is the ability to rapidly share new information in literal seconds, and with computers the added ability to respond to changes automatically faster than a human can even read the output.

This takes those machines from the industrial revolution and turns it up to 11 in terms of how fast things can advance.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Advanced technologies allow the rapid research and development of other advanced technologies. Its a feedback loop, if you will.

Anonymous 0 Comments

For thousands of years, spread of bad ideas were the norm. New technology requires the growth of knowledge. It is knowledge that allow us to create new things and have advanced technology.

For thousands of years, humans didn’t figure out how to create new knowledge in a systematic way. Instead, they were spending their time and energy to NOT create knowledge, but to keep things the same, to “defend” their ignorance about the world.

It’s only after things like the scientific revolution and democracy that allowed us to create knowledge in rapid ways. Now, our entire culture and societies work in such a way that the creation and the growth of new knowledge is actively encouraged.