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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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.
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