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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Because material science wasn’t at that level yet. Obviously certain events had profound effects on our ability to advance technology like the scientific method (1500) but it would still be another 300 years before germ theory (1800) came around, the industrial revolution (1800). This paved the way way for Nicola tesla to invent alternating current generators and modern electrical devices but it’s still before the discovery of the proton(1900). Before then you don’t really have the chemistry or knowledge to make things like modern microchips. It’s not easy to understand or prove something like the structure of the atom because they too small to see, even with a microscope. Modern electronics require chips that have millions if not billions of transistors on a single chip, so there was just no way of making such a thing.
The answer is energy, meaning coil and oil.
Since humans are able to extract huge amounts of energy from coil and oil, we started building machines to do what we used to do using human body. And much more efficiently.
Since we have “free” energy, we can become sedentary, we can live in cities, most of us can go to university, etc.
I recommend you reading Jean Marc Jancovici “World without end”. Very interesting book, talking about climate change, energy and society.
EDIT : Added the coil instead of only oil, thanks to Douglas1994 comment.
Collective knowledge. We started with simple observations (oh look! Every time the sun rises from that rock, it gets cold!) to getting explanations about everything from priests and elders to scientists, philosophers and pure luck. Once collective knowledge in theoretical science is proven and disproven, exponential discoveries and inventions happen.
It’s not that we are smarter today, the past 100-200 years, there’s more information fed to us for collective knowledge to wok on.
It’s about to get a whole lot more interesting
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
Because humanity hadn’t developed cognitive problem solving methods yet. Imagine medieval blacksmith asking a local learned man how to make better steel and getting a response that he should try to find answers from bible because all truth is in it. The concepts of science and engineering just weren’t there. The tools to build the tools didn’t exist.
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.
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.
Advanced technologies allow the rapid research and development of other advanced technologies. Its a feedback loop, if you will.
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.
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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