Technological Advancement

[hobie]

How was mankind able to advance so much in less than a century during the 1900's and why did it take so long to do so? Were we helped by aliens? Why weren't we able to progress faster? Were we not smart enough from year 1 to the 20th century?

[paulpablo]

How was mankind able to advance so much in less than a century during the 1900's and why did it take so long to do so? Were we helped by aliens? Why weren't we able to progress faster? Were we not smart enough from year 1 to the 20th century?

I think its because certain advancements have led to very rapid communication with each other which speeds up advancements.

Have we improved much since the 90's? I was born in 1984 and most of the stuff I can think of that has improved hasn't really been a new invention, it's just stuff that already existed that has been made faster, smaller, better looking, more convenient and available to the general public.

[pocaracas]

Well...
there are a lot of causes for that...
First, the giants had to come, Newton, Galileo, Tesla, Maxwell...
Then those who stood on the shoulders of these giants...

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Then, as the people became free from hard labor and the population increased and information traveled faster, more and more people stood on the shoulders of those who stood on the shoulders of the giants...
And the tree grew and now we have millions of people researching in several fields of expertise, all in parallel, all leading to even more people working on the advancement of science as a whole.

[Captain Colostomy]

The realization that religion wasn't the answer opened up new lines of inquery.

Man...population increase, improved education, networking...a whole slew of bullet points has helped. Not aliens, though.

Oh, and intelligence of our forefathers isn't the issue. You can be a bloody genius, but it isn't likely to be realized to it's full potential if you're a nomad in a loincloth.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

hobie, suppose for a moment that a modern nuclear engineer was suddenly transported to the 5th century CE, with all of his science, technological, and engineering skills intact. The chances of his being able to build a fission reactor are non-existent. Why? Because technology is a slow, cumulative process. Discoveries are made and built upon by successive generations of discoverers. This is why canoes are built before battleships and why splinting broken legs comes before artificial limbs.

If you'd like to think of it in more immediate terms, consider a single human being. A newborn has essentially the same parts and potential as a Grandmaster, but very few one-year olds can play a decent game of chess.


Furthermore, I strongly suspect that knowledge proceeds by geometric progression - the more we learn, the more we CAN learn. I don't see any reason to drag aliens into the picture, and even less reason to suspect that Divine beings helped us along (if they had, we might very well have had fission reactors in the 5th century).

Boru