Quote:
Originally Posted by sortie
True,
but don't underestimate the ingenuity of the people before us.
They produced many inventions that led to us being able to build on top of them.
There were less people and therefore less people to invent in those days.
They invented ways to make our life easier so that we have way more free time to invent.
If we added up all the inventions over time; those who came before us had
more inventions but didn't have mass marketing for everyone to know about them.
Some of our new inventions are old inventions that now make a lot more sense
because we finally understand what the inventor was seeing.
What comes strongly to my mind here is chemotherapy and placebo medication.
Ancient "witch doctors" used all of this for centuries before "modern man" understood it.
We ain't "modern". We have just collected more tools over time and are arrogant about it.
Neanderthal would have invented a computer too if he had not ran out of time.
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I didn't say man hadn't progressed in the thousands of years before the last 100.. What I said is we have progressed at a faster rate in the last 100 years vs any other time in history.
No one argues that for instance the Greeks achieved extremely complex things or that the Egyptians built things that still baffle us today. It still is nothing compared to what we have achieved in the last 100 years.
We are not arrogant about it, we should be proud that we live at this time because humans have accomplished more in this short time than any other time in history. It's just a shame we worry more about the next iPhone than solving the problems that face us.
From the time of the Greeks until just before the Civil war man traveled by horse and buggy or wooden ships. In the short time frame after the civil war we have built automobiles, massive size boats, invented aircraft and traveled to the moon, ect..ect..