There's more of us. Specifically, there's more of us contributing to human advancement than ever before. "Luxuries" like literacy are a pretty new advancement.
I had a bowl with 1 cracker in it for 3 weeks. Over the last 24 hours it now has 7 crackers. And people say my cracker bowl is not overpopulated...
Look. Raw numbers mean nothing. What is the sustainable population of this planet. 1 billion? 10 billion? 100 billion?
I have no idea. As tech improves, our impact per person could be lower. So perhaps the limit today is 5 billion... But in 20 years it could be 20 billion.
At even midsize population density, I am pretty sure we have space for WAY over 100 billion people on this planet. Food production needs some more work, perhaps a bit of us eating lower on the food chain..
Population is doubled every 2 generations during the 20th century. If nothing else changed, the probability of human advancement should have been at least 2x.
There are other factors like better life expectation that speed up advancement a lot (more probabilty of having advancement per generation).
But I think the literacy factor is the key. Sadly I have no data to prove it, but I bet this was the cause of all this.
Not just the raw population, 100-200 hundred years ago most of that population was involved in agriculture, now it's a few percent. Dabbleing in science used to be a rich mans hobby, now it's a career path for many.
If you add all the people who ever lived on earth, it's still less than people who are alive right now.
Industrial growth, more room for more population, more manpower to evolve, loop until earth cannot sustain certain limit of population unless there's a breakthrough to feed 10s of billions.
I think you're evading babyrainbow's question. Many new technologies have been developed, true. But we've also spent the last century conducting experiments in communism and genocide. So on the whole, are we (and I'm including the whole human race in "we") better off in all respects or only in some?
Look at the Old Testament for descriptions of too many genocides.
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If graded on a curve, the 20th century comes out as a pretty nonviolent genocide-free century.
The Industrial Revolution made a lot of manufacturing processes much, much more efficient. Before the revolution, you had one manufacturer of everything in every region/village. One blacksmith, one seamstress, one cobbler, one baker, you name it. The Industrial Revolution made large-scale manufacturing possible, freeing up a lot of time for things like education and innovation.
Think of it. In today's society, there is almost nothing around you that hasn't been manufactured by one single person from a to z. The amount of collaboration and globalization in our society is mindboggling, something that was unthinkable before the Industrial Revolution.
So it's not just the past 100 years, it's more like the past 200 years. It's easy to look at someone from 1840 as ancient, simple even. Just keep in mind that things like the steam engine, photography or electrification were just as novel and influential then computers or the internet in our age.
Before the industrial revolution, almost all manufacturing of common goods, including food, was performed by human hands and feet. This limited output capacity to that of human strength and endurance; and it was exhausting for humans, preventing most humans from having time or energy for intellectual activities.
On the contrary, there were a handful of areas where humans had already begun to exploit motion and force outside of human muscle to carry out work. One long-time example is using horses, mules, and other animals to provide force for transporting goods over distances. Even humans were payloads transported upon animal backs. Another key advancement for humans was using water and wind to transport large amounts of goods from one place to another. Sailboats allowed for transporting of goods a very long distance. In today's age we may take self-driving transport for granted, but once upon a time humans actually had to transport goods by hand and foot.
Why the industrial revolution was a powerful next step in exploiting nature is because it allowed not only transport of goods, but also finer, more complex tasks to be carried out without requiring human muscle. Now sewing, grinding, cutting, molding, bending, digging, and drilling could be done by machine in large quantities with good reproducibility.
Hence, first humans exploited nature (and other animals) for transporting goods. Then humans began exploiting oil, coal, and electricity for carrying out more complex physical tasks that require large amounts of force. As machines grew finer, they were able to manufacture smaller, more precise goods.
The next stage was to allow humans to carry out not only large scale physical tasks without continuous human effort, but also to carry out intellectual tasks in mass without continuous human effort. This is where computers come in. They exploit nature to get information processed quickly and reliably.
At least a few areas remain where humans are doing the heavy lifting. One is reproduction. Humans are still required to take care of new humans while they are brought from incapacity to self sufficiency. This is still a difficult, time-consuming task, especially if the goal is having quality output. Another area where humans still do heavy lifting is learning. Unfortunately learning has not become much more efficient or quicker than it was in the past. Humans are very slow at learning, and a massive human effort is generally involved.
I guess it would be correct to say: Many reasons and very hard for me with my knowledge to judge which ones had the most effect. But since it is an interesting question I will throw a guess at it.
I think reading through the history we may owe a lot to WWII. One of the cruelest thing ever happened to humans may have redirected their global way of living together. As soon as the competition got redirected a bit towards tools which required more investment in science many miracles like medical, space and communication advancement happened.
One of my favorite yet most saddest quotes which may relate to above would be when Neil deGrasse Tyson said that (not exact word order): "Unfortunately no discoveries have ever been made for the sake of science all have been driven from war or other secondary factors.".
So to sum up, we have been going into the loop of advancement & war destruction for many centuries. I guess in last 100 (or 75) years we did it less, so the 'secret' is there.
Funny maybe in 200 years where there are so much more advancement in tech, people will stay as dumb as today.
Same should've been said from people from 500 years ago. Maybe we are dumber even.
Literacy and education, starting to be seen as useful for all classes in the 19th century, following a long period of scientific progress among the higher classes during the 17th and 18th century.
Cheap manufacturing of more or less everything, including high quality food, newspapers and books.
More people, although there are many countries with a lot of people and no scientific advance, so you also need the above.
This isn't a simple question, but I just wanted to mention that around the turn of the 20th century, there were a lot of changes in math.
A bunch of fields got reformulated and there was a rush of mathematicians coming up with new ways to express problems, which led to brand new fields. These ideas then filter into other sciences, allowing for those researchers to better describe and solve problems, etc.
That isn't to say this is the only reason, but it's a contributing factor.
33 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 67.2 ms ] threadIn only 116 years we've added another 6 billion to that total. :(
...and people say we're not-overpopulating the planet...
Look. Raw numbers mean nothing. What is the sustainable population of this planet. 1 billion? 10 billion? 100 billion?
I have no idea. As tech improves, our impact per person could be lower. So perhaps the limit today is 5 billion... But in 20 years it could be 20 billion.
Population is doubled every 2 generations during the 20th century. If nothing else changed, the probability of human advancement should have been at least 2x.
There are other factors like better life expectation that speed up advancement a lot (more probabilty of having advancement per generation).
But I think the literacy factor is the key. Sadly I have no data to prove it, but I bet this was the cause of all this.
Industrial growth, more room for more population, more manpower to evolve, loop until earth cannot sustain certain limit of population unless there's a breakthrough to feed 10s of billions.
Think of it. In today's society, there is almost nothing around you that hasn't been manufactured by one single person from a to z. The amount of collaboration and globalization in our society is mindboggling, something that was unthinkable before the Industrial Revolution.
So it's not just the past 100 years, it's more like the past 200 years. It's easy to look at someone from 1840 as ancient, simple even. Just keep in mind that things like the steam engine, photography or electrification were just as novel and influential then computers or the internet in our age.
On the contrary, there were a handful of areas where humans had already begun to exploit motion and force outside of human muscle to carry out work. One long-time example is using horses, mules, and other animals to provide force for transporting goods over distances. Even humans were payloads transported upon animal backs. Another key advancement for humans was using water and wind to transport large amounts of goods from one place to another. Sailboats allowed for transporting of goods a very long distance. In today's age we may take self-driving transport for granted, but once upon a time humans actually had to transport goods by hand and foot.
Why the industrial revolution was a powerful next step in exploiting nature is because it allowed not only transport of goods, but also finer, more complex tasks to be carried out without requiring human muscle. Now sewing, grinding, cutting, molding, bending, digging, and drilling could be done by machine in large quantities with good reproducibility.
Hence, first humans exploited nature (and other animals) for transporting goods. Then humans began exploiting oil, coal, and electricity for carrying out more complex physical tasks that require large amounts of force. As machines grew finer, they were able to manufacture smaller, more precise goods.
The next stage was to allow humans to carry out not only large scale physical tasks without continuous human effort, but also to carry out intellectual tasks in mass without continuous human effort. This is where computers come in. They exploit nature to get information processed quickly and reliably.
At least a few areas remain where humans are doing the heavy lifting. One is reproduction. Humans are still required to take care of new humans while they are brought from incapacity to self sufficiency. This is still a difficult, time-consuming task, especially if the goal is having quality output. Another area where humans still do heavy lifting is learning. Unfortunately learning has not become much more efficient or quicker than it was in the past. Humans are very slow at learning, and a massive human effort is generally involved.
I think reading through the history we may owe a lot to WWII. One of the cruelest thing ever happened to humans may have redirected their global way of living together. As soon as the competition got redirected a bit towards tools which required more investment in science many miracles like medical, space and communication advancement happened.
One of my favorite yet most saddest quotes which may relate to above would be when Neil deGrasse Tyson said that (not exact word order): "Unfortunately no discoveries have ever been made for the sake of science all have been driven from war or other secondary factors.".
So to sum up, we have been going into the loop of advancement & war destruction for many centuries. I guess in last 100 (or 75) years we did it less, so the 'secret' is there.
Cheap manufacturing of more or less everything, including high quality food, newspapers and books.
More people, although there are many countries with a lot of people and no scientific advance, so you also need the above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-field_system
A bunch of fields got reformulated and there was a rush of mathematicians coming up with new ways to express problems, which led to brand new fields. These ideas then filter into other sciences, allowing for those researchers to better describe and solve problems, etc.
That isn't to say this is the only reason, but it's a contributing factor.