The last 100 years or so.
 

I have finally come up with something I'd like to get your opinion and thoughts on.

It's known our race has been around for more than 2000 years and as a people we've gone through alot. What really gets me thinking some times is how "fast" we've made technological advances such as nuclear power, a-bombs, cars and bread machines. I mean, were we lazy in the begining or what? Why or how have we progressed so much in a relativley short period of time? Perhaps it was one important discovery that snowballed and broke the proverbial ice to get us going.

Let me spin it around for a second now. Perhaps we are going not actually progressing at all...think about how we are simply destroying our planet with pollution and non-recyclable compact discs all the time. Are we doing this in the hope that one day we'll figure out how to fix everything we've buggered up? When we didn't have cars, yahts, or airplanes the world didn't really get affected much - all the crap we've pulled in that last century has probably scarred earth for the remainder of it's life.

My question is do you think we as a people are on the right track or are we just setting ourselves up for self-destruction?

Nothing lasts forever. Even if we are on the "right track" we are on the road to extinction.
As for scarring the Earth, well, it's a lot older than we are and it will be around for a long time after we're gone. Maybe we've scarred it for the rest of our existence (as a species), but frankly, we're as fleeting as a candle burning compared to the lifetime of the planet.

easytiger kinda puts it into perspective.

The amount of time we spend on this planet as a race is relatively nothing.

To adress your first point, it's called industrialization. Once we learned to use machines for work, it blew the doors wide open.

As far as scarring the planet, I do believe we ought to do our best to contribute to a healthy environment, but NOT because I think the planet is in danger. The planet is fine and will always be fine - it adapts. The only real issue is if we can adapt fast enough as well. (Plus, I'd like to see as fwe species go extinct as possible just cause animals are cool :D)

The bikers I ride with have a motto...


Nuke and Pave.

the world is old. I dunno. I think the world is old although I don't entirely believe in evolution.

We're way older than 2000 years, dude. Ever heard of the stone age and such?

As for the speed of advance: it's not linear but exponential. It's got a lot to do with being open-minded and inquisitive, which really got a boost during the renaissance. After that, we were discovering new things all the time. Then, with the invention of cars, planes, mass communication, it all went a lot faster: instead of one man discovering new things, all of a sudden *everyone* was discovering things, and telling each other about it.

Computers accelerated that even more, as did the internet. I think you'll see an ever increasing rate of invention, until we finally reach the limit of the human capacity to change. Then we'll have to slow down a bit, to let people get used to new things. One need only look back ten years to see how much has changed - imagine that much change in *one* year, or even a month...

It's simply not true that before the industrial revolution, there were no problems with the environment. There are countless reports of mass deforestation, for example. Most of Northern/Western Europe used to be covered in forests, and most of that is gone now. Also, I think that whole idea about the planet being destroyed isn't going to matter in the future: we'll find new, clean ways of getting energy, for example. And when the shit really hits the van, we can always build some spacecraft and spread out...

...unless the fundamentalists win, of course. :eek:

Raymond Kurzweil's books, "The Age of Intelligent Machines" and "The Age of Spiritual Machines" add the additional effects of Moore's Law into the post-industrial speed-up of technological advance.

As a technologist, I believe we have the tools at our disposal to create the most positive results for human life - whether our collective ID will allow it is another question...

If the Sun were a hollow ball, you could fit about one million Earths inside of it!

If you think of the Sun as a basketball, the Earth would only be the size of the head of a pin -- a mere speck.

How insignificant we are, just compared to our own Sun, which is just a mere star itself.

If you are inclined to some heavy and heady reading, pick up a copy of "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. It won a Pulitzer Prize for addressing this topic.

You're making me rethink spending all that money to landscape my new house & property! How depressing.

yeah..after we are gone it will just be a planet with some plastic, diapers, and other nonbiodegradables....

I figger once we screw up this planet, we'll just find a new one to plunder...

gotta love science.

The human race has been around for more than 2000 years.... Chinese history records alot further back before 2000 years.

we had to get the basics down first, then it was smoot sailing

Thanks for the suggested reading material. The next one I wanna read about is the theory of reletivity...I think it's wickedly bizzarre; of course I have only heard bits and pieces about it till now.

seomthing else to think about, a theory that i learned about in my history of ancient civilizations class thinks that if it weren't for the near utter destruction of everything in the library of alexandria back when ceaser invaded (fighting marc anthony and cleopatra, i believe), the world could be much more advanced than it currently is. it's thought that the destruction of all that info set the world back as much as 1500 years. having it may have prevented the dark ages, even? who knows?

Actually this discussion has been around longer than I have. In my lifetime, we have gone from B&W TV and the first jet planes to HDTV and space flight. Yet, I heard my parents and grandfather talk about the dramatic changes from horse and buggy (Gramps was a blacksmith) and outhouses to cars and flush toilets.

As Dragonlich said, the speed of change has not been linear but exponential. If you want some older reading material on the subject, check out "Future Shock".

My thoughts on where this will lead have to do with how we generate new technologies. We don't expect one individual to know everything needed to develop new concepts. We have compartmentalized this process of creation. Someone comes up with the overall concept, someone(s) else applies their knowledge to make it work. The rest of us don't care how it works, but what we get out of it. When you have millions of groups doing this, the rate of new technology is mind-boggling for the individual, but workable for the individual groups doing the development because they aren't looking beyond their own projects.

The other concept is that of the damage done to the earth. No question that there has been some. But at the same time, we are applying new technologies to fix it. At one time many rivers flowed with undrinkable, down-right dangereous water. Those same rivers today have been restored. Old mining techniques left huge scars in the earth through strip mining. Many of those areas today are being rebuilt with technologies that have been recently developed. My point is that as we realized the problems we have caused someone developed ways to mitigate those problems.

Obviously, I am pretty optomistic that we will continue to see that rapid growth of new technologies; and that we will learn to fix the problems that we didn't anticipate; and that we will learn to better anticipate the problems that our changes will cause and fix them before they are problems.

i say we're just setting ourselves up for disaster.

just because we're smarter doesnt mean things will get better ..

Are we smarter? I find myself wondering this all of the time. Can education fill the void when common sense wilts away? Do you need both?

I personally think that this is just like learning a trade. You ever seen the work area of a brand new painter or drywaller? We as an industrialized society we're just cubs, greenhorns. The longer we do it, the cleaner we'll learn to be, and I think that the more time goes by, the more we're going to be able to fix from past mistakes. Heck, with the advances in dna and cloning, we'll probably even be able to bring back a lot of the species that we made extinct.

Hell yes, I'll use any excuse I can to get out of landscaping. The good thing about that one is that it's a permanent excuse, not like it being too hot out for a couple of hours or something.:D

No, we're not smarter, nor does common sense wilt away. We're the same people we used to be a thousand years ago. We just have more knowledge of the world. People have been making mistakes forever, but now, you'll hear about it on the evening news.