It doesn't dispute that they were made intentionally - in fact, it says the opposite. (These are carefully made so they don't overlap and they were not produced by locomotion.) If this is "art" art... is up to everyone to interpret for themselves. But then again, today you can give yourself a paint enema, squirt it from your asshole all over a canvas and some people will call it art.
> But then again, today you can give yourself a paint enema, squirt it from your asshole all over a canvas and some people will call it art. Jesus, what artist is this a reference to?
> I disagree, there is something special about this moment in time. Your ancestors all felt the same way. So will your children.
i always come back to the fact that "time travel" wasn't a notion until relatively recently; simply by the fact that so little changed on a centuries-long scale, and traveling through time would essentially place you in precisely the same spot, with the same set of experiences and technologies. presently, we've the opposite problem: technology advances so quickly it's difficult / near impossible to accurately predict…
Stories of time travel in some form or other goes back thousands of years, e.g. Hindu mythology.
Found at 14,000ft on the Tibetan Plateau. Very likely altitude adapted denisovans, whose genetic adaptations to living in such low oxygen are still present in modern day Tibetans. Really incredible.
It's awesome, But bit disappointed that the artist's impression shows them bare body without any protection from the elements while clearly showing the elevation. They would have obviously had very thick clothing made up of animal fur.
> it's blatently obvious that there's more going on right now... Blatantly obvious ? Not to me. I'm a technologist (e.g. wrote a bunch of code the results of which you use every day) with a degree in history and in many ways ancient Greece seems more vital than today.
We’ve legit left the planet and put people on the moon. The past hundred years has absolutely been something special in the history of the human race
The person you're replying to seems to argue that the founders of our civilization were more vital than us, who are merely building upon their legacy.
> is there anything at all that they conceptually couldn't fathom? Well you set the bar artificially high with that phrasing. Is there ever anything people of the last couple thousand years would be literally unable to conceptually fathom? No. We know that from ancient texts, they would be able to grasp anything we have today (even if it might take more elaborate explanation). 1950s Americans, or any citizens around…
> People in 2007 were truly astounded by the iPhone. It almost felt like a product delivered from the future. It put all industry jaws on the floor and reset the grid for everyone in the tech industry, without exception. This is a large exaggeration. I was there as an adult. It was another cool piece of tech, sure, but come on.
I think it depends who you were. Some people went more or less directly to being always connected to an iPhone from a world of monochrome Nokias and portable CD (or cassette, even) players and the internet being on a PC tower in a separate room of the house, if you had it at home at all. The intermediate steps - laptops, Palm pilots, iPods - were far from universal, at least in my world.
Is this really true? If someone from 1950s America time-travelled to the present day, is there anything at all that they conceptually couldn't fathom? Maybe if you transported someone from 1950s China to present-day China, they would be more shocked, but a present day suburban home in 2021 is not all that markedly different than a 1950s home -- and neither is the workplace, the commute, the cars. Mostly replaced pape…
One of my ancestors father was wealthy. They took long trips over the summer. One year, she came home and they had electricity. One year, they had a telephone. She saw one of the demonstrations of flight by the wright brothers. A global pandemic. No war is good, but I'd put the world wars as particularly bad. She saw people drive cars on the moon, on television! ~1905-1985 was a pretty good run. Cell phones, the inte…
Don't forget refrigeration and automobiles. 1885-1985 was an amazing century!
Only if we populate the galaxy. Which isn't that hard if we try. But even then we lived at the origin of the galactic species. Pretty special. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
Populating the galaxy isn't that hard? Care to explain?
If you had todays technology and 100 million years to do it it wouldn't be particularly hard. The hard part is getting things done within our lifetime, but that doesn't matter for something like populating a galaxy. Slow ships are just fine, humans can reproduce on the ship. High failure rate and those ships being huge and expensive isn't a problem if you have thousands of years of production to make them.
It doesn't really matter what my ancestors felt, it's blatently obvious that there's more going on right now, and faster than 10,000 years ago. Back then, you'd be lucky to see a single revolutionary invention in a lifetime. Now we're seeing them every decade, if not annually. I don't disagree that my descendents will be justified in feeling the same way, as long as the exponential curve keeps on going and civilizati…
By symmetry of the exponential curve, your ancestors would be just as justified.
I don’t think this is quite right. To take a European example, the ancient Romans discovered concrete, then successor civilizations largely forgot how it worked for ~500+ years. Not all eras of history even had a positive slope to the curve.
> I disagree, there is something special about this moment in time. Your ancestors all felt the same way. So will your children.
It doesn't really matter what my ancestors felt, it's blatently obvious that there's more going on right now, and faster than 10,000 years ago. Back then, you'd be lucky to see a single revolutionary invention in a lifetime. Now we're seeing them every decade, if not annually. I don't disagree that my descendents will be justified in feeling the same way, as long as the exponential curve keeps on going and civilizati…
Hinge of history. Effective altruism folks look at it mathematicaly. Historians look at it historically. Most humans look at it with their senses.
We’ve legit left the planet and put people on the moon. The past hundred years has absolutely been something special in the history of the human race
The person you're replying to seems to argue that the founders of our civilization were more vital than us, who are merely building upon their legacy.
It's a certainty that people in the future will look at us and say "they were merely building the future for us" and "right now is most important, not back then".
We have been saying this forever, and will continue to do so.