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200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

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Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#141

Post by yesimahuman »

exporectomy wrote: post #94
yesimahuman wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s likely they will all look back at this particular period of a hundred or so years as one of the most pivotal times for at least one really big reason: that’s when we set the climate on a path of destruction

Why not when we invented nuclear weapons and set civilization on the path of destruction? Or when we invented fertilizer and set the wilderness on the path of destruction or when we started applying science and set traditional stabilizing religious cultures on the path of destruction? I know why. It's because you're overwhelmed with your own contemporary culture which has indoctrinated you to believe that particular…

Thanks for the downvote because you disagree that completely disrupting climate norms isn’t a notable event that is very much happening _right now_ and will disrupt future generations significantly. Go read my comment again, I never said it was the _only_ notable event. It is objectively significant. So are nuclear weapons. So are hundreds of other things that make the last 100 years extremely significant in history.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#142

Post by agumonkey »

bspammer wrote: post #55
willcipriano wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'd put just a bit of water in your wine. You're basing your view on technology and technological output, but in other cultures and times it might be of zero value. Personally that's not what qualifies for a special moment in history (the potential ecological collapse is higher).

Also consider that technology, even in it's most beautiful form, is rarely seen by people. They live in a blur of tamed down ease of use. It's not necessarily an existential enlightenment for them (it also backfires a lot, people are leaving devices to go back to more time outside and sport, look at parkour and people living in the wild for instance)

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#143

Post by gumby »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #124
edgyquant wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did say “seems more vital” because I have read a lot of the classics, for enjoyment and instruction, and find a lot of current writing on the topics discussed in classical literature to be derivative at best.

TBF there’s a survivorship bias in older work: the stuff people found useful has been more likely to survive. Also a more modern (i.e. anyone in the subsequent couple of millennia) has to say something new, not just repeat the old. Which is harder to do.

I’m not arguing that the current world isn’t amazing (went to the moon! Reduction in poverty and higher living standard! I’m typing this comment on an iPad!). Simply making the point that it’s hardly uniquely so (and arguably the 2021st century has so far not been the peak of technical or social development).

What is unusual of the current age is the widespread belief that the current times are somehow unusual.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#144

Post by OJFord »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #62
bspammer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

You're responding to a comparison to >10k years ago (8000BC) with '1950s America'?

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#145

Post by thefounder »

adventured wrote: post #71
radicaldreamer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

>> truly astounded by the iPhone.

For some reasons I was not truly astounded at all. I had several smartphones before but I preferred smaller "cool" phones until iPhone 4.

The iphone became for phones what the ipod was for music players. Great device but not really from the future. I bought it for the web browser.

Even today I use my iphone perhaps at 10% of its power mostly for things that I do on my laptop anyway(mail, chat, web browsing) so

I'm actually astounded that I can't hook it to a monitor and use it as a computer/macbook so to me it seems we got stuck in the past.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#146

Post by rvense »

bouncycastle wrote: post #134
rvense wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was already using a PDA by that time (pocket PC), and the technology was already there, so not like it came out overnight. The only thing Apple improved on was the UX.

"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed."

Most people were blissfully unaware of the existence of PDAs, much less how they worked or what they could do, and for them the iPhone might as well have emerged perfectly formed from an unspecified bodily orifice of Steve Jobs. The statement "It almost _felt like_ a product delivered from the future" is entirely justified.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#147

Post by dwaltrip »

subsubzero wrote: post #43
toshk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of them. In many places in Tibet I've seen them, especially in the old Kham area, they were all over the place. The Tibetans believe it's prove of the depth of meditation that one can put the hand in the rock. Source: https://books.google.es/books?id=OUhmDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA101&lpg=P...

Thats right, the explanation for these handprints is that Tibetan Buddhist monks have transcended normal human abilities and made handprints in stone. This is for Vajrayana Buddhism or what westerners refer to as Tibetan Buddhism.

Seems unlikely.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#148

Post by noir_lord »

tshaddox wrote: post #70
bspammer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's true (and I hope it is, because it means things go very well for humanity), we're still one of the first generations to see major change _within_ our short lives. For millions of years, technology and tools stayed roughly the same from generation to generation. I'm 25, and the technological progress since I was born is mind-blowing.

> we're still one of the first generations to see major change _within_ our short lives. One could argue that people were seeing major technological/scientific/philosophical/cultural changes within their lives at least as far back as the Enlightenment (and I'd argue much further back than that), and what has actually changed is just that the number of people affected by those changes has grown (perhaps exponentially)…

Lets accept that the rate of change of technology during the enlightenment was as rapid as the last 100 years (it wasn't but lets accept it) - that was two centuries ago, these prints are 200K years ago, that's 3 orders of magnitude older.

There have been points in our history where technology/knowledge has advanced quicker than the baseline but the last two-three centuries (and particularly the last one) have been exceptional.

Whether that rate of change is sustainable for another century I don't know, I'd like to hope so since it'd mean humans are doing pretty well.

But if you took someone born in 1880 (a century before me) and they lived 90 years they'd have seen the invention of flight, the invention of the motorcar, the electrification of the world, the invention of wireless, the invention of TV, the invention of the internet, the invention of antibiotics, the invention of synthetic materials, the invention of the telephone, the first heart transplant, the invention of the nuclear bomb, the discovery of the structure of DNA and literally thousands of other technologies and discoveries in one human lifespan).

At no other point in human history has a single life span seen so much*.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#149

Post by kungito »

Aunche wrote: post #87
radicaldreamer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the 1950's people technology was still relatively grounded in people's understanding. Any intelligent person in the 1950s could understand how an automobile or refrigerator worked if they wanted to. In present day, people treat technology as magic. It's easy enough to figure out how to use your iPhone to FaceTime someone on the other side of the world, but it's nearly impossible to truly understand how it's done.

Funny you should mention refrigerator because I'm pretty sure barely any non engineer could understand reverse Carnot cycle, let alone electricity on multiple levels of abstraction (current/fields/kirkhoffs laws/electromagnetism)

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#150

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

rvense wrote: post #146
bouncycastle wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was already using a PDA by that time (pocket PC), and the technology was already there, so not like it came out overnight. The only thing Apple improved on was the UX.

"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." Most people were blissfully unaware of the existence of PDAs, much less how they worked or what they could do, and for them the iPhone might as well have emerged perfectly formed from an unspecified bodily orifice of Steve Jobs. The statement "It almost _felt like_ a product delivered from the future" is entirely justified.

> The statement "It almost _felt like_ a product delivered from the future" is entirely justified

Not in the American middle-class, upper middle-class, and wealthy.

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