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

gizmodo.com

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

#151

Post by cmod »

vidarh wrote: post #122
cmod wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it's probably worth splitting the hair between spiritual and "literal" time travel

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

#152

Post by npsomaratna »

bspammer wrote: post #38
adriand wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really amazing. I find this sort of thing absolutely haunting. It's a vivid reminder that there is nothing particularly special about this moment in time: it's only special to us because we're living it. But their present moment was no less vital and immediate and real to them as this moment is to us. And yet, it happened so incredibly long ago! I had the same feeling when I encountered a beautiful statue of a woman…

I disagree, there is something special about this moment in time. We're in an insane inflection point of human development. For millions of years things stayed roughly the same. It's really only in the last 10,000 years that stuff has really kicked off, and the last 300 where human development has gone absolutely crazy. There's several existential threats that might destroy civilization over the next few hundred year…

I agree. If you look at, say, Ancient Egypt from the start of the old kingdom to the end of the middle kingdom (a 1000 year period), people's lifestyles changed very little.

Compare the start of the 20th century to the start of the 21st (a mere hundred year period)—the differences are amazing. Air travel, radio and television, computers, cars being universal (in developed countries at least)—the list just goes on, both big and small.

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

#153

Post by rvense »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #150
rvense wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

who cares about them

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

#154

Post by vidarh »

cmod wrote: post #151
vidarh wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stories of time travel in some form or other goes back thousands of years, e.g. Hindu mythology.

it's probably worth splitting the hair between spiritual and "literal" time travel

The stories in question involves literal travel.

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

#155

Post by edgyquant »

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.

Well we are building on their legacy there’s no arguing than that. But I don’t think they’re more vital than us and I do think we are living in a more vital time.

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

#156

Post by hattori31 »

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…

Seeing revolutionary inventions is not the meaning of life though nor makes our time more precious than others.

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

#159

Post by exporectomy »

yesimahuman wrote: post #141
exporectomy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think I have a downvote button. You said "path of destruction". That's the speculation based on current popular opinion. Had you been saying this 50 years ago, you would have chosen whatever the popular path of destruction at that time was instead, having no awareness of climate change.

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

#160

Post by spullara »

Jensson wrote: post #127
BarryMilo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably a lot less time than that if we decided that is what we wanted to do.

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/scie...

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