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Ask HN: How is that humans advanced so much in the past 100 yrs in all fields?
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: Ask HN: How is that humans advanced so much in the past 100 yrs in all fields?
#2There'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.
Re: Ask HN: How is that humans advanced so much in the past 100 yrs in all fields?
#3There'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.
From 1900 till date it was luxuries that brought forward human advancement?
Re: Ask HN: How is that humans advanced so much in the past 100 yrs in all fields?
#4What are these advancement that you see that made you ask this question?
Re: Ask HN: How is that humans advanced so much in the past 100 yrs in all fields?
#5There'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.
Seconded. In 1900 there were 1.2 billion people on the planet, and it took over 100,000 years to get to that number.
In only 116 years we've added another 6 billion to that total. :(
...and people say we're not-overpopulating the planet...
Re: Ask HN: How is that humans advanced so much in the past 100 yrs in all fields?
#6There'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.
From 1900 till date it was luxuries that brought forward human advancement?
The point is that literacy is not considered a luxury now, but has been in most of human history.
Re: Ask HN: How is that humans advanced so much in the past 100 yrs in all fields?
#7[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How is that humans advanced so much in the past 100 yrs in all fields?
#8What are these advancement that you see that made you ask this question?
If you go back 100 years and fast forward to today, this period is where humans have advanced most than all of the 5000 years
Re: Ask HN: How is that humans advanced so much in the past 100 yrs in all fields?
#9There'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 was a bit skeptic about your comment and Jaruzel's one until I saw this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/File:P...
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.
Re: Ask HN: How is that humans advanced so much in the past 100 yrs in all fields?
#10The 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.