Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Timeline of the Human Condition

southampton.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 121 posts

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#101

Post by bloak »

dredmorbius wrote: post #76
ekianjo wrote: post #72

These timelines are always amusing since there's a lot more entries in recent years than older periods. As if we knew what is going to be significant 1000 years from now. Hubris.

There is a recency bias. But there's also an absolutely undeniable acceleration in physical and other quantifiable bases (knowledge, understanding, population, global impacts, energy utilisation, raw materials consumption, pollution) through time. For Earth, the very rapid emergence of life (within the first few hundred million years), and then the lack of extensive complexity emerging for another 3 billion years , u…

When I read about the history of science I get the impression that almost everything of interest happened between about 1860 and about 1960. Since then there has been continuous quantitive progress in some areas, such as "Moore's Law", but qualitatively nothing to compare with what happened in the period 1860-1960.

It's subjective, of course. Maybe I'm just old and nostalgic.

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#102

Post by dghf »

soheil wrote: post #63

> 2900 accurate prediction of lunar eclipses (Germany) There was a Germany 2900 years ago?

They've got to call the place something. What name do you suggest? Germania is attested no later than 98 AD (in Tacitus's book of the same name).

They could have gone with central Europe, I guess, but that's vaguer and still arguably anachronistic, as its use as a geographical term (as opposed to the mythological princess) isn't recorded until c. 500 BC.

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#103

Post by xtiansimon »

The realization of time and the capacity of visualization —

There is a wonderful book showcasing an exhibit at the Montreal Museum of art.

I guess you could say this exhibit’s thesis is to talk about the effect of photography in culture to take what is numinous about nature (vast beyond measure) and to make it concrete and visible.

Similarly the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment changed culture. As I recall it was Keates who lamented Newton for ruining poetry.

Cosmos : From Romanticism to Avant-Garde, 1801-2001 By Clair, Jean (Editor) ISBN 10: 3791320890

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#104

Post by tim333 »

jabo wrote: post #10

The note at the end puts this timeline into calendar years, which is mind-blowing: > Rescaled to a calendar year, starting with the big bang at 00:00:00 on 1 January ( ), the Sun forms on 1 September ( ), the Earth on 2 September ( ), earliest signs of life appear on 13 September ( ), earliest true mammals on 26 December ( ), and humans just 2 hours before year’s end ( ). > For a year that starts with the earliest tr…

On that scale HN has existed for about 30ms and us for a few times longer.

Maybe singularity type stuff will allow us to hang out a while longer. Physics type evolution of stars and plants -> biological evolution of lifeforms reproducing and dying -> AI evolution of our mind children as it were.

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#105

Post by dsign »

richardatlarge wrote: post #82
scollet wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think humans would evolve in a variety of ways to transcend humanity.

That’s awfully optimistic. Humans evolved out of nature and into culture— and culture is only a millisecond old on the evolutionary timeline. All evidence points against a Star Trek future and instead a future of perpetual dismal decline. As climate change shows, humans may be clever as individuals but they can’t even compare to ants as an intelligent collective species

That's awfully inaccurate. Some part of human culture has increased quality of life. If you think the opposite, I will provide a list of places and lifestyles that are free of said cultural bits for you to go and experience.

With that said, no, progress is not a given, and we have one million and one ways to shoot ourselves in the feet. Both climate change and getting depressed and suicidal about climate change count, though the later is worse, because it affects our collective self-esteem and our capacity to work for a better future.

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#106

Post by Stevvo »

wolverine876 wrote: post #78
lindseymysse wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but remember that for almost all of history, nothing happened" This seems like a anthropocentric view of the world. Planets moved immense distances, there were generation after generation of bacteria, mountains rose up and crumbled, seas were made and disappeared again. A lot happened before we showed up. A lot will happen after we're gone, also.

We are talking about two different things. I don't mean that there weren't any football games and thus nothing interesting happened. If you look at a timeline, you might see: - 3.5 bya: First prokaryote - 2.5 bya: FIrst eukaryote - 0.6 bya: Cambrian explosion - 0.44 bya: First terrestrial life All the text you see is about change. But 99.99999...% of that time, there is no such event. We write about and think about t…

To me it comes across as hubris to claim 'nothing happened' for hundreds of millions of years just because we can't see any evidence for it. Looking into the fossil record tells us very little about what was going on hundreds of millions of years ago, despite it being the best tool we have for looking back at such long scales.

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#107

Post by pphysch »

wolverine876 wrote: post #33

Recently I researched a dozen or two of the events on the table, and there is a lot of uncertainty of fact, issues of definition, and interpretation involved. That doesn't mean the author is wrong, but take each date as one interpretation of many. For example, Ancient Greek, developed in ~8th or 10th century BCE (facts aren't 100% clear), is typically credited as the first phonetic alphabet, where characters represen…

Yeah, there is a strong cultural bias here. "Timeline of the Human Condition according to one Westerner's interpretation of a couple Western encyclopedias"

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#108

Post by soheil »

dghf wrote: post #102
soheil wrote: post #63

> 2900 accurate prediction of lunar eclipses (Germany) There was a Germany 2900 years ago?

They've got to call the place something. What name do you suggest? Germania is attested no later than 98 AD (in Tacitus's book of the same name). They could have gone with central Europe, I guess, but that's vaguer and still arguably anachronistic, as its use as a geographical term (as opposed to the mythological princess) isn't recorded until c. 500 BC.

I just think it’s confusing to relate it to the country of Germany or its people when in fact it has nothing to do with it. Whereas if you call something India from 500 BC it very much has to do with modern India and its people.

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#109

Post by wolverine876 »

Stevvo wrote: post #106
wolverine876 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are talking about two different things. I don't mean that there weren't any football games and thus nothing interesting happened. If you look at a timeline, you might see: - 3.5 bya: First prokaryote - 2.5 bya: FIrst eukaryote - 0.6 bya: Cambrian explosion - 0.44 bya: First terrestrial life All the text you see is about change. But 99.99999...% of that time, there is no such event. We write about and think about t…

To me it comes across as hubris to claim 'nothing happened' for hundreds of millions of years just because we can't see any evidence for it. Looking into the fossil record tells us very little about what was going on hundreds of millions of years ago, despite it being the best tool we have for looking back at such long scales.

> To me it comes across as hubris to claim 'nothing happened' for hundreds of millions of years just because we can't see any evidence for it.

I think that's an important perspective, but I am not seeing how it applies in this case: We're talking mostly about evolutionary changes. For example, right now evolution is happening but it's unlikely that you or I will ever notice it in our relatively short lifespans. And the chance of an event as big as the first eukaryote or the K/T extinction event (the one that killed the dinosaurs) is very, very tiny.

For around the first billion years of earth's history, there was no life at all (as best we can tell right now) - nada, zilch, 'nothing' happening evolutionarily, for most intents and purposes (afaik).

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#110

Post by wolverine876 »

pphysch wrote: post #107
wolverine876 wrote: post #33

Recently I researched a dozen or two of the events on the table, and there is a lot of uncertainty of fact, issues of definition, and interpretation involved. That doesn't mean the author is wrong, but take each date as one interpretation of many. For example, Ancient Greek, developed in ~8th or 10th century BCE (facts aren't 100% clear), is typically credited as the first phonetic alphabet, where characters represen…

Yeah, there is a strong cultural bias here. "Timeline of the Human Condition according to one Westerner's interpretation of a couple Western encyclopedias"

I wouldn't be surprised, but in what entries do you see the Western bias? I wonder what I might be getting wrong myself.
Post reply on HN