Why haven't we advanced much in the past 1000 years?

Question

A thousand years is a long asss time. But all of the major advancements came in the past hundred years, give or take. So what were we doing the other 900 years, for reals? It seems like a thousand years from now we'll be up the asss in technological advancement, but do you think we'll advance THAT much?

Answer 1

it has!

Answer 2

because we were all to obsesed with getting what we wanted like a bunch of kids not much diffrent to nowadays where all adults are exempt from there rules

Answer 3

"According to computer scientist Dr. Jacques Vallee, information is now doubling every 18 months.

Nearly four billion years of evolution to get to the first tool. Almost four million years to arrive at the information density of Rome in 1 A.D. Only one-and-a-half thousand years for information to double and for the West to arrive at Leonardo, the high point of Renaissance and the dawning of Protestantism. Two-and-a-half centuries for the next doubling, the rise of Industrialism, the birth of Democracy -- and the radical supra-democratic heresies of socialism, anarchism, feminism...

Only six years for the doubling of information between 1967 and 1973.

Even then, nobody I knew personally had a home computer. Today everybody I know has a home computer.

We are in what Alvin Toffler calls the Third Wave -- Information Civilization. If Vallee is right about information doubling every 18 months, and Gordon is right about fractals increasing where information flow increases, then everything must become steadily more unpredictable from here on -- more "chaotic" in the mathematical sense.

That "chaos" may be expressed as breakdown and violence, such as we are seeing in the current rumble [Persian Gulf War, 1991] between Goddam Insane and Huge Berserk Rebel Warthog. In the doubling of information between 1900 and 1950, we went through a World Depression and two World Wars.

The "chaos" may, however, be expressed instead as a rapid acceleration toward a more stable and coherent world. After the democratic Revolutions of the late 18th Century, Europe settled into peace and steady progress for nearly a hundred years.

The "chaos" is most likely leading us to social transformations that none of us can foresee with more than foggy approximation. I think it will include economic collapse and economic recovery, space colonization, longevity, Bucky's World Energy Grid, and breakthroughs in nanotechnology that will literally make the most advanced scientific gadgets "as cheap as dirt."

Is this information-acceleration a Mandelbrot fractal, as Terrence McKenna claims? Will we reach a point in 2012 where information doubles a million times a second?

I don't know. But, just as the Persian Gulf War was an awful shock for those of us who dare to dream of a better world, I think there are other shocks ahead that will be even more disconcerting -- to those who think they can still "govern" the world by violence. In the first month of this war there has been more anti-war protest, world-wide, than any year of the Vietnam war... I don't know. I have no infallible crystal ball -- but the day I decided not to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge in 1955, I committed myself to going along for the ride, however rough it gets. I also try, within my limits, to make a contribution that will add to the probability of Utopia and decrease the probability of Oblivion, for us all. "

Answer 4

For much of the past 2,000 years, human knowledge and advancement was suppressed by the old men in dresses.

Answer 5

Science builds on itself.  You could argue that the pace of scientific development has been exponential.  Understanding fire on a scientific basis allowed people to explore chemistry, metallurgy, and steam power (among other things) which produced the industrial revolution.  Another aspect is communication.  A thousand years ago, most a person communicated with people who were born within a few miles of where they were born.  Most of people's time was spent finding enough to eat.