The moon is a somewhat facetious benchmark, but we harnessed fire some 400k years ago. Agriculture, or more generally culvitating your own food, is another major milestone that happened 10k years ago, or thereabouts. Those are more reasonable, especially because other intelligent species could piggy back off our technology to speed up their own progression.
2500 years ago stabbing each other with iron weapons was literally cutting edge technology.
In the past 200 years we have invented: production automobile, airplanes, space flight, launched probes into interstellar space, computers, the internet, ... We have discovered relativity, quantum mechanics, galaxies, ...
Assuming we are able to survive, imagine where we'll be in 200k years. Actually you can't. It's just impossible to even begin to try to imagine that. On that scale we'll likely have even begun to experience evolutionary speciation as we settle different regions of space and end up with extended periods of relative isolation.
And now consider that this entire timeline is but 400k years. That's not even a blink in the eye of the cosmos.
Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, 20-30 kyr of ~stability is amazing. And here we are, after maybe 10 kyr of technology, pushing atmospheric CO2 to arguably dire levels. And the anthropgenic extinction event. Not to mention those hypersonic gliders. Although they are damn cool, you gotta admit.
And think about the timescales we are talking about here. We might be creating something that evolves and persists for millions of years. We don’t seem anywhere close to the level of knowledge or wisdom needed to safely do anything that has that kind of long term impact.
Especially since at the point any civilization starts to develop technology, it happens really exponentially. Even just 1 million years, which is nothing compared to geological time scales, is an absolutely insanely long amount of time to develop technology after the initial spark.
Our 300,000 year old species didn't even settle down until a mere 12,000 years ago, we didn't really develop proper government systems until 2-3,000 years ago and learnt flight only ~120 years ago.
Within the last 120 years we went to the Moon (!), developed the integrated microchip, the Internet, AR/VR and built deep space solar communications infrastructure, got smartphones, MRTs... you name it.
Even among all of these marvels, we still poop though.
millions of years of evolution wasnt expecting densely populated metros and near instantaneous world travel. the speed with which we can traverse the world in the last 100 years, at scale, changes everything.
Humans are really just an example, I regret mentioning it. All significant developments in life (e.g. multi-cellular lifeforms, post-Cumbrian explosian animals) took hundreds of millions to billions of years.
reply