Modern technology - Why did it take so long?

Discussion in 'Science & Society' started by superluminal, May 18, 2007.

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    It would have some plateaus in it.

    There is also the question of place, as well as time. Tech innovation not only happened in bursts, over small time spans, but in specific areas, over small distance spans, in human history.

    Literacy helped abrogate the time span effect. Then transportation and communication tech shortcircuited the distance span effect. But historically, they will affect the shape of your graph.
     
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  3. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    The last time I saw the graph plotted it was exponential, and the rule of thumb "90% of all inventions ever made occurred in the current 10% of recorded history" is a good indicator.
    Place doesn't come into it as we're discussing human invention, not English/ Chinese or whatever.
     
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  5. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    Fair enough, but I think your find that the growth in the number of inventors and scientists has grown at the same rate. Most of the scientists who have ever lived are alive today by most estimates. See, for example, here, stating:
    Interestingly,the point of the professor's article is that the vast increase in the rate of technological change has to end pretty soon. Personally, I agree with that. The exponential growth has been possible because, not only has population been increasing, but the proportion of the population dedicated to science and technology has vastly increased. There comes a point where the proportion of the society entering scientific fields will level off, and the growth in the number of technologists will then be determined solely by the growth in the population, which is less than exponential.
     
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  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Yeah, I've seen the graph, i just don't think their method of counting inventions is reasonable.

    For example:
    So if the Mayans invent a script, and the Romans invent a script, is that two inventions or one, worldwide?

    Are the plants and animals humans bred into form "inventions" ?

    There are hundreds of separate inventions in an Inuit kayak. How are they counted? How many times are multiply invented things like fired pottery and throwing sticks of various kinds counted?

    If you look around, most of what you are looking at - most everything except for plastic material and electronic gear - dates back more than 10% of recorded history in some form.

    It seems to me what you have is an unprecedented amalgamation of invention, brought about by tranpsort innovations. At one time the draft horse, harness, wheel, and plow blade were all invented - but not all in the same place. The potato was in one place, distillation apparatus elsewhere, the right yeast still further yonder. Genghis Khan found most of the parts for the seige engines his Horde invented already invented in separate places.

    How do you count something like that?
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2007
  8. River Ape Valued Senior Member

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    I have just taken a look at this thread for the first time. Whilst I can find much to agree with in several of the posts, there is one propelling factor behind modern technology which I think is being neglected: the vital importance of precision engineering.

    The Romans could NOT (as someone claimed) have invented the printing press -- they could not have manufactured movable type to the required precision. It was no accident that Gutenberg was a goldsmith; nor that he was German (though precision metalworking was equally advanced in Bohemia); nor that he lived in the fifteenth century. In the same century, the same advances in metalworking techniques were applied to clocks (which descended from the clocktower to become household items for the first time) and to personal firearms.

    The popularity of these products spurred an explosion of precision craftsmanship through Western Europe during the sixteenth century. Without it, the mechanisation of spinning and weaving which set off the Industrial Revolution in England would not have been possible. Nor would steam power have replaced the waterwheel.

    Whilst schools tend to teach something of the origins of physics and chemistry, the history of metalworking tends to be unexplored, untaught, and unregarded.
     
    Last edited: Jun 21, 2007
  9. neosethis Registered Member

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    i am wrong or all (or close) "BAM" advancment come just befor and after a War ?
     
  10. TruthSeeker Fancy Virtual Reality Monkey Valued Senior Member

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    Which war caused the industrial revolution?
     
  11. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    The good thing about the British, who kicked it off, is that they were in a war almost constantly with someone when the Industrial Revolution began, usually France: the Seven Years War, Pontiac's Rebellion, the various Anglo-Mysore Wars, the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolutionary Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, the Anglo-Dutch Java War, the American War of 1812, and there are plenty more.

    I don't know to what extent one can argue that the wars were the spur that kicked off the Industrial Revolution. I'm sure there are some connections, but I doubt a strong case could be made that the wars were the sine qua non that brought the Industrial Revolution into existence.
     
  12. TruthSeeker Fancy Virtual Reality Monkey Valued Senior Member

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    What about today? War in Iraq? What kinds of advancements is it bringing? It's only skyrocketing the US's debt, making it more difficult for any new technology to be developed.
     
  13. Ganymede Valued Senior Member

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    Neccesity is the Mother of invention. But War is the father of invention.
     
  14. peta9 Registered Senior Member

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    War is the father of certain types of inventions, not all inventions. Humans could still invent without war and inventions for war would be unnecessary and that's even better if humans could get past it. Trade is so much more efficient and less moronic, tragic, and primitive.
     
  15. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    What you're talking about now are more than inventions. They are technologies. Agriculture is the key technology that ended the Mesolithic Era and ushered in the Neolithic Era. It required humans to build permanent settlements, which forced us to learn how to live in harmony and cooperation with people outside our own extended family, which had been the norm going millions of years back to our chimp- and gorilla-like ancestors, whose other descendants still live that way. It also allowed us to create more things than we could carry with us as nomadic hunter-gatherers, which gave rise to the first surpluses, including enormously important surplus food to weather hard times. Agriculture was the first step on the path to civilization. Of course it can be seen as two distinct technologies that were invented at different times: farming and animal husbandry. The point is that agriculture was invented by more than one people in more than one time and place. At least six, since six widespread independent civilizations arose on Earth, but perhaps more, since there may have been other people who never made the next step to civilization or who were assimilated by somebody else with a head start before they got the chance. We speak of agriculture as a technology, without regard to the number of different instances of its invention. In no case was it invented by a single person, since it obviously takes several generations to get it all right.
    Same thing. Written language is a technology, not really a single invention. At least in the Middle East where our own civilization arose, it started out as tick marks in clay to record business transactions: who got how many sheep, who owed whom how many jugs of olive oil. Like agriculture, it didn't manifest all at once as a system for recording spoken language, that evolved slowly. Like agriculture, it arose independently in multiple places. I'm not sure about the Incas, but each of the other five civilizations invented their own writing systems. So we speak of written language as a technology, not a gadget that was invented over and over again.

    Also like agriculture, written language is one of the key technologies that got us here, since it allows knowledge to be passed on in more or less exactly its original form, without being memorized and recited with incremental errors over the generations. It's interesting to speculate at what stage civilization would have stalled without written records. As noted in another thread, astronomy is a bone fide science and it predates writing and perhaps even civilization. But it's hard to imagine Euclid, much less Newton, without writing.
    Yes, I think that ten percent assertion was originally made by someone who wants to prove that we're superior to our ancestors. It does not take into account the importance of the inventions. Energy conversion, FTA (faster than animal) travel, mass production, the germ theory of medicine, electronics, there's no question that we have a lot to be proud of in the last half millennium. But spoken language, boats, farming, animal husbandry, government, metallurgy, written language, sewers... we wouldn't be here without these entire technologies, all of which came first. Note that most of them even occurred before the start of recorded history.

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  16. Fugu-dono Scholar Of Shen Zhou Registered Senior Member

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    Took us awhile to get our hands on alien technology to be able to recycle their advance tech for our use. :m:
     

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