@futurebird Paolo Bacigalupi (wrote "the Wind Up Girl") has this interesting idea of like (I forget his exact wording, and this is paraphrasing a paraphrase of a talk) a "hump" that technological civilizations have to get over. He frames things in terms of extractive resources, things that are non-renewable, and asks the question of whether your civilization can use the time of prosperity granted by these to invent a method of living without them. And if you don't in time, you simply crash.
@futurebird So extrapolating, if you're hunter-gatherers, the resource is wild animals and the question is whether you can invent agriculture before you hunt your game to extinction. If you're farmers, the resource is arable soil and the question is whether you can invent agronomy before soil salinization turns your land into a desert. If you're a technological civilization, the question is whether you invent renewables before you dig up and burn all the renewable fossil fuels ("peak oil").
@futurebird In any of these cases, advancing technology could push you over the hump, or (if you research the wrong technology— making better spearheads instead of farms) just accelerate the rate at which you consume the nonrenewable resource. And once the finite resource is gone, you (and whatever civilization/species comes after you on that planet) have permanently lost the prosperity hand-up that previously would have created conditions making it easy to develop the escape technology.
@futurebird 1/3
maybe this says more about me than about SF in general, but in the SF I read, misuse of tech was often presented as a likely cause of the extinction of technologically advanced species; such a species may find it easy to divert a dangerous asteroid, but the same tech that enables asteroid diversion also enables wars with targeted asteroids (potentially capable of much more damage than thermonuclear weapons)
I'm not entirely convinced that technology aids in improving diversity.
There seems to be a strong incentive to hoard techniques and technologies, then when that breaks down eventually the people who didn't have access tend to do things the same ways as those who did.
@futurebird humans before technology where at the cusp of extinction many times. there is some possibility that first technologies (fire, stone working, housing, ...) evolved from this experiences.
But we have this way of not seeing earlier technologies as the "real technological revolution" the older the tech, the less effort we ascribe to its development and refinement. Producing this silly idea that we are always right on the precipice of the biggest revolution yet.
Actually I'm nuch more impressed by the person who got the idea of making a blade out of a silex shard, or the one who found a way to send a javelin farther than their much stronger friend by using an atlatl, or the one who found how to start a fire
@levpetrovitch@futurebird@benni
sewing (as in clothing) and sowing (as in planting seeds) are two that seem like huge transformational technologies to me. Clothing is hugely important for dealing with different climates, weather, and terrain of all kinds, in addition to its numerous social functions. And most types of clothing require sewing or weaving, or both.
Planting crops I don't need to go on about largely because nearly everyone recognizes what huge changes it enables.
@futurebird@benni Historian here, and I strongly agree with this. Most claims for the absolutely game-changing profundity of present advances are rooted in gross ignorance of the history of whatever field is being talked about. Sometimes it's willful ignorance, sometimes genuine, often it's motivated by desire to sell your own product. But overall, most claims that we are RIGHT NOW about to see the biggest change EVER in X fail to stand up to even the quickest serious look at the history of X.
(Climate change/ ecological collapse, sadly, seems to be the exception to this.)
@futurebird
it seems bitingly similar to the thing Niklas Wirth was on about for tech history and constantly re"new"ed ideas borne from ignorance, computers seems to be the most brazen example, and is not terribly surprising its a wider trend. @benni
@futurebird@benni A great example is string. I often think about those heroes that figured out that plant fibers could be twisted together and used to hold things together, then woven to make clothing, containers, and structures.
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