Monday, November 14, 2022

111422c



In some ways our distant ancestors had it easy. Look at any first, the first music, the first botany, first whatever. I mean, nobody knew anything, so whatever you did, why, it was the best that had ever been. When you think about it though, no matter how it looks, this can't be true. Our species is what, 400,000 years old, give or take? And how long did it take before the first person thought, hey, I don't have to just use a rock. I can whack it with another rock first; it'll be better. We went on for millennia then before we came up with any further tech or art improvements (that were preserved). Looks like innovation was hard in those days. Now it seems there are ten new things every minute. But to our descendants, if we are lucky enough to have any, innovation in our time will look pretty slow too. Not because things keep speeding up, but because we stopped using durable things. 400,000 years in the future, what's going to remain from our time? A Nikon camera and a shoelace in a former peat bog? Or the remnants of a layer of green glass spanning the globe? Say, that sounds familiar. When did something like that happen before? Meteor, shmeteor. Maybe some of those dinos were savvier than we think!

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