Comment by vitally3643
3 days ago
That's one theory, yes. Cooking food (with fire) makes more calories available, meaning less hunting required to support more individuals, and/or freeing up more time and calories for thinking. This allowed us to evolve bigger and more complex brains.
While it's not a given that fire is a hard prerequisite for an industrial civilization, it certainly accelerated our technological development. Fact of the matter is, we know of exactly one civilization, which is not enough to draw any conclusions. There's no real reason we know of that aquatic species cannot evolve into a technological civilization, we just haven't seen it happen. Fact is we don't really know how an intelligent technological species evolves. We only have guesses from our own history.
Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI.
Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.
That's the fun thing, since we have only observed a single advanced civilization, and that one only indirectly through archaeological evidence, there's no hard facts to be had! We can only make guesses. We don't know what is and is not required to make an advanced technological species, and we won't have any answers until we meet another one to compare with.
Arguably they're all fire -- requiring/involving forms of combustion.
(Well, debatable about agriculture, slash'n'burn wasn't the only form of it, but it was common for land clearing at least... all we have now is one that involves combustion engines, though...)
Nuclear weapons and the control structure around their use and fossil fuels and the C-corporation and what it optimizes for will probably turn out to be more important to the long-term future of humanity and it's civilization.
Fossil fuels are another feature like fire. One of the leading theories is that the availability of extremely energy dense fuels is one of the primary reason we were able to industrialize, and that without those fuels industrialization would be vastly more difficult if not impossible.
Personally I disagree with 'impossible', but it would definitely be harder. There's a pretty good argument to be made for leaving significant quantities of fossil fuels in the ground for the next civilization. If we wipe ourselves out, whoever comes next is going to very badly need those fuels to rebuild an industrial base.
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It looks like you've already done so with the order of the sequence that you used.
AI hasn’t taken its final form yet.
AI is not important at all. Just make things more convenient, but is completely unnecessary.
Check back in 5 years. This is going to age poorly.
The reason is that, despite what many think, AI actually is able to create novel ideas and solutions. That's why AlphaGo was so important; it couldn't beat the world's best Go player just be being a fancy autocomplete and a big processor. It had to create new discoveries and then use them effectively. That was the turning point. It's been a decade of improvements since then, and AI is already making discoveries we couldn't have made without it. The impacts are already here and in your world, you just haven't recognized them as such yet. But in a few years it will be undeniable to even the most uneducated observer, since changes that could not be possible will be present in every person's life as the effects ripple out across basically every industry.
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And a sample size of one.
That's what I said, yes.
We have counter examples of human pods that never really achieved “civilization”.
What’s missing that make them more akin to orcas or wolves?
It is possible it is just time. Modern humans are considered to have existed for 300k~ years. Civilizations are about 6k years old.
So who knows. Maybe if you gave them an extra 10k years, they would have achived "civilization". It is not much for the scale of human existance. But it is longer than any of our civilizations has existed for.
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Written language ?
Got it too easy ?
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