alt Hacker NewsLet's compare the progress made by the modern world against the life of the tribes on the remote untouched islands.
Unfortunately the stories of success of the modern world were written by the modern world. So what we call as success or progress is only valid in modern world. There is no language or terms that can describe success and agreed upon across these two worlds.
For example, you may be able to wipe out that tribal population within minutes. But that may not mean success or progress, in terms of adaptation to the surroundings. Dinosaurs also ruled the land with their might. But adaptation is something different from being mighty. The context can get much more mightier against you.
Most of scientific and industrial advances were made by people who have no survival struggles and who were greedy for money or reputation. A lot of it was not needed for human adaptation and evolution.
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> the life of the tribes on the remote untouched islands.
Which ones? Or is it just romantic conjecture?
On the other hand, dinosaurs may have survived if they had a space program! :)
> Most of scientific and industrial advances were made by people who have no survival struggles and who were greedy for money or reputation. A lot of it was not needed for human adaptation and evolution.
I'm not sure what the motivations of the people who developed penicillin were, but I'm happy they did what they did.
Also vaccines (smallpox, polio, MMR), indoor plumbing and chlorination, sewage treatment, electrical lighting (so we didn't have to burn candles, whale oil, or gas piping/lighting to every room of the house), etc.
> Unfortunately the stories of success of the modern world were written by the modern world.
While I think that is a profound insight that we should contemplate a lot more than we do instead of taking our value system (the one we all share, not only the ones we disagree with) for granted, I can't help also contemplate how inadequate, or underdeveloped, our language is as a tool to identify such. Hopefully, some day we will have more value-neutral means to properly view the relative isolated conceptual bubbles from which each culture views another. We're not there yet.
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Life on Earth is going to be temporary - the Sun itself already guarantees that on a long timeframe. But on far more immediate time frames there have been countless mass extinction events and countless more will happen - in fact we're well over due for one. One could very well happen tomorrow - there won't necessarily be any warning.
For instance one hypothesis for one of the most devastating mass extinction events was mass volcanic eruptions. The volcanos don't kill you, usually, but they blot out the sky which not only sends temperatures plummeting but kills all plantlife, which then rapidly kills anything that depended on those plants and on up the food chain. Another hypothesis for another mass extinction event was an unfortunately directed gamma ray burst. It would end up killing life off through a similar ends, even if the means to get there is quite different.
It's likely that the only means to 'beat' these events in the longrun is technology and expanding into the cosmos - becoming a multi planetary species first and eventually a multi star system species. That we (and many other species species for that matter) seem to have this instinct to expand as far as we can is probably just one of the most primal survival instincts. Concentrated over-adaption to a localized region and circumstance is how you get the Dodo.