How Heterosexual Couples Met (From /r/DataIsBeautiful)
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The rate of technological advancement has drastically exceeded our collective rate of evolution.
Humans have an average generational turnover time of 20 years. That is, it takes two decades for a newborn female to grow up and start producing offspring of her own.
That's a pretty slow turnover time.
Technology used to advance fairly slowly; a baby born a thousand years ago could expect to grow up in more or less the same world his parents grew up in, save for maybe one or two slowly-spreading innovations every two or three generations.
That started to change with the end of the Victorian era.
I used to marvel at my grandparents having seen the early days of flight, and the advent of electricity and all the changes that brought (the farm my grandmother was born on didn't have it.) But then I realized I've probably seen more change than they did just in the past 20 years ... never mind how much has changed overall since the late 1960s ...
Anyway, I wonder if that's a solution to the Fermi Paradox. Just as technological change gets out of control, the species evolves to be too stupid to keep up with it all thanks to a lack of natural selection.
Don't forget medical progress. Things like CAT scans/MRI really revolutionized medicine.
My aforementioned grandmother died at 72 basically because of CAT scans/MRI not being available in 1980. And now, I just survived heavy shit because of these things, and more that didn't exist 50 years ago. They've been able to save preemies that wouldn't have lived when I was born (yes, the survival of younger and younger preemies even sparked a line of fucking toys back in the 90s.)
Airplanes being safer and transporting more humans everywhere. It's so normalized you don't even notice.
Drones opening up more secrets of the natural world. And affecting it.
If anything, technologies have become more efficient at what what they do, for better or for worse.
As a guy who works in IT I get weird looks when I espouse my belief that technology was a mistake. People become increasingly concerned once they realize I'm not joking.
I'm in IT. Early on in my career I would hear guys "joking" about just up and quitting to work on a farm. It did not take me very long to realize it wasn't a joke.
I don't fully agree with Uncle Ted, but damn
Working on a farm, buying some acreage in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, running screaming into the woods, living in a mountain cabin, it's got many forms but it's all the same realization.
lifts coffee mug, looks out window to field Yep.