Hacker News Reader

Comment by darby_nine | Hacker News Reader

> It is remarkable how quickly we went from rudimentary powered flight to the moon.

I never got these kinds of statements. What on earth are you comparing us to? Somehow people who make the above statement never remark how slow it was moving from the development of agriculture to being sedentary, for instance.

View on HN

Seems like that's exactly the kind of implicit comparison being made. We went very quickly from early flight to rocketry relative to how quickly we went from early agriculture to complex agricultural societies.

That doesn't seem that interesting—of course people were more interested in living life than in technological advancement. The kind of industrial mania that produced our current society is something we can't exactly opt out of.

I'm pretty sure that people at all points in history have been interested in using technology to improve their lives.

Funny that you say what on Earth are you comparing us to. It's just that Earth, look at the time it takes for purely biological evolution to take place. Flight is estimated to have first evolved 350 million years ago in insects, then dinosaurs 220 million years ago, then birds, and bats 60 million years ago. From insects to bats is 290 million years. It took us less than 100 to go from basic flight to leaving the planet. On nearly any scale we humans have evolved and adapted on an unprecedented timescale. Hell, humans only evolved 100,000 years ago or so. It's a blink of the eye compared to literally everything else on our planet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com