What if the industrial revolution started 50 000 years ago

There's a similar thread on the "Intelligence & Machines" board. Except he was only asking about doing it 2,000 years ago. And he misspelled "Industial." I posted there concerning the conditions that were necessary for the Industrial Revolution to occur.

50,000 years ago was the beginning of the diaspora out of Africa. (That date was very recently moved forward from 70,000BCE.) So the I.R. would have to have occurred in Africa, where all the people were.

The geography of Africa did not propel technological change because of its north-south orientation. The key technology that drew us out of the Stone Age was agriculture. Animals and plants can be traded among neighboring cultures for a good distance in an east-west direction because they're in the same climate zone. It's much more difficult in a north-south direction.

The Agricultural Revolution did indeed occur much later in Africa than elsewhere. And it occurred in North Africa, which at the time was both culturally and geographically a continuum with southern Asia rather than with sub-Saharan Africa.

It can be hypothesized that Homo sapiens had to leave Africa before the conditions prompting the foundation of civilization could occur. Why that emigration itself happened so late in our time on Earth is a separate question, but even that answer is emerging. 50,000 years ago was a dreadful ice age. So much water was trapped in the ice caps that rainfall everywhere was very low. All of Africa had practically turned into a desert. Humans became desperate to find a place with more food and some of them managed to make the crossing into Asia Minor.

See the "Out of Africa" thread on the Human Science board for more on this, and for citations of source material. This research is very recent and is just now making its way into the popular media.

 

That's just the recent spectacular stuff like rocketry, nuclear fission and radar. Some of our most important technologies were invented long before the modern era. Not only were they not inspired by the desire to kill, they actually mitigated that desire.

Remember that in the Mesolithic Era murder was the cause of 60% of adult deaths. This was because nomadic hunter-gatherers could just barely eke enough food out of their territory to keep themselves alive--in a good year. This required each tribe to regard every other tribe as a competitor for scarce resources. It was rational to protect its meager surplus, set aside for hard times, from theft by another tribe which had already fallen on hard times or simply wanted to build up its own meager surplus. And to protect its precious territory from encroachment. The Mesolithic skeletons we find with their hacked bones and caved-in skulls show that fighting to the death was Stone Age "morality."

The Neolithic Revolution changed all that. The technology of agriculture--farming and animal husbandry--produced a significant surplus of food for the first time in history, so the need to protect food and food production was not so great. It also not just permitted but required larger communities of humans to live together in harmony and cooperation, in order to utilize the division of labor and enjoy the economies of scale that characterize the agricultural lifestyle. People were forced to make peace by the technology they had invented.

The next major technological Paradigm Shift was civilization itself. Increasing division of labor allowed citizens to specialize in building sturdier houses, crafting more comfortable furniture, sewing more beautiful clothes, creating art and music, trading with other cities, brewing spirits and teaching the young. Increasing economies of scale allowed surplus labor and other resources to be devoted to those pursuits instead of food production. Again, people had to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with ever-larger communities, which now included complete strangers, in order for their new technology of city-building to work.

The wheel, written language... other important technologies were invented without causing an increase in violence. It wasn't until bronze metallurgy was invented that a Paradigm-Shifting technology was used to make war. And even then, bronze was a powerful force for peace because the two ores needed to make it, copper and tin, rarely occur in proximity. Cities had to stay on peaceful terms and trade with each other before they could even make bronze!

If you want to pick on a technology, pick the Iron Age. Iron ore is plentiful and requires no alloying, no diplomacy with one's neighbors in order to swap raw materials. Once the people in the cities invented iron metallurgy, every tribe of barbarians copied it and became a bloodthirsty "kingdom." Iron was arguably the technology that did the most harm to human relations (nuclear fission killed only one ten-thousandth of the earth's population), yet look at everything we've achieved with it. We draw a line in history between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. It was a Paradigm Shift, and not because of its killing power.

Even now, a persuasive case has been mounted for calling the new Paradigm-Shifting technology, electronics, a force for peace. The internet has linked the economies of the world's major nations so tightly together that it would be risky for one to attack another. Furthermore, it has linked the people so tightly together that increasingly large numbers of us regard each other as fellow citizens rather than competitors.

I ask each of you reading this, would you condone an attack by your country on any of the dozens of countries represented by the other SciForums members who are reading this?

That hundred-year snapshot is an anomaly. I'm sure people said the same thing about bronze spears and steam-driven warships, without balancing them against the enormous benefit conferred by those technologies.

Not as many of us are looking for those ways as were doing it in the past. Remember that as recently as 15,000 years ago everyone hated every member of the tribe in the next valley and was willing to kill them if they got too close. Today, in stark contrast, the government of the most powerful nation that ever existed is collapsing on itself because a huge segment of its citizens object to the rather tiny war (by historical standards) it is waging on people who are literally on the other side of the planet. People whom, frankly, a lot of American don't even like very much. We just don't think we have the right to kill them.

You can thank electronic technology for that. Television brought the Vietnam War into our living rooms at dinner time--in COLOR.

 

Leo, I hope you're being sarcastic. This is a place of science and the scientific method requires all extraordinary claims to be accompanied by extraordinary evidence. Unless you have new evidence for the UFO claim that has not yet been tested, peer reviewed and rejected, posting it on one of our science boards is trolling and against the rules.

 

I have complained before that science has a bit too much of a guild aura about it, and this is nowhere more annoying than in its lack of terminology for effective communication with laymen. I have never found a succinct, standard definition of the scientific method. Even the Wikipedia article is 24 pages plus references. I think that as you gain a scientific education you are taught the scientific method and one of the tests of whether you're fit to be inducted into the "guild" of scientists is that you demonstrate your knowledge and practice of it. But it's not written down concisely so that you could divulge it to a layman, as though you're expected to endure various medieval tortures before committing that breach of secrecy.

Nonetheless, Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827), one of the greatest scientists in history (e.g., the Laplace transform), stated, "The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness." This is known as the Principle of Laplace and it is often cited in scientific papers, both by name and by quotation. Google turned up 5,000 hits on just the name.

Marcello Truzzi, co-founder of CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal--my wife and I were members of the L.A. chapter for years), reworded this as "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." This may be a reasonable principle for confronting faith healers and past-life regression therapists, but it is not a proper scientific statement since science does not generally deal with proof.

Carl Sagan, a man with a mission to bridge the communication gap between scientists and laymen, changed it to proper scientific form, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," and popularized it.

 

But where would they go? Unless they found a way around relativity AND an enormous new energy source, they would be limited to this solar system and--still requiring prodigious supplies of energy if not translight speeds--the handful of planets that may exist in nearby systems. Maybe relatively small Mars could be terraformed, but other than that we don't have evidence of another planet on which humans could live comfortably. If they had the technology for terraforming, surely they could far more cheaply and with far less social unrest solve whatever problems their earlier technologies had caused on this planet.

In 49,000 years, even at relativistic speeds, they might be able to explore a larger portion of the galaxy and found more habitable planets. But the energy needed to transport millions or billions of people through interstellar space would bankrupt the most advanced economy. Just lifting them out of earth's gravity well would probably bankrupt ours--if we even have that much energy available. And I'm not ignoring the prospect of unimaginably efficient new technologies, I'm just looking over my shoulder at the laws of thermodynamics, which ain't goin' away.

As for "fundamentalists"... In the 12,000 years since we began advancing out of the Stone Age, we have overcome quite a lot of our Stone Age instincts. A large enough fraction of the population has already overcome the instinct for religion that the religionists are starting to take us seriously and looking for ways to marginalize us. Don't you think that in 50,000 years the whole human race might have enough time to outgrow religion?

No. Anthropologists have determined that 60% of the adult skeletons they find from the Mesolithic Era bear incontrovertible evidence of having died violent deaths. Crushed skulls, spear punctures, axe slashes, etc. Check the citations in the "Least Violent Times" thread.

It fits with what the less romantic among us always suspected about the pre-agricultural Stone Age. A nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe produces no significant surplus food (or any other surplus wealth since they have to carry everything they have). So any other tribe that comes close has to be regarded as competitors for their limited hunting/gathering territory, or as outright enemies come to steal what pathetic food stores they might have socked away. During a bad year, it's likely that every tribe would be fighting every other tribe for the right to survive the famine.

It was the technology of agriculture that produced humanity's first surplus. This gave one Neolithic tribe the leeway to trade some of its surplus food to another tribe who needed it and promised to repay them by making some of their especially nice tools, pottery or clothing.

Then the technology of civilization introduced division of labor and economy of scale, and the surplus wealth of the population became so large that they had to invent things like money and writing just to manage it fairly. The need to kill another human being for food became so rare that 12,000 years after the first farming we look at those hacked-up skeletons from the Mesolithic Era and say, "No no no, there just has to be another explanation. I don't want to believe that my ancestors ever behaved that way."

It was technology--including the technology of city building--not religion or philosophy, that gave us peace. And don't for a minute doubt that even at its worst, civilization has always been a more peaceful time than the Mesolithic.