More and Better Future

19 thoughts
last posted Sept. 10, 2012, 12:41 a.m.

8 earlier thoughts

0

The interesting thing about this idea of "more and better future" is that the evolution of culture changed the game: we're no longer reliant on the slow rate of the genetic evolution, because cultural evolution, guided directly by human intelligence, can proceed at a much faster rate.

Humans progressed from being almost completely earthbound to landing on the moon in less than 200 years. That's taking hot air balloons (first flight 1783) as the first genuinely practical method of human flight, leading up to the US moon landing in 1969. Earthbound to space travellers in barely a dozen generations. That's an absolutely astonishing rate of progress when compared to the kinds of time frames involved in genetic evolution.

10 later thoughts