45,000 years is relatively such a blink of an eye. At the same time it’s pretty impressive to have found this painting, it’s also pretty amazing that the vast majority of human history is almost entirely unknown to us.
For scale, this reaches back in time roughly 10-15% of the way to when Homo Sapiens first emerged.
Then again, it took us 66 years to go from the first human flight to landing a person on the moon, and 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars, solved worldwide energy generation and storage, and invented AGI.
It’s just too bad we are unable to intellectually or socially progress at anywhere near the same rate as we scientifically progress.
libraryofbabel 1196 days ago [-]
> For scale, this reaches back in time roughly 10-15% of the way to when Homo Sapiens first emerged.
Ah! But only if we're talking about anatomically modern homo sapiens. Behaviorally modern humans emerged much later, and in fact one of the most definitive signs of behaviorally modern humans is the existence of cave paintings!
Defining behavioral modernity is an endless debate, but a key part of it is symbolic thought - the ability to think with abstractions and manipulate concepts. Representing a group of pigs on a wall in pigment (or even considering doing so a meaningful activity) demands powers of abstraction that humans acquired only recently, in the last 50,000 years, most likely via the development of language. This is ultimately why finding the earliest cave painting is such a big deal. It shows that in this place there were people who had crossed that behavioral chasm and in some sense were more like us.
For more on this subject, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins by Ian Tattersall (2012) is a wonderful read.
tsimionescu 1196 days ago [-]
It is absolutely obvious that in 60 years we will have neither AGI nor a colony on Mars.
For AGI, we are so far from even having a clear idea how to even approach this problem (no, deep learning and backpropagation are not promising avenues).
For Mars, there are no real incentives, and the problem of a self sustaining colony underground in an irradiated environment with little oxygen and grabity is absurdly difficult. We might at best have essentially a space station on Mars in 60 years, but a self sustaining colony that wouldn't die off 2 years after something catastrophic happening to the Earth is far beyond our current engineering, much farther than any advance in the last 60 years.
Not to mention, for any plausible catastrophe happening to the Earth apart from a gamma ray burst, the Earth will still be much, much more habitable than Mars. So even if you are motivated by survival of the species, trying to build a colony on Mars before having a huge array of self-sustaining underground habitats on Earth is putting the cart way ahead of the horse. You'd even get the first-hand experience needed to actually have any hope of building something like this on Mars.
peter303 1196 days ago [-]
"Progress" is a fairly recent philosophical concept. Up to a few hundred years ago there was no significant observable technological change between your life, your grandfathers and grandchildren. Some societies have ideas of utopias at the beginning or end of history, then some sort of ramp up or down hence.
wayanon 1196 days ago [-]
How about in warfare - weren’t weapons ‘improving’ through the centuries?
jacquesm 1196 days ago [-]
About as fast as materials science. That was the limiting factor.
notsureaboutpg 1194 days ago [-]
Yes but the weapons "improving" didn't translate directly into armies winning, and it still doesn't today. The US is right now retreating from Afghanistan, where it spent 20 years losing to a much smaller, much less-funded, much lower-tech militia (the Taliban).
So again, the idea of "progress" as a totality is very new (and you could argue, still wrong, it isn't absolutely clear that we are progressing as a species or even as a society).
paulryanrogers 1196 days ago [-]
> and 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars, solved worldwide energy generation and storage, and invented AGI.
Even evolution cannot overcome the cold, hard limitations of physics. Unless by settled Mars you mean some transplanted bacteria survive there, and solved energy we consumed every reasonably reachable drop of fossil fuel.
zaroth 1196 days ago [-]
I’d say it’s pretty well certain that between solar and wind there’s abundant energy to be harvested. It’s just a matter of storing it cheaply, and lithium supply is rather extensive.
At this point it’s “simply” a matter of scaling up the manufacturing base, which is one thing humans are astoundingly good at. Just look at silicon production scale over the last 40 years and extrapolate for lithium ion.
Likewise, there’s no boundary in physics, technology or human physiology to stop us from establishing a human colony on Mars.
paulryanrogers 1196 days ago [-]
> there’s no boundary in physics, technology or human physiology to stop us from establishing a human colony on Mars.
There's no self sustaining settlement in Antarctica. Mars is much further away and less habitable.
TaylorAlexander 1196 days ago [-]
Mars being farther away makes it a better candidate for a self sustaining settlement. Why try to make a self contained settlement on Antarctica when what you want the scientists there to spend their time on is research? I mean it would be cool but I can understand why it isn’t necessary there.
tsimionescu 1196 days ago [-]
That's true, but on the other hand, it's much, much, much simpler to have a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica than on Mars. And there's also nothing to be gained from Mars in any reasonable time frame other than research.
I am extremely skeptical that we will even have a space station on Mars in the next 60 years. A self sustaining colony is laughably far off.
TaylorAlexander 1196 days ago [-]
I haven’t given timelines in any parent comments. I say in a parallel comment approx “if starship and SpaceX succeed in making a base and regular support missions” in the next few decades then I could imagine Mars being self sustaining for at least emergency conditions in 50-200 years. I don’t know what “laughably far off” means. I’m certainly not saying it will happen in our lifetime I’m just describing possible timelines. The comment I responded to talked about the present motivations for Mars exploration which I think was incorrect - it has never been presented as a land full of resources as implied by the comment I first responded to. It’s about long term human goals.
I disagree that there is “nothing to gain” and in fact I think there’s a lot humanity could gain from the development of regular space travel and settlement of other planets.
tsimionescu 1195 days ago [-]
"Laughably far off means" was meant to mean that we can't define a credible timeline. It is essentially impossible to do with our current skills (especially in terms of logistics and automation) so any estimate of timelines is extremely speculative. It could take 200 years, it could take 1000 years.
Overall, I believe that there is 0 reason to even attempt it for now. The Earth is in the middle of an existential crisis for human civilization as we know it, and all of our resources are required at home. We need to rebuild the global economy from the ground up in a way that will reduce global warming. Mars is no escape from this, certainly not in the next centuries.
Any cent that goes to a Mars colony would be better spent on Earth. If not for combating global warming, then at least for building self-sustaining colonies on Earth that could become a refuge for humanity if all else fails, or if we get struck by some asteroid. And this would not only buy us guaranteed survival, it would also act as a perfect model for a Mars colony is some far future - if we had actually built one on Earth, with all its requirements, building one on Mars would certainly become much easier.
Until and unless we know for sure that we could build truly permanent high-tech human settlements on Earth, there is no point in trying to in space. There is nothing to be gained from Mars if we can't build a permanent colony there not dependent on Earth resources, and we will not be able to build a permanent colony there unless we first build one on Earth.
Mediterraneo10 1196 days ago [-]
> And there's also nothing to be gained from Mars in any reasonable time frame other than research.
There is the prestige of having your nation expand, while others don’t. It is hard for democratic states to maintain long-term goals because power changes hands every election cycle, but it's not impossible that a stable and developed authoritarian country like China could launch such a venture just to cement its status as the leading superpower. That is not to claim, of course, that that colony would be self-sustaining anytime soon.
ithkuil 1196 days ago [-]
Necessity is the mother of invention. Often this become necessary for no good reason, but once that are necessary they can be the only reason that matters.
tsimionescu 1196 days ago [-]
This argument could be applied to anything that is not completely impossible, right? It essentially pre-supposes that if something is theoretically possible, humanity can do it with today's engineering practices. I don't think this is a safe assumption.
TaylorAlexander 1196 days ago [-]
I think that’s taking it too far. We haven’t made Antarctica self sustaining because it hasn’t been necessary. But making Mars potentially self sustaining (at least in an emergency situation) is more important given the vast distance to Earth. And from an engineering and physics perspective it seems perfectly possible as long as humans can survive in low gravity for generations.
tsimionescu 1195 days ago [-]
It sounds like the scenario you are imagining is something like us building a colony on Mars dependent on the Earth, and some time after having a situation where the colony must become self-sustaining or go extinct. I would say that, unless the colony has a few more hundred years of contact with the Earth to prepare for this, it will go extinct with 100% certainty.
The amount of resources and people that you would need for a colony on Mars to survive indefinitely without imports from Earth is staggering. You would need all of the highest tech industries from Earth (certainly chip fabs and robotics), large mining operations, smelters. You would need enough population to man all of these (or automation on a scale we are very far from, that could entirely handle factories and self-maintenance), and enough agriculture for this population. And you would have to do all of this with no access to fossil fuels - which also means no plastics and no access to many common lubricants. And of course, all of these things would have to be built underground, with huge tunnel boring operations required for any expansion.
This may all seem possible from a physics perspective, but it is something that would have to be planned for generations in advance, well outside of our realistic civil engineering capabilities at least. And since doing all of this with the hundred million people that would be required with today's industrial practices would likely complicate things a lot more on Mars, you would need automation at a level that our robotics engineering is still very far from.
It all seems possible to some extent, but definitely not something that could happen during a catastrophe, and absolutely not something that could happen without all of the bases being laid out from Earth (that is, it is impossible for a colony that was not designed and prepared from Earth to be fully self-sustaining to become self-sustaining once on Mars out of necessity).
postingawayonhn 1196 days ago [-]
There's not really any incentive to create one and the long dark winters aren't exactly ideal for food or energy production.
skedaddle 1196 days ago [-]
Are you talking about Antarctica or Mars?
ncmncm 1196 days ago [-]
Yet, still overwhelmingly better in every way than Mars.
WalterBright 1196 days ago [-]
Settlements in Antarctica are not practical because of the Antarctic Treaty System.
abecedarius 1196 days ago [-]
Which physical limit specifically? I don't see any relevant one; 60 years is a long time.
refactor_master 1196 days ago [-]
Radiation, temperature and the lack of oxygen and gravity, for example?
Tell me how many underwater and arctic settlements we have today. They should be unclaimed territories just teeming with possibility, in our own backyard.
Yet they’re... not? You’d think that after space flight we’d have 8 metro lines in the Arctic by now, if it was all just a matter of waiting around.
And you want to fly how far for something that supposedly is full of some untapped potential?
abecedarius 1196 days ago [-]
"Cold, hard limitations of physics" is distinct from not yet having done all the engineering.
Mars colonies are way down the list of things I think worth trying to do, but it's absurd to call them physically impossible, even on a 60-year deadline.
Radiation: interpose some matter.
Temperature: heater.
Oxygen: Mars has plenty in situ.
Gravity: current humans might actually find this a problem for long-term health, I'm not sure, but it's a bounded one, not likely to compare to long-term zero-g life. There's no barrier in physics to spinning up big centrifuges, even though it's ridiculous. Biomedical approaches are more likely for a biomedical problem.
paulryanrogers 1196 days ago [-]
Unless there are significant breakthroughs you'd exhaust or pollute much of Earth's resources to build a poor substitute on a planet that cannot naturally sustain human life.
abecedarius 1196 days ago [-]
It'd be inefficient anyway to use Earth resources except for some early bootstrapping. Extraterrestrial resources (asteroids, the moon, solar power, local resources on Mars) are more accessible. And it's underappreciated that for what you do need from Earth, launch can get much cheaper/cleaner after enough development in space, just as an elevator system gets more efficient with a counterweight.
AlotOfReading 1196 days ago [-]
There are quite a few permanent arctic settlements. Alert comes to mind, as does Resolute Bay. There have also been innumerable sea ice settlements, but obviously none were permanent. Are you thinking of the Antarctic instead?
tsimionescu 1196 days ago [-]
There are no self-sustaining Arctic settlements - i.e. Ones that grow their own food locally without hunting and without getting regular air drops, generate their own electricity, de-salinate or thaw their own water etc, create their own fabrics and building materials, and have some options to create their own microprocessors if needed. Oh, and that can launch its own rockets to space.
Musk is purportedly dreaming of a colony on Mars that would survive if the Earth were destroyed. That means that not only do they need to grow food, get water and generate electricity from Mars, but they will also have to have the manufacturing capacity to make everything from tunnel boring machines to microprocessors. An actually self-sustaining colony on Mars would likely have to be closer in size to a large city on Earth than to a permanent base in Antarctica.
AlotOfReading 1196 days ago [-]
Even a large city today doesn't do most of those things. How many microprocessors are fabbed in London, rockets launched in NYC, or lumber harvested in SF? This seems like an unreasonable standard to measure by.
tsimionescu 1196 days ago [-]
Well, can you imagine a colony that could survive indefinitely if the Earth were destroyed (Musk's stated goal) without having all these things? If they couldn't build another water processor chip, how long would the colony last?
So I would look at it the other way: even a large city on Earth isn't entirely self sustainable. How could we hope to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars in 60 years?
AlotOfReading 1196 days ago [-]
Yes but regardless, I'm not going to pursue the fools errand of defending an elon musk schedule. That wasn't the bit my comment responded to. I simply pointed out there are already many permanent arctic settlements, and you came back with new goalposts that no city on earth meets.
paulryanrogers 1196 days ago [-]
"self sustaining settlements" was the goalpost
AlotOfReading 1196 days ago [-]
Yes, and again we're talking about the high arctic Inuit, one of the most historically self-sufficient groups out there. Like most other people on the planet, they don't produce a lot of microchips, but they've spent the past millennia or so producing everything else they needed out of what was available in the local environment.
tsimionescu 1195 days ago [-]
The Inuit are self-sustaining by the standards of humans living on Earth, but they are in fact dependent on a huge, globe-spanning ecosystem for all of their food. Even disregarding the problems of high-tech required on Mars, they are not self-sustaining in the sense we were discussing here - they wouldn't be able to survive if the rest of the earth were barren.
jakear 1196 days ago [-]
But of a shot in the dark here but anyone know of good sci fi books from the perspective of someone colonizing another planet after their original plant died and humanity not having sufficient resources to maintain earth’s development rate?
> How could we hope to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars in 60 years?
WE can hope, but we can also DO. Isn't that the point?
jacquesm 1196 days ago [-]
Large cities are not sustainable by themselves. They need the rest of a country to keep them alive. Really, this whole thing is a pipe dream.
SpaceX has done wonders for getting the cost of moving a kilo of matter into orbit. From a tech point of view it is a very large but still incremental step from where we were before.
A self sustaining Mars colony is science fiction.
TaylorAlexander 1196 days ago [-]
Idk about others but Elon’s stated goal for settling Mars is to keep a second seed for humanity if Earth is somehow destroyed. Elon isn’t going to Mars for its appeal as a habitat directly, but because it can serve as a backup for humanity. It also makes other exploration of the solar system more likely as the ships needed to support Mars can also bring humans to the Jovian system etc.
refactor_master 1196 days ago [-]
So you’re telling me a) there’s going to be a self-sustaining colony on Mars, b) they’re happy to be there, and c) they’ll also be happy to leave their cozy colony behind to come rebuild Earth that was somehow wrecked so badly that human civilization has been wiped out?
This to me seems like an immense number of mental hoops, when you can’t even make people wear a piece of cloth over their face literally for the sake of humanity.
TaylorAlexander 1196 days ago [-]
Yes I think that if SpaceX succeeds with Starship and starts building the colony as they hope, that 50-200 years from now the settlement would be at least partially self sustainable (can self sustain in an emergency).
There are many reasons an independent settlement makes sense. Earth could get stalled in political deadlock, have a nuclear war, or fall under the control of autocratic regimes.
But there are direct benefits to humanity even without these worst case scenarios. Independent thought and political control at a time when the countries on earth become ever more intertwined (China’s Belt and Road) will probably serve some benefit in our future.
And then regular rockets between Earth and Mars would pave the way for asteroid mining, which would allow construction of massive solar energy harvesters.
That’s 200-500 years out but if we’re capable of starting now I’m not opposed to folks trying!
tsimionescu 1196 days ago [-]
What do you think could possibly happen to the Earth that would make it as un-inhabitable as Mars?
Even an asteroid strike in the middle of a nuclear war wouldn't come anywhere close.
TaylorAlexander 1196 days ago [-]
I’m not sure, but I don’t just mean physically destroyed but perhaps engaged in a new world war or ruled by autocrats. Either place could become that but if it happens to Earth it could set back human progress hundreds of years. It would be nice to have some more distant human thought, I think, with a broader view on existence than those of us here.
I think there are benefits to an independent settlement beyond physical destruction. In any case I’m saying Musk isn’t going there because it’s full of resources as was suggested up thread. He’s going there for the long term benefits to humanity he believes it will achieve. If you want to get rich in space mine asteroids. Which will probably become more viable if Mars colony ships ever routinely travel between Earth and Mars.
jacquesm 1196 days ago [-]
And even then Earth would be much more habitable than Mars will ever be.
Elon Musk may end up going to Mars, I don't think after the last decade anybody will bet against that. He could very well be this generations Neil Armstrong in being the first person to set foot on another planet. Which would be a stupendous achievement in and of itself, even if he dies in the attempt to land there itself.
But after that he'll either die there anyway when his resources run out or he'll run right back to mamma earth assuming they can manage to resupply their fuel and make it back here somehow.
tsimionescu 1195 days ago [-]
Even then - if the Earth were completely taken over by autocrats, it would still be easier to construct and defend an impenetrable fort on Earth than it would be to construct one on Mars - else the autocrats controlling the Earth would easily conquer (or destroy) Mars as well.
Now, if we were to think of a colony ship or a colony on a distant planet light years away, that would make some sense, but that is probably a project for the year 5000, not 2000.
jacquesm 1196 days ago [-]
60 year relative to the first flight to the moon a settlement is entirely off the deep end.
abecedarius 1196 days ago [-]
Is that what was meant? I didn't think of that -- normally the word means 60 years from now.
Yes, I'll be surprised if they manage a crewed mission at all by 2029.
jacquesm 1196 days ago [-]
Ok, we'll make it 2081. Still bullshit. There is absolutely no way that there will be a Mars based self sustaining colony in that time period. Real life and Hollywood are both able to surprise us but only one of those two dabbles in self sustaining Mars settlements for the foreseeable future.
When the moonlandings first happened the papers and popular science writers (and SF writers) were all over what would happen next. What happened next is nothing. Sure, we have the ISS, it's been a neat little testbed and good PR for space development.
But colonizing another planet is a lot harder than it may seem. I'll challenge anybody that believes that this can be done to 10 30 ton semis full of gear, food and oxygen, then to set up shop right off the coast somewhere and prove that within a decade they can be self sustaining. That's many orders of magnitude easier than doing the same thing on Mars and it is still very much this side of impossible.
The 'self sustaining' bit is the nasty part here, as long as you can ship in food, oxygen, water, toilet paper and whatever else you think you might need on your faraway planet you'll be fine within your little environmental cocoon. But another planet without a breathable atmosphere is so incredibly hostile to life that your first mistake will be your last.
abecedarius 1195 days ago [-]
If "absolutely no way" is everyday hyperbole for "I think it's unlikely" then sure, I think that's reasonable. It would need a break in current trends.
60 years is the interval between Zuse's first Turing-complete relay computer and the popping of the dotcom bubble. Or between the Wright flyer and Project Gemini. Outer space has ridiculously more resources available than Earth surface, making it economically irresistible. Powerful economics plus 60 years of development can equal... a lot, as I said to start this subthread. Mars itself is not very attractive, but if space happens bigtime then even a sideshow can also happen.
100% self-sustaining would be unlikely (there's no real point in the last increment towards that), but colonies on Earth always had trade too.
jacquesm 1195 days ago [-]
They had trade because they could. A Mars colony has to be self sustaining otherwise it will simply vanish at some point. For trade to work the cost to trade has to be acceptable.
abecedarius 1195 days ago [-]
Think of a world with many orders of magnitude more space travel, at an energy cost on the same order as the net energy difference between source and destination (which can be negative depending on net flow). Is that a world of autarkies? No, except where people prize autarky for its own sake.
fian 1196 days ago [-]
The progress from first man made flight to landing on the moon was largely driven by world encompassing wars.
A huge amount of research and development went into aeroplane design as people quickly realised they could be used very effectively for reconnaissance, strafing infantry, bombing and resupply. This led to the development of air to air combat which led to faster planes and eventually jet engines.
The German development of the V2 rockets for bombing London from a great distance led to a lot of work on rocketry which was then able to built on for the space race.
The space race was two super powers pouring enormous resources into research and development to ensure there would be no military gap from lack of capability in near earth orbit.
From a military perspective, colonising Mars is unlikely to have any major military benefit on Earth. I'd guess there are many other hot topics for the military to focus on (autonomous/semi-autonomous warfare, cyber warfare, biological warfare etc).
Colonisation of Mars is (currently) more likely to be pursued by commercial or non-military scientific purposes. Perhaps some of the commercial entities now rival small countries in terms of economic might. I doubt though that a commercial entity (Space-X) will be able to get very large groups of people to unite (and sacrifice other interests) in pursuit of a common goal in the same way that they do during times of conflict.
lrossi 1196 days ago [-]
> and 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars, solved worldwide energy generation and storage, and invented AGI
Unless we self destruct by then, possibly wiping out most life on this planet with us.
WalterBright 1196 days ago [-]
> 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars
Not as long as there is the popular notion that only researchers should go to Mars and anyone going there for profit is bad. See National Geographic's "Mars" miniseries.
The only way people will settle the solar system is when:
1. there's money to be made
2. people get past the notion that terran life will "contaminate" the other worlds
dr_dshiv 1196 days ago [-]
In 60 years, moon sports leagues will have created the first sustainable extraterrestrial economy. Mostly below-ground moonball, of course, but the lowgrav dirtbiking also draws a fair share of advertising dollars.
jacquesm 1196 days ago [-]
> 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars
Bullshit.
unphased 1196 days ago [-]
I think this is reasonable unless SpaceX runs into a wall at some point. Settle has a fairly wide range of interpretation, but yeah it may take longer than this before a "permanent" settlement can be established.
I find AGI in 60 years to be more controversial than Mars. Not enough evidence yet. One can def hope though.
jacquesm 1196 days ago [-]
Agreed, that too is a bullshit claim.
satori99 1196 days ago [-]
If I was alive in 1909 and someone made the claim that man would be walking on the moon in 60 years, I'd have called bullshit too.
jacquesm 1196 days ago [-]
But that's not the claim. The claim is that 60 years counting from the moonlanding we will have a settlement on Mars. I don't believe it for a moment. And even 60 years from today is a thing that I would not believe. We have a hard enough time keeping places much more hospitable to life on planet earth supplied.
Maybe, just maybe, we will have made a manned round trip to Mars. And that would be quite an accomplishment. A much more likely chance is a one way trip with all hands lost, assuming they make it to the destination at all.
jacobolus 1196 days ago [-]
> claim is that 60 years counting from the moonlanding
To be fair, “hence” means counting from now, not counting from the moon landing.
jacquesm 1196 days ago [-]
Ok, fine by me. Still bullshit.
yongjik 1196 days ago [-]
On the other hand, it's been 51 years since Apollo 11, and not only we don't have any Moonbases (either now or in near future), we haven't even gone back there.
nsomaru 1196 days ago [-]
What’s the likelihood that the fantastical myths of old are the stories of an advanced civilisation which was destroyed (along with their knowledge), and the myths are the fragments of memories of that time which became distorted by the passage of huge amounts of time?
ncmncm 1196 days ago [-]
Oral traditions of Australian aborigines record events going back at least 7,000 years, and as much as 13,000 years, old. Sea level rise dating that far back displaced people living on what is now seabed, called Sahul, between New Guinea and Australia, obliging people who lived there to move to Australia, causing conflicts whose negotiated resolution is still passed down.
20,000 years ago, the sea level was 400 ft lower. People had already lived there for tens of thousands of years. Even 13,000 years ago there were still millions of square miles now inundated. If there were not legends reflecting such an event we would need to know why. As it is we do have such legends, everywhere. The flood did not recede; we call it the sea now. It happened gradually, but large flat areas would have been covered in a generation.
What was Sundaland is girded by what are now Indonesian islands. The Yellow Sea west of Korea and the northern South China Sea off Viet Nam to Taiwan were dry land. Territory stretching out hundreds of miles around India, particularly to the west, south of Pakistan, shows evidence of construction (visible right before the big tsunami). Britain was not an island; we call the land where the North Sea is now Doggerland. The whole Persian Gulf was dry land, south of Mesopotamia. The oldest cities there border the gulf.
None of what you predict for 60 years from now is guaranteed. Scientific progress relies on stable societies and intellectual and social stasis.
When intellectuals progress, revolutions are often the result, and the same is true for when societies en masse evolve their ways of thinking about society itself.
There have been documented periods of technological stasis because humanity was engaged more in sociopolitical battles and problems and could not effectively support technological progress.
Technological and scientific progress are always going to be intertwined with social and intellectual changes. This is why so many scientists worked on the Atomic bomb project, this is why eugenics was popular and then profoundly unpopular. This is why you have scientists trying in vain to find a "gay" gene, etc. Etc. Science informs sociopolitics and vice versa. If one falls apart the other goes with it
baybal2 1196 days ago [-]
For most of homo sapiens history we didn't even knew stone tools.
AlotOfReading 1196 days ago [-]
Stone tools predate the evolution of H. sapiens. Key words to search are "Oldowan" and"Acheulean" tools.
_Microft 1196 days ago [-]
Thanks a lot - knowing the appropriate key words and terms makes all the difference when looking up new things.
baybal2 1196 days ago [-]
I am so embarassed of my ignorance
1196 days ago [-]
ndstephens 1196 days ago [-]
Homo habilis ("Handy man") largely gets its name b/c some of its fossils are associated with early stone tools. Homo habilis dates back to roughly 2 MYA (million years ago). Home sapiens only dates back to about 300,000 years ago.
walrus01 1196 days ago [-]
Highly recommended Werner Herzog documentary film about a cave in France:
I was lucky to catch this in the cinema when it came out. At the time, I remember thinking that Herzog made good use of 3-D film to capture the experience of being inside the cave.
the_local_host 1196 days ago [-]
What's striking to me is that prehistoric art in parts of the world that were unlikely to be in communication with each other tend to hit on common themes, e.g. the frequent depiction of animals (as opposed to depicting humans, which is apparently fairly rare). Where does the impetus come from?
ncmncm 1196 days ago [-]
Ordinary handprints are a natural idea. Stenciled handprints are an absolutely unnatural idea. That they appear in practically every cave-painting site indicates cultural transmission spanning tens of thousands of years and miles.
Similarly, "seven sisters" interpretations of the Pleiades are found from Africa to Australia and everywhere in between. The last time the Pleiades were recognizably seven stars was 40,000 years ago. "Seven sisters" legends everywhere include an accounting of the missing sister.
fuzzfactor 1196 days ago [-]
Starting from a very small population of cave people, as hominids expanded exponentially for thousands of years when everyone was still much more closely related no matter how far apart they were, migration pathways would not all have to remain open for tradition to be carried on to some extent.
I think it's also accepted that some cultures spent thousands of years with very little change compared to the climactic and geographic variations they endured.
Art periods are of couse referred to as "schools" and the most prominent way tradition is carried on by modern artists who intend to produce a work that will stand the test of time, is to use medias that are much closer to Rembrandt or Michaelangelo than what we see in the caves.
But not that different either.
Whatever was proven to last more than a few generations at the time.
IOW techniques proven over unknown generations of artists who came before, so much so that maintaining any knowledge on the subject required a degree of faith or superstition not less intense than efforts which preserved religious or cultural traditions, even of prehistoric humans.
Maybe for thousands of years.
It's not the Flintstones but it is just modern man in prehistoric times.
Artists who are contemporaries will need to develop a trend together in order for a school to form, and from what we see in recent centuries, a certain style often takes a while to catch on but also can last more than a generation even when there is only one progenitor as a seed.
Even though almost all art & science have always been lost without a trace.
The little bit that does stand the test of time and get preserved probably lasts much longer if it had been in development for more years before initial recognition.
And you've got to figure that schools of art come & go in much less rapid cycles the further back in time. But the materials that will last have evolved much less quickly.
The latest trends are still often depicted using inorganic pigments on canvas or carved in marble, and signed using the artist's name, styles can be wildly different but that part is exactly like it was done over the most recent centuries.
A recognized predecessor might have simply been inorganic pigment on a cave wall, signed with a hand stencil, when you're trying to paint a masterpiece that will stand the test of time. If nothing else had ever been proven this is what most would do.
And that tradition would likely have lasted orders of magnitude more generations when pop culture or art appreciation cycles were slower. Much slower in all probability, and probability can have some tall odds.
Like when there's not that many people in the world yet, most of them are going to be more similar than they are later.
Seems like the initial trend from earliest centuries could have actually lasted for earliest unfathomable millenia before any other school of art might have arose naturally as it was going to do anyway.
Could be all art everywhere started out always being signed with a hand stencil and it was so widespread and universal a trend it did not dissipate for tens of thousands of years. And it was everywhere, at home, at work, on billboards etc., you just couldn't get away from it, for like eons. It's been a while and it wouldn't be too surprising if the only thing preserved from way back then is in caves, and it could have been painted there intentionally for generations to enjoy into the unforseeable future, based on proven techniques from the unknowable past.
trianglem 1196 days ago [-]
Especially negative human handprints. They’re all over the place and doesn’t seem intuitive at all to me. Holding a mix of red ochre + water in your mouth and blowing it against your hand held on a wall. Incredible!
Zuider 1196 days ago [-]
One possible explanation is that, in order to produce the desired clear outline of a hand, it would be more effective to use the 'stencilling' technique than it would be to attempt to transfer paint directly from the palm on to an uneven surface.
wombatmobile 1196 days ago [-]
if hand stencils aren't obvious what is?
What would you have adorned your cave with 45,000 years ago?
trianglem 1196 days ago [-]
I feel like I would do a palm print before a stencil print.
wombatmobile 1195 days ago [-]
With what sort of paint?
Do you think the result would be as distinctive as the stencil?
trianglem 1195 days ago [-]
The same? Red ochre + water? Why would it be different?
wombatmobile 1194 days ago [-]
Consistency of adhesion, consistency of transference, and contrast of outline, I imagine.
I haven't tried it. I'm making speculative inferences from the existing data vs the non-existent data.
andi999 1196 days ago [-]
To me I find the hand outlines strange. Personally I wouldn't do them. And it is interesting they show up in multiple pictures.
Zuider 1196 days ago [-]
It is also striking how similar the style is between the Indonesian and European cave paintings, where the heads and feet of the animal are depicted as being smaller and more gracile than in life.
gus_massa 1196 days ago [-]
Was so rare to depict humans? I'm not an expert, but in https://www.google.com/search?q=cave+painting&tbm=isch approximately one half of the painting contains humans (and some are a photo of a single figure in a big painting).
garbagetime 1196 days ago [-]
It was rare (if it happened at all) to depict humans in as much detail as, for example, the pig in the OP. Mostly they're just stick-figure type characters.
yodon 1196 days ago [-]
We're talking about drawing styles that were used for tens of thousands of years. Even if most people never travelled more than a couple miles from their birthplace, the information those people knew, like how to draw animals, is able to rapidly jump from person to person in order to cross continents. This isn't just the domain of lyric poetry. Modern electronics works the same way. When you press the return key on your keyboard, there are unlikely to be any physical electrons that travel from your keyboard to the CPU or even from one side of the CPU to another. It's surprising how fast these information transmission processes can happen even with comparatively immobile and lossy information carriers.
fit2rule 1196 days ago [-]
There are basic shapes, which can be found in the human body, and which all cultures seem to have eventually discovered ..
For scale, this reaches back in time roughly 10-15% of the way to when Homo Sapiens first emerged.
Then again, it took us 66 years to go from the first human flight to landing a person on the moon, and 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars, solved worldwide energy generation and storage, and invented AGI.
It’s just too bad we are unable to intellectually or socially progress at anywhere near the same rate as we scientifically progress.
Ah! But only if we're talking about anatomically modern homo sapiens. Behaviorally modern humans emerged much later, and in fact one of the most definitive signs of behaviorally modern humans is the existence of cave paintings!
Defining behavioral modernity is an endless debate, but a key part of it is symbolic thought - the ability to think with abstractions and manipulate concepts. Representing a group of pigs on a wall in pigment (or even considering doing so a meaningful activity) demands powers of abstraction that humans acquired only recently, in the last 50,000 years, most likely via the development of language. This is ultimately why finding the earliest cave painting is such a big deal. It shows that in this place there were people who had crossed that behavioral chasm and in some sense were more like us.
For more on this subject, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins by Ian Tattersall (2012) is a wonderful read.
For AGI, we are so far from even having a clear idea how to even approach this problem (no, deep learning and backpropagation are not promising avenues).
For Mars, there are no real incentives, and the problem of a self sustaining colony underground in an irradiated environment with little oxygen and grabity is absurdly difficult. We might at best have essentially a space station on Mars in 60 years, but a self sustaining colony that wouldn't die off 2 years after something catastrophic happening to the Earth is far beyond our current engineering, much farther than any advance in the last 60 years.
Not to mention, for any plausible catastrophe happening to the Earth apart from a gamma ray burst, the Earth will still be much, much more habitable than Mars. So even if you are motivated by survival of the species, trying to build a colony on Mars before having a huge array of self-sustaining underground habitats on Earth is putting the cart way ahead of the horse. You'd even get the first-hand experience needed to actually have any hope of building something like this on Mars.
So again, the idea of "progress" as a totality is very new (and you could argue, still wrong, it isn't absolutely clear that we are progressing as a species or even as a society).
Even evolution cannot overcome the cold, hard limitations of physics. Unless by settled Mars you mean some transplanted bacteria survive there, and solved energy we consumed every reasonably reachable drop of fossil fuel.
At this point it’s “simply” a matter of scaling up the manufacturing base, which is one thing humans are astoundingly good at. Just look at silicon production scale over the last 40 years and extrapolate for lithium ion.
Likewise, there’s no boundary in physics, technology or human physiology to stop us from establishing a human colony on Mars.
There's no self sustaining settlement in Antarctica. Mars is much further away and less habitable.
I am extremely skeptical that we will even have a space station on Mars in the next 60 years. A self sustaining colony is laughably far off.
I disagree that there is “nothing to gain” and in fact I think there’s a lot humanity could gain from the development of regular space travel and settlement of other planets.
Overall, I believe that there is 0 reason to even attempt it for now. The Earth is in the middle of an existential crisis for human civilization as we know it, and all of our resources are required at home. We need to rebuild the global economy from the ground up in a way that will reduce global warming. Mars is no escape from this, certainly not in the next centuries.
Any cent that goes to a Mars colony would be better spent on Earth. If not for combating global warming, then at least for building self-sustaining colonies on Earth that could become a refuge for humanity if all else fails, or if we get struck by some asteroid. And this would not only buy us guaranteed survival, it would also act as a perfect model for a Mars colony is some far future - if we had actually built one on Earth, with all its requirements, building one on Mars would certainly become much easier.
Until and unless we know for sure that we could build truly permanent high-tech human settlements on Earth, there is no point in trying to in space. There is nothing to be gained from Mars if we can't build a permanent colony there not dependent on Earth resources, and we will not be able to build a permanent colony there unless we first build one on Earth.
There is the prestige of having your nation expand, while others don’t. It is hard for democratic states to maintain long-term goals because power changes hands every election cycle, but it's not impossible that a stable and developed authoritarian country like China could launch such a venture just to cement its status as the leading superpower. That is not to claim, of course, that that colony would be self-sustaining anytime soon.
The amount of resources and people that you would need for a colony on Mars to survive indefinitely without imports from Earth is staggering. You would need all of the highest tech industries from Earth (certainly chip fabs and robotics), large mining operations, smelters. You would need enough population to man all of these (or automation on a scale we are very far from, that could entirely handle factories and self-maintenance), and enough agriculture for this population. And you would have to do all of this with no access to fossil fuels - which also means no plastics and no access to many common lubricants. And of course, all of these things would have to be built underground, with huge tunnel boring operations required for any expansion.
This may all seem possible from a physics perspective, but it is something that would have to be planned for generations in advance, well outside of our realistic civil engineering capabilities at least. And since doing all of this with the hundred million people that would be required with today's industrial practices would likely complicate things a lot more on Mars, you would need automation at a level that our robotics engineering is still very far from.
It all seems possible to some extent, but definitely not something that could happen during a catastrophe, and absolutely not something that could happen without all of the bases being laid out from Earth (that is, it is impossible for a colony that was not designed and prepared from Earth to be fully self-sustaining to become self-sustaining once on Mars out of necessity).
Tell me how many underwater and arctic settlements we have today. They should be unclaimed territories just teeming with possibility, in our own backyard.
Yet they’re... not? You’d think that after space flight we’d have 8 metro lines in the Arctic by now, if it was all just a matter of waiting around.
And you want to fly how far for something that supposedly is full of some untapped potential?
Mars colonies are way down the list of things I think worth trying to do, but it's absurd to call them physically impossible, even on a 60-year deadline.
Radiation: interpose some matter.
Temperature: heater.
Oxygen: Mars has plenty in situ.
Gravity: current humans might actually find this a problem for long-term health, I'm not sure, but it's a bounded one, not likely to compare to long-term zero-g life. There's no barrier in physics to spinning up big centrifuges, even though it's ridiculous. Biomedical approaches are more likely for a biomedical problem.
Musk is purportedly dreaming of a colony on Mars that would survive if the Earth were destroyed. That means that not only do they need to grow food, get water and generate electricity from Mars, but they will also have to have the manufacturing capacity to make everything from tunnel boring machines to microprocessors. An actually self-sustaining colony on Mars would likely have to be closer in size to a large city on Earth than to a permanent base in Antarctica.
So I would look at it the other way: even a large city on Earth isn't entirely self sustainable. How could we hope to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars in 60 years?
Or, that sort of area.
WE can hope, but we can also DO. Isn't that the point?
SpaceX has done wonders for getting the cost of moving a kilo of matter into orbit. From a tech point of view it is a very large but still incremental step from where we were before.
A self sustaining Mars colony is science fiction.
This to me seems like an immense number of mental hoops, when you can’t even make people wear a piece of cloth over their face literally for the sake of humanity.
There are many reasons an independent settlement makes sense. Earth could get stalled in political deadlock, have a nuclear war, or fall under the control of autocratic regimes.
But there are direct benefits to humanity even without these worst case scenarios. Independent thought and political control at a time when the countries on earth become ever more intertwined (China’s Belt and Road) will probably serve some benefit in our future.
And then regular rockets between Earth and Mars would pave the way for asteroid mining, which would allow construction of massive solar energy harvesters.
That’s 200-500 years out but if we’re capable of starting now I’m not opposed to folks trying!
Even an asteroid strike in the middle of a nuclear war wouldn't come anywhere close.
I think there are benefits to an independent settlement beyond physical destruction. In any case I’m saying Musk isn’t going there because it’s full of resources as was suggested up thread. He’s going there for the long term benefits to humanity he believes it will achieve. If you want to get rich in space mine asteroids. Which will probably become more viable if Mars colony ships ever routinely travel between Earth and Mars.
Elon Musk may end up going to Mars, I don't think after the last decade anybody will bet against that. He could very well be this generations Neil Armstrong in being the first person to set foot on another planet. Which would be a stupendous achievement in and of itself, even if he dies in the attempt to land there itself.
But after that he'll either die there anyway when his resources run out or he'll run right back to mamma earth assuming they can manage to resupply their fuel and make it back here somehow.
Now, if we were to think of a colony ship or a colony on a distant planet light years away, that would make some sense, but that is probably a project for the year 5000, not 2000.
Yes, I'll be surprised if they manage a crewed mission at all by 2029.
When the moonlandings first happened the papers and popular science writers (and SF writers) were all over what would happen next. What happened next is nothing. Sure, we have the ISS, it's been a neat little testbed and good PR for space development.
But colonizing another planet is a lot harder than it may seem. I'll challenge anybody that believes that this can be done to 10 30 ton semis full of gear, food and oxygen, then to set up shop right off the coast somewhere and prove that within a decade they can be self sustaining. That's many orders of magnitude easier than doing the same thing on Mars and it is still very much this side of impossible.
The 'self sustaining' bit is the nasty part here, as long as you can ship in food, oxygen, water, toilet paper and whatever else you think you might need on your faraway planet you'll be fine within your little environmental cocoon. But another planet without a breathable atmosphere is so incredibly hostile to life that your first mistake will be your last.
60 years is the interval between Zuse's first Turing-complete relay computer and the popping of the dotcom bubble. Or between the Wright flyer and Project Gemini. Outer space has ridiculously more resources available than Earth surface, making it economically irresistible. Powerful economics plus 60 years of development can equal... a lot, as I said to start this subthread. Mars itself is not very attractive, but if space happens bigtime then even a sideshow can also happen.
100% self-sustaining would be unlikely (there's no real point in the last increment towards that), but colonies on Earth always had trade too.
A huge amount of research and development went into aeroplane design as people quickly realised they could be used very effectively for reconnaissance, strafing infantry, bombing and resupply. This led to the development of air to air combat which led to faster planes and eventually jet engines.
The German development of the V2 rockets for bombing London from a great distance led to a lot of work on rocketry which was then able to built on for the space race.
The space race was two super powers pouring enormous resources into research and development to ensure there would be no military gap from lack of capability in near earth orbit.
From a military perspective, colonising Mars is unlikely to have any major military benefit on Earth. I'd guess there are many other hot topics for the military to focus on (autonomous/semi-autonomous warfare, cyber warfare, biological warfare etc).
Colonisation of Mars is (currently) more likely to be pursued by commercial or non-military scientific purposes. Perhaps some of the commercial entities now rival small countries in terms of economic might. I doubt though that a commercial entity (Space-X) will be able to get very large groups of people to unite (and sacrifice other interests) in pursuit of a common goal in the same way that they do during times of conflict.
Unless we self destruct by then, possibly wiping out most life on this planet with us.
Not as long as there is the popular notion that only researchers should go to Mars and anyone going there for profit is bad. See National Geographic's "Mars" miniseries.
The only way people will settle the solar system is when:
1. there's money to be made
2. people get past the notion that terran life will "contaminate" the other worlds
Bullshit.
I find AGI in 60 years to be more controversial than Mars. Not enough evidence yet. One can def hope though.
Maybe, just maybe, we will have made a manned round trip to Mars. And that would be quite an accomplishment. A much more likely chance is a one way trip with all hands lost, assuming they make it to the destination at all.
To be fair, “hence” means counting from now, not counting from the moon landing.
20,000 years ago, the sea level was 400 ft lower. People had already lived there for tens of thousands of years. Even 13,000 years ago there were still millions of square miles now inundated. If there were not legends reflecting such an event we would need to know why. As it is we do have such legends, everywhere. The flood did not recede; we call it the sea now. It happened gradually, but large flat areas would have been covered in a generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater_pulse_1A#/media/File...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundaland#/media/File:Map_of_S...
What was Sundaland is girded by what are now Indonesian islands. The Yellow Sea west of Korea and the northern South China Sea off Viet Nam to Taiwan were dry land. Territory stretching out hundreds of miles around India, particularly to the west, south of Pakistan, shows evidence of construction (visible right before the big tsunami). Britain was not an island; we call the land where the North Sea is now Doggerland. The whole Persian Gulf was dry land, south of Mesopotamia. The oldest cities there border the gulf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Doggerland3er_en.png
See orange areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathymetry#/media/File:Mid-oce...
When intellectuals progress, revolutions are often the result, and the same is true for when societies en masse evolve their ways of thinking about society itself.
There have been documented periods of technological stasis because humanity was engaged more in sociopolitical battles and problems and could not effectively support technological progress.
Technological and scientific progress are always going to be intertwined with social and intellectual changes. This is why so many scientists worked on the Atomic bomb project, this is why eugenics was popular and then profoundly unpopular. This is why you have scientists trying in vain to find a "gay" gene, etc. Etc. Science informs sociopolitics and vice versa. If one falls apart the other goes with it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams
Similarly, "seven sisters" interpretations of the Pleiades are found from Africa to Australia and everywhere in between. The last time the Pleiades were recognizably seven stars was 40,000 years ago. "Seven sisters" legends everywhere include an accounting of the missing sister.
I think it's also accepted that some cultures spent thousands of years with very little change compared to the climactic and geographic variations they endured.
Art periods are of couse referred to as "schools" and the most prominent way tradition is carried on by modern artists who intend to produce a work that will stand the test of time, is to use medias that are much closer to Rembrandt or Michaelangelo than what we see in the caves.
But not that different either.
Whatever was proven to last more than a few generations at the time.
IOW techniques proven over unknown generations of artists who came before, so much so that maintaining any knowledge on the subject required a degree of faith or superstition not less intense than efforts which preserved religious or cultural traditions, even of prehistoric humans.
Maybe for thousands of years.
It's not the Flintstones but it is just modern man in prehistoric times.
Artists who are contemporaries will need to develop a trend together in order for a school to form, and from what we see in recent centuries, a certain style often takes a while to catch on but also can last more than a generation even when there is only one progenitor as a seed.
Even though almost all art & science have always been lost without a trace.
The little bit that does stand the test of time and get preserved probably lasts much longer if it had been in development for more years before initial recognition.
And you've got to figure that schools of art come & go in much less rapid cycles the further back in time. But the materials that will last have evolved much less quickly.
The latest trends are still often depicted using inorganic pigments on canvas or carved in marble, and signed using the artist's name, styles can be wildly different but that part is exactly like it was done over the most recent centuries.
A recognized predecessor might have simply been inorganic pigment on a cave wall, signed with a hand stencil, when you're trying to paint a masterpiece that will stand the test of time. If nothing else had ever been proven this is what most would do.
And that tradition would likely have lasted orders of magnitude more generations when pop culture or art appreciation cycles were slower. Much slower in all probability, and probability can have some tall odds.
Like when there's not that many people in the world yet, most of them are going to be more similar than they are later.
Seems like the initial trend from earliest centuries could have actually lasted for earliest unfathomable millenia before any other school of art might have arose naturally as it was going to do anyway.
Could be all art everywhere started out always being signed with a hand stencil and it was so widespread and universal a trend it did not dissipate for tens of thousands of years. And it was everywhere, at home, at work, on billboards etc., you just couldn't get away from it, for like eons. It's been a while and it wouldn't be too surprising if the only thing preserved from way back then is in caves, and it could have been painted there intentionally for generations to enjoy into the unforseeable future, based on proven techniques from the unknowable past.
What would you have adorned your cave with 45,000 years ago?
Do you think the result would be as distinctive as the stencil?
I haven't tried it. I'm making speculative inferences from the existing data vs the non-existent data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25767330
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Hohle_Fels