The Tenth Age of Mankind

[Swammerdami]

I find it fun to make lists. What is the best depiction of The Ten Ages of Man ? (Feel free to define 8 or 12 ages, or whatever, instead of 10.) At this scale it makes little sense, I think, to separate Bronze and Iron Ages.

1. Early Stone Age -- humans develop speech and use of fire and tools
2. Age of Farming -- more productive economies
3. Age of Civilization -- cities develop; use of copper, wagons, beer etc.
4. Age of Empires -- bronze, large empires, iron, etc.
5. Middle Ages -- feudalism replaces imperialism
6. Age of Discovery -- printing press, new sea routes, etc.
7. Age of Enlightenment -- science, social progress
8. Industrial Age -- industrial economy
9. Age of Electronics -- telephones, computers, etc.
10. Age of Stupidity -- fascism, environment destruction, social media

I hope fellow Infidels offer alternatives to this List.

I fear there will be objections to my designation of the Tenth Age. Will the Post-Rational Age, which was ushered in perhaps by Adolf Hitler and Newt Gingrich, be as important to human history as the Age of Discovery or the Age of Enlightenment? I'm afraid so. Some prognosticators think sites like Facebook presage an imminent collapse of civilization.

I was reminded of the dominance of stupidism by a news story today. OceanGate, the same company that lost the Titan submersible ("accidents are the price of innovation") now plans to colonize Venus' atmosphere by the year 2050. Their motto for this project is "Why Not?"

There are hundreds if not thousands of even more cogent examples that stupidism now dominates American thought. But I'll stop here for now.

 

[bigfield]

I'd just call if the Information Age.

This period of human history is likely going to be defined by information technology, which has given people far-greater access to information but has also given information disseminators greater access to people. Stupid social movements are just one effect of that technology.

If we're going to name the ages after the worst things that humans did then we'd need an Age of Continental Genocide, an Age of Unprecedented Cruelty, an Age of Especially Insane Religion, an Age of Brand New Ways to Kill Lots of People etc.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

The de-evolution era. Devo was right!

 

[rousseau]

Two stages, before the Anthropocene, and now we're in the Anthropocene.

 

[Politesse]

Ordinary Time: From Antiquity to Present
People be living their best life in various ways and places.

The Age of Fapping: 1825-2023
Europeans divide history into supposedly universal "ages" that just so happen to favor their own accomplishments and value perspectives, and which get suspiciously shorter and more detailed the closer they get chronologically to the present.

 

[bilby]

OceanGate, the same company that lost the Titan submersible ("accidents are the price of innovation") now plans to colonize Venus' atmosphere by the year 2050.

Sounds like someone there heard that it's considered a virtue to be able to perform under pressure, and took that a tad literally.

 

[DBT]

The tenth would probably be the Great Filter;

''Simply stated, the Great Filter says that intelligent interstellar lifeforms must first take many critical steps, and at least one of these steps must be highly improbable. Indeed, the premise of the Great Filter is that there’s at least one hurdle that is so high virtually no species can clear it and move on to the next. But while the term the Great Filter suggests the conscious action of some sort of exogenous entity, in reality, the hypothesis is more a way of thinking about the relative likelihood of certain events happening — or not happening — in their own natural course.''

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The tenth would probably be the Great Filter;

''Simply stated, the Great Filter says that intelligent interstellar lifeforms must first take many critical steps, and at least one of these steps must be highly improbable. Indeed, the premise of the Great Filter is that there’s at least one hurdle that is so high virtually no species can clear it and move on to the next. But while the term the Great Filter suggests the conscious action of some sort of exogenous entity, in reality, the hypothesis is more a way of thinking about the relative likelihood of certain events happening — or not happening — in their own natural course.''

But we are not certain the great filter is in front of us. Let's look back in time. What steps on the road to humanity are hard? Obviously, we have no direct way of answering this but we can look at how long it took as a rough proxy for difficulty. If something happened quickly and it took 100x as long on another world it wouldn't have much effect overall.

We see two steps that took billions of years: the development of multi-cellular life and the development of intelligence. Note, also, that we just barely squeaked in under the wire, 99% of the clock has already run out. If either of those slow steps took even 5% longer Earth would not have ever had an intelligent species. A simple Monte Carlo shows that Earth only had a 25% chance of developing intelligence even if the observed timeline represents the average. What if it's not the average, though? Either of those could be very low-probability events and we saw them because only a planet that made the jump could have an observer to note it.

(And for those that question the 99%: That's the point where the Earth can no longer compensate for solar warming. The world will warm--highly favoring small fast-breeding species over large slow-breeding ones.)

 

[bilby]

Either of those could be very low-probability events and we saw them because only a planet that made the jump could have an observer to note it.

It's plausible that a large Moon (and the consequent large tides) is a prerequisite for life to move out of the oceans, and that moving out of the oceans is a prerequisite for technology (try smelting ore underwater some time) or even agriculture (fencing in an effectively two dimensional tract of farmland is far easier than fencing in a three dimensional area of ocean).

Earth has an astonishingly large moon, by the standards of the rest of the solar system, and the only significant moon not belonging to a gas giant (the Martian moons are pathetic. Deimos is only 12km across and orbits so far from Mars that it will eventually escape and become an asteroid; While Phobos is only twice as large, and orbits so close that it is spiralling in, and will break up and be destroyed within fifty million years or so. Neither Martian moon exerts worthwhile tides on the planet, and even if Mars had oceans they wouldn't have been bordered by a wide tidal zone in the way Earth's oceans are).

Oceans with significant tides are likely very uncommon in the galaxy, even if oceans are a common feature of exoplanets. Earth's tides are pretty impressive - so much so that the smallest county in England at high tide is the Isle of Wight, while at low tide it passes that crown back to the "official" holder, the county of Rutland*.






*Almost half of the county of Rutland is underwater, but the border is drawn such that the freshwater reservoir occupying that area is included in the county; The county boundary of the Isle of Wight is the coastline. So Rutland permanently has a lower land area than the Isle of Wight, but which county has the largest area enclosed within its boundaries varies with the tides.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Either of those could be very low-probability events and we saw them because only a planet that made the jump could have an observer to note it.

It's plausible that a large Moon (and the consequent large tides) is a prerequisite for life to move out of the oceans, and that moving out of the oceans is a prerequisite for technology (try smelting ore underwater some time) or even agriculture (fencing in an effectively two dimensional tract of farmland is far easier than fencing in a three dimensional area of ocean).

Earth has an astonishingly large moon, by the standards of the rest of the solar system, and the only significant moon not belonging to a gas giant (the Martian moons are pathetic. Deimos is only 12km across and orbits so far from Mars that it will eventually escape and become an asteroid; While Phobos is only twice as large, and orbits so close that it is spiralling in, and will break up and be destroyed within fifty million years or so. Neither Martian moon exerts worthwhile tides on the planet, and even if Mars had oceans they wouldn't have been bordered by a wide tidal zone in the way Earth's oceans are).

Oceans with significant tides are likely very uncommon in the galaxy, even if oceans are a common feature of exoplanets. Earth's tides are pretty impressive - so much so that the smallest county in England at high tide is the Isle of Wight, while at low tide it passes that crown back to the "official" holder, the county of Rutland*.






*Almost half of the county of Rutland is underwater, but the border is drawn such that the freshwater reservoir occupying that area is included in the county; The county boundary of the Isle of Wight is the coastline. So Rutland permanently has a lower land area than the Isle of Wight, but which county has the largest area enclosed within its boundaries varies with the tides.

I think tides helped but I don't think they're essential--storms will make waves which will do the same thing, just slower.

The moon is more important in stabilizing seasons.