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[Rivercurse]

adam_grif wrote...
The Earth is ~6 billion years old, and modern humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years.

Is this true?  Wow human progress over the last 500 years has been ludicrously fast in comparison to the previous hundred thousand years then.. Why is that?

[Icinix]

Rivercurse wrote...

adam_grif wrote...
The Earth is ~6 billion years old, and modern humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years.

Is this true?  Wow human progress over the last 500 years has been ludicrously fast in comparison to the previous hundred thousand years then.. Why is that?

Alien interbreeding.

[adam_grif]

Rivercurse wrote...

adam_grif wrote...
The Earth is ~6 billion years old, and modern humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years.

Is this true?  Wow human progress over the last 500 years has been ludicrously fast in comparison to the previous hundred thousand years then.. Why is that?

Most of human existence was spent as stone age hunter-gatherers, where most of our free time was spent collecting or preparing food. The two most important changes that let us break away from this lifestyle was the domestication of crops (i.e. agriculture) and the development of written language. The former allowed people to have much more free time than they otherwise would because a few people could produce the food that many people would eat, freeing the others up to do other things. The develpoment of writing allowed knowledge to be accurately recorded across generational timescales, whereas before this the only long term storage was oral tradition, where stories were (often unreliably) passed from one person to another. Much in the manner of chinese whispers, this is not a good way to store information long term. With writing on long term storage (Stone tablets, papyrus, paper etc) allows each generation to learn what the last one knew, and then build on that. This is what Isaac Newton was referring to when he said that he was "standing on the shoulders of giants" - he would not have discovered what he did if there had not been hundreds of generations of people preceding him, slowly building up the knowledge that he would then expand during his life.
 
Cultures that never developed these two things never progressed technologically. The Australian Aborigines were still stone-age hunter gatherers without writing or agriculture when Europeans arrived a few hundred years ago. Their only notable technology was learned through trial and error, the Boomerang, which had interesting aerodynamic properties that they did not really understand.  Other isolated cultures, in the pacific, Africa and South America, are also on a similar technological level - i.e. very little or no technology at all.

Even with those two things though, societies will plataeu at a certain level of technology until specific discoveries are made. Examples include the mathematical concept of "0". which prevented the Roman mathematicans from discovering the kinds of advanced mathematics that the Arabs would later develop during the Medieval era.

[vanslyke85]

The discovery of one thing leads to the discovery of many. Fire lead to so many things.

[sth128]

Humans have been around for a few hundred thousand years. We did not start advancing until the advent of language and recorded history. Once we invented a way to record and communicate our knowledge to the next generation, accumulation of advances and technology was possible.



And we advanced faster in the last 100 years compared to the thousands before because technology follows an exponential growth curve. Also population increase means a general increase of collective ideas and possibilities.

[Bad King]

Humans were mere hunter gatherers back then. They would have been sparsely populated and technologically unsophisticated. The reapers would have no reason to harvest them, however 50,000 years would be plenty of time for humans to develop to the technological level that would make them eligible for harvesting.

[Weltenschlange]

adam_grif wrote...
Even with those two things though, societies will plataeu at a certain level of technology until specific discoveries are made. Examples include the mathematical concept of "0". which prevented the Roman mathematicans from discovering the kinds of advanced mathematics that the Arabs would later develop during the Medieval era.

Oh, come on holmes. Please don't be mean, give some credit to the Hindus.

[Exile Isan]

Rivercurse wrote...
Is this true?  Wow human progress over the last 500 years has been ludicrously fast in comparison to the previous hundred thousand years then.. Why is that?

The invention of the printing press and the ability to harness electricity in the last hundred may have had something to do with it.

[2kgnsiika]

didymos1120 wrote...

2kgnsiika wrote...

ME: Genesis is also from an in-universe perspective, narrated by a character, who is completely fallible.

But one who should know better.  You can rationalize the errors if you want, but they're still there and this "unreliable narrator" notion goes against the whole point of it in the first place: filling people in on ME1's story.  The actual story.

First of all, Shepard's statement is true enough. It may be a little simplistic, but if you want to describe the Reapers' activites briefly and clearly, then saying that they reap everyone about every 50,000 years is good enough. Besides, he's a space marine cyborg, not a goddamn egghead. If someone started nitpicking his statements like that in the games he'd twist their balls into a pretzel.
Also, all in-universe narrators are by definition fallible, unless they're omniscient. And using Shepard as the narrator for Genesis is pretty much the only choice (or at least the obviously best choice), as it intimately introduces the player to the main character and gives them their version of the story.

I'd like to add that I do think BW devs should be careful not to oversimplify the story like that when they want to give an accurate description of the setting. I just think that it's important to consider who is saying this and in what context.

[Kenshen]

ZachForrest wrote...

Rivercurse wrote...

Q to ppl in the know, what stage of development was Earth even at 50,000 years ago?

Humans started to develop some semblance of culture and act in ways we modern humans would recognise.

The continents were basically in place, and the Earth was subject to frequent ice ages. Although the same climates we experience now were present in the right places for the most part.


edit: not that i'm in the know.

We were in an ice age around that time or at the late stages of said ice age.  It is thought that around this time that modern man started taking our first steps out of Africa and exploring the rest of the world.  While many things would seem the same then as now there still are some animals and plants that didn't make it to our current date.  One thing we do know that happened around 50,000 years ago was a meteor impact in Northern Arizona. A site called Meteor Carter.

[xI extremist Ix]

Dinosaurs! It makes sense now! There wasn't a meteor, global shift, or volcanic activity. They were too developed and space faring and so the Reapers casted them dowN!

[JorgeX]

sth128 wrote...

Humans have been around for a few hundred thousand years. We did not start advancing until the advent of language and recorded history. Once we invented a way to record and communicate our knowledge to the next generation, accumulation of advances and technology was possible.

And we advanced faster in the last 100 years compared to the thousands before because technology follows an exponential growth curve. Also population increase means a general increase of collective ideas and possibilities.

As my former history teacher said:

" In early ages tecnology advanced very slowly like a snail.
when we invented writing and alphabeth tecnology began to walk.
In the middle ages or "obscurantism" age tecnology advanced like a snail again.
After the Renaissance tecnology began to run
And now in the 20th and 21st centuries tecnology doesn't run it FLIES".

[DarthSliver]

Well I am sure the Reapers are thinking now " sure wished we wiped out those monkeys last time we were here"

[vanslyke85]

DarthSliver wrote...

Well I am sure the Reapers are thinking now " sure wished we wiped out those monkeys last time we were here"

Indubitably. 

Modifié par vanslyke85, 27 janvier 2011 - 06:29 .