

The problems with describing this like one parabola are two-fold for me. If we look at the long arm of history, we as a species have been far less interconnected so knowledge wasn’t shared to the same extent it often is today. One of the reasons why a hypothetical Covid-819 would’ve killed more people. At the same time, various regions have gone through their own periods of trouble, dark ages, decays of empires, and religious doom. You’d have to interpolate quite heavily in the bottom part of the parabola to get started. Bronze tools could take a century to spread. Strictly speaking, Gutenberg didn’t invent book printing; China beat him to it. But the repercussions of his movable type were arguably far more reaching. Or more recently, the industrial revolution started around 1750 but didn’t affect a majority on this planet until about 50 years later. There were uncontacted people it never reached that were washed away by the 2006 tsunami. Where to plot these things on an overarching exponential graph become choices. And thus a statistic you’re forging yourself.
And then exponential means at some point we’re going to reach a point where we near constantly innovate stuff. You’d have to do the work of two scientific Nobel prizes before you had your first piss in the morning just to keep up with the pace. This pace of development isn’t sustainable. There has to be an out.
That’s why I would favour a model based on quantum leaps that show localised growth in hockey stick curves. Change today may seem fundamental and omnipresent. But 🫲 six seven 🫱 probably never reached North Korea.










I don’t buy into “wood” obviously meaning “sandalwood.” If you have lived with carpenters, they smell like fresh timber and sweat. So if that wasn’t an option, I don’t think the contestant was specific enough.