Agriculture is minor? Metal working is minor? Architecture is minor? Writing is minor? Mathematics up to calculus, the magnetic compass, gear trains and clock escapements, and gunpowder are minor? I think you underestimate how profoundly important these things are.

That said, technological advancement was certainly slower in the past than it is now. I’d mark this up to two factors. One is the development of the scientific method. While bits and pieces of thought about empirical testing of ideas have been around for centuries, they didn’t become sufficiently rigorous or sophisticated until relatively recently. The idea that you want to try to disprove an idea and fail is kind of counterinuitive.

More importantly, though, it’s an economic and demographic issue. Invention is expensive. It takes time, clever people, and quite probably expenses for materials. To a first approximation, scientific and technological progress are produced in proportion to the amount of educated labor you can throw at problems. For most of history, though, we’ve had slow, incremental changes and the occasional leap because the people involved in any kind of technological change mostly have to be doing something productive at the same time, and full-time thinkers were very, very rare. There wasn’t sufficient agricultural surplus to support that many people not directly engaged in subsistence agriculture. Innovation was also risky. Try to introduce, say, a new plow design now and your worst-case scenario if it doesn’t work out is that the farmers who try it have some debt issues to deal with for a few years. Try it in 1000 AD and your worst-case scenario is that the farmers who try it starve and die. This encourages a certain conservativism.

But through slow improvement of technology over thousands of years (better agriculture, better transportation, increasing use of machine power), more and more people could spend more time on things that weren’t concerned with immediate survival. We got larger populations with more people who had more time. Around the 18th century, with Europe’s agricultural revolution, the rise of massive use of water power, and the introduction of steam, we started to hit a tipping point. We could afford more urban workers than farmers, and we could afford to invest labor and capital in creating new ideas and new inventions. There’d always been a positive feedback loop, where innovation made other innovations easier, but this was when that relationship started to become visible. Societies got to the point where a deliberate program of innovation became a viable option rather than a reckless luxury.

TL;DR: There’s more innovation now because we can afford it.

I wouldn’t call earlier inventions “minor” (carved stone tools, the wheel, bow and arrow, mining, weapons and axes, domestication of plants and animals, waterwheels) but you are right about the “explosion”. Historians of course are still arguing but the simplest explanation is that you need a core number of people who followed a procedure and had a shared attitude to make the leap. From Bacon and especially Newton and Galileo forward you had that, with the scientific mindset creating something pretty close to our modern philosophy of science: measurement, universal rules, publication of results for examination by peers, natural and systematic explanation using mathematics. There was a community of scientists (who didn’t use that word yet) communicating with each other in Latin that was a hive-mind that exponentially expanded what one mind could do. They were ambitious, creative, competitive, worked on perfecting tools like the telescope and other apparatus, compared notes, sought and got patrons (for those without their own funds), had governments start to find prestige in sponsoring them (see the Royal Society) once they realized that practical gains could lead to weapons, capture of new lands, an expansion of trade, an improvement of productivity of mines and farms.

The relative freedom of the UK was also key.

Matt Riggby gave great answer but I would add accumulation of knowledge. Both through discovery and social evolution. As we pooled more and more knowledge we could do more things with it. At start we dependent on knowledge coming in that limited our development. Then we hit a tipping point when was more knowledge than individual could hold and only limit was how people combined knowledge to create breakthroughs. As more and more people get involved the acceleration was natural and at same time continued to grow pool of knowledge.

So as you get more tools and more people of cause you get ever accelerating progress.

The steam engine.

Mechanical power replaced muscle power. This allowed the workforce to change from about 80–90% involved with food production and distribution to less than 3% in three or four generations. In addition, steam power allowed production to occur anywhere. Previously, the main source of mechanical power was flowing water.

This phenomenon built on itself. Cheap and ubiquitous power meant that everyday chores could be automated. Weaving and clothes-making were supplanted by factory-made items. Refrigeration meant that individuals could keep food fresh for longer such that gathering food was no longer a daily chore.

The story continues. Motorized vehicles delivered supplies instead of horse-drawn carriages. Steam shovels could dig a foundation or a ditch in a few hours. Powered tools accelerated construction.

Before the steam engine, the fraction of the population devoted to technological advancement was a tiny piece of a percent. Most of the labor force was busy simply staying fed and sheltered. Today, several percent of the population devotes its energy to developing things that make us more productive.

Science and technology advance exponentially. Each minor advance can spur, for the sake of argument, four other minor advances. Those advances spur many others. And so on.

Population, especially in the human race's earlier years, has also grown exponentially. Even if a mated pair of humans only produces two offspring, population would grow very fast. And only two offspring was an anomaly for much of our history.

Progress in medicine also aided technological progress. If research into a subject and finding applications took decades, a person with a shorter lifetime would make less progress. And that person's work would be less likely to receive attention from later generations, because it had not produced anything of note in their short lifespan.

With population growing in such a manner, there are more people who can stumble onto a discovery. There are more people to diligently research answers to questions that they are asking (researchers and philosophers), and more people to find ways to apply the new discovery in new ways (engineers).

Yes, there have been forces in the past that have restricted discovery and progress. But researchers and engineers are the type who tend to ignore restrictions imposed by authorities such as religion and autocracy.

It is very easy to look at the past 150 years and not comprehend the scientific and technical advances that happened before then. You may look at a smart-phone and see only the advances in the past 40-50 years, but the fact is that there are a lot more discoveries that went into that phone's development than you think.

It took hundreds of years to develop the process to make glass. Creating glass without flaws seemed an impossible task for a long time. And the effort that went into creating strong glass that was thin enough to use in a smart-phone?

Plastic? A large number of advances had to be achieved to even get to the point where humans could start to use crude oil at all, for anything. The refining process that allowed humans to start developing plastic required technology that wasn't possible for a long time.

Rubber? While some primitive tribes were using rubber gum for quite a while, it couldn't be used reliably until chemistry and manufacturing progressed far enough. And vulcanizing was discovered by accident. Yes, a lot of rubber today is from petrochemicals, but you can develop something to mimic something else if you don't have the original to inspire your work.

Aluminum? Refining aluminum required a lot of advances in chemistry. At one point, aluminum was considered more precious than gold, and that was before pure aluminum was even possible. For a time, the refining process was very unhealthy for workers.

Every material in that smart-phone required at least a thousand years of progress, and many of the materials required to create those end-products also required major progress.

Computer programming would be such a foreign concept to people living a thousand years ago that it would be akin to witchcraft, or mental illness. But it built on thousands of years of progress into mathematics and thousands of years of philosophy and logic.

And that doesn't take into account the discoveries of electricity and chemistry that allowed the development of energy storage, wireless and cellular technology, and other concepts. Smart-phones wouldn't exist if not for space-flight, for example.

Some people have asked why the human race didn't advance faster than it did. But the real "miracle" is that we advanced at all.

It was the slow realization that the inexplicable could be explained if certain principles, processes and standards of evidences were implemented. Many phenomena we understand quite well today such as lighting and earthquakes used to be considered the products of the inscrutable minds of various gods. Once it was realized that the realm of the gods was not as immediate as supposed, and that there was tractable regularity in the material world, humans began to employ science to construct a foundation of scientific knowledge that could be expanded across many domains of inquiry. Greatly assisting this expansion was first the creation of writing which allowed for the faithful transmission of knowledge to the next generation, and then the priniting press which increased general knowledge among the masses.

The invention of rational thought.

The modern human species has been around for about 250,000 years.
We have had “civilization” (agriculture, organization beyond a small tribe) for about 25,000 years — about 10% of human history.
We have had philosophy and logic for about 2,500 years, since the ancient Greeks — about 1% of human history.
We have had the scientific method, a systematic and reliable way to determine what is true and what isn’t, for about 500 years, since the Renaissance — about 0.2% of human history.

So it’s no surprise that actual rational thought is far from universal human practice yet; it’s a new invention.

Nonetheless, those who have practiced it have made amazing progress in human flourishing in just that short time.

Pick a random, man-made object near you right now.

Consider for a moment how many different developments were required for this object to exist in your presence: discovery of the materials, figuring out how to work them, developing the skills and the tools to work them, figuring out how to combine them and the tools required for that. Then there's the development of using those particular materials and tools to make that particular thing. Then there's the transportation. Do all the tools and materials and knowledge of manufacture exist within ten miles of you? Then special transportation is required. That's another combination of developments. How many people with specialized skills were required to make that object exist?

Nearly everything around you is the result of millions of steps of development, all interconnected in a complex web of knowledge, tools, politics, economy, and geography.

Now add one more problem: survival is hard.

I'm willing to bet the possibilities of starving to death or dying of exposure haven’t seriously crossed your mind today. Yet those two concerns are constant for most of the creatures that inhabit this world. When your thoughts and energy are focused on not dying today, you don't sit around pondering fiberoptics or photovoltaics.

The single greatest achievement of human technological development was the efficient production and storage of surplus food. For most of human history, food production dominated daily life. And the labor required barely kept up with the volume produced. More labor meant more mouths to feed and thus more food required.

But then, one day, technology — that network of complex applied ideas — finally allowed people to consistently and reliably make and store more food than they needed. This critical tipping point provided a security of survival that was previously unheard of, and people suddenly had the resource that modern technology development needed - free time.

Free from the burden of working to survive, people applied their efforts to more luxurious things, pushing the limits of knowledge, science, and technology with curiosity rather than desperation. And since technology continuously builds on itself, every new discovery enhanced the capabilities of what came before. The pursuit of luxury, exploration, and imagination were increasingly possible. And since the population could now grow much larger, thanks to the technological ability to reliably feed it, more brains existed to produce ideas and more hands were available to provide labor.

One by one, other tipping points were reached.

The modern technology you enjoy is the result of thousands of generations making small improvements until the very nature of existing as a human in this world was changed, again and again.

Population and non-survival work time.

For most of history most people had to spend most of their time on survival tasks, most obviously getting food. There was very little surplus time and energy to work on technology. Also, the population was a minor fraction of what it was the last few centuries.

With improvements to food production and other survival tasks, the percentage of time spent on mandatory work was reduced. People could spend entire careers on improving technology. Increases in population meant there was more people to do that kind of work. The amount of technological improvement person-hours in the last year may well be more then the person-hours of multiple centuries of the Stone Age.

Well for starters if you have a computer with internet connection, can communicate in real time with people anywhere in the world or fly anywhere you want within say 24 hours you think Hunter Gatherers who keep no livestock and have no gardens are “backward”.

Reality though is that humans and their pre-human ancestors spent hundreds of thousands of years as Hunter Gatherers before they began practising Agriculture by domesticating Livestock and planting crops from about 10 thousand years ago or so.( Homo Sapiens dates from around 200 K years ago).The next thing after agriculture was to have “civilisations “(eg Roman, Greek, Egyptian and so on ) starting about 4000 years ago or so.What about modern cities (running water , electricity ) and the kind of technology we are used to? Well THAT is barely 300 years old . In fact to this day there are a few hunter gatherer communities left although they will ALL soon be extinct or “absorbed into civilisation”.

The point is that there is nothing fundamentally “wrong” with living as a Nomadic hunter gatherer community IF there is (1) a low population density and hence (2) lots of land that does not have “owners” who will fight over “their land”.

Is it any wonder that humans and their pre human ancestors spent hundreds of thousands of years as Nomadic hunter gatherers, Mostly less than 5000 years as communities occupying specific places probably under the rule of chiefs and kings ,practising agriculture , mostlly subsistence farming. The farming lifestyle led to an increase in population and a demand for more land

Modern Technology was only possible after the printing press was invented in 1436 allowing for widespread literacy which in turn was a catalyst for more scientific developments culminating in what we have today.

Three things more than any others transformed the modern world. Firstly, the moveable type printing press made the world’s knowledge widely available. It is hard to over emphasize how important this single invention was. It sped up knowledge transfer by 100x.

Next most important IMO were the discoveries of a Isaac Newton. Suddenly the world was understandable for the very first time. This started a cascade of new thinking that has not stopped.

Thirdly, the steam engine. For the first time in human history we did not need to work by the sweat of our brow. This improved productivity massively.

Put together, these three events gave the world better thinking, better work and spread the ideas quickly. That is what why the human condition has improved so much in the past few hundred years.

Why did it take humans so long to invent bicycles?

There was no need for one. Until 1815 when Mount Tambora erupted and sent a massive cloud of ash into the sky, killing so much vegetation that grazing animals starved to death, the bicycle was just an impractical amusement for the rich. Early “roads” were too rough for most wheeled vehicles, and certainly not ones that you had to steer and balance. Moreover, the bicycle was pretty useless, since it had little capacity to carry things. People could better walk aside a ox-drawn cart full of their supplies, rather than try to negotiate their way on an inherently unstable contraption that barely held themselves.

But, back then, horses were also a luxury item, and most of them were captured in the wild and tamed. When many of them died of starvation, the rich people looked for a replacement. Their eyes turned to earlier wheeled conveyances, and certain improvements were made - like adding a seat and a way to steer them.

They were still very unstable and pretty impractical. They were nicknamed “dandy-horses” and banned from many countries because the streets were too rough and people were getting hit on the sidewalks. Attempts to improve stability lead to the “high wheeler”, which was almost impossible to ride without an assistant to get started, and dangerous once in motion. They were strictly “sporting” machines. You will note that in most pictures, the riders are all very well attired, even when used for racing.

It wasn’t until the 1890’s that additional improvements made them usable by common folk. The “safety bicycle” added such novel features as equally-sized wheels, a padded seat, and brakes.

You may recall that the Wright Brothers operated a bicycle shop. By 1900, bicycles were common enough to support “repair shops”. The Wrights’ contribution to the bicycle was adding a lubricant reservoir to the wheel hubs which made the wheels easier to spin - and faster.

“Why did it take us this long to become as advanced as we are, and why couldn't we have developed electricity 1000 years ago?”

Understanding builds on understanding. When you know little it takes a long time to learn a little more. When you know a bit more the various things you know interlink to create greater understanding so the speed at which understanding grows keeps increasing.

The same goes for technology. When you have little technology you cannot immediately make highly technological items. With simple tools you can make slightly more complex tools and, with those, slightly more complex tools that those.

Inventions do not arise out of thin air or out of the mind of just one person. They are the outcome of thousands of generations of thinking and learning. Great ideas keep on rolling around every generation or so but only become successful inventions when the circumstances allow it to happen.

In the Sixteenth Century Leonardo da Vinci drew a rough picture of a screw-cutting lathe but the idea went nowhere because the technologies of his time were not sufficiently-developed to make accurate lead screws and guides. It was 150 years later that Henry Maudslay was able to build that lathe that was then the ancestor of metalworking lathes in use throughout modern industry.

With accurate lathes available Maudslay was able to make screws accurately-enough for them to be standardised and interchangeable. That allowed Maudslay’s student, Joseph Whitworth, to publish the first thread standard for industry.

Accurate machine tools then allowed Maudslay, Whitworth and two of Maudslay’s other students, James Naismyth (inventor of the steam hammer) and Marc Isambard Brunel to pioneer mass production, making pulley blocks for the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars.

Marc Brunel’s son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was then able to build on the work of his father and associates to make great locomotives, bridges, tunnels and iron ships.

Each step in understanding and technology built on what went before. It all takes time. It is easy to think that, stranded on a desert island, you could rebuild modern technology. But faced with the sea, the sand and the scrappy littoral vegetation you might find it difficult even to make a fire and even prising limpets off the rocks to feed yourself might tax your ingenuity. You might get as far as a stone axe but not a smartphone.

Several reasons:

1. We haven't been capable of sufficient technological sophistication for most of that time. Modern humans weren't around for about 80% of your time frame.
2. There's a lot more of us. For most of those years, global population was probably less than a few million, and it stayed at those low levels for thousands of years. It wasn't until the invention of agriculture that it could start going up, and even then it's probably only in the last 200 years that we hit a billion people. Now we're several times that. For the past 150 years, there have been thousands of times the global population of earlier years. More people means more brainpower to throw at technology.
3. We're rich. Instead of nearly everyone having to spend all of their time farming or hunting and gathering, we can afford to have large numbers of people making figuring out technological problems their full-time jobs. People living on the edge of subsistence, like most of our ancestors did, couldn't afford that. They had to be relatively conservative, because for them, a failed experiment meant very bad things. For us, it's just a poorer showing on the quarterly report.
4. If we see so far, to paraphrase Eliot, it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Technology begets technology. Our ancestors made the difficult leap to farming thousands of years ago. Small, cumulative improvements increased yields, getting us to a state where a handful of farmers can feed huge populations of non-farmers, who can spend their time figuring out more ways to make more new things. Our ancestors invented writing. Again, generations of little improvements increased the reach and power of the written word, allowing us to store and communicate information in a dizzying variety of ways. All of those small, hard-won victories build on one another, accelerating the rate of technological change and ramping up to the explosion of new ideas and invention we've seen over the past few centuries.

Let’s focus on a specific example. Mark Twain wrote a fantasy about a 19th Century Connecticut Yankee who travels back in time to King Arthur’s era (6th Century). In Chapter 38, knights riding bicycles save the Yankee from being executed.

It’s natural to ask why people hadn’t invented bicycles by the year 500 AD. Opinions on the first bicycle vary. This one, invented in 1873, might have been the first.

What held up the invention?

• Technological advancement: It took a long time for people to develop the ability to work with steel and other materials needed for bicycles.
  [2]
• Design iteration: It takes many cycles of trial and error to invent anything.
• Poor quality of roads: Roads weren’t good enough for bicycles until the 19th century.
• Competition from horses: Horses were good enough for many centuries.
• General economic growth: You can’t have bicycles until people are wealthy enough to buy one.
• Cultural and intellectual factors: The idea of a two-wheeled geared vehicle isn’t obvious at all.

That last factor might have been the most important one. The earliest designes for a wheeled self-propelled vehicle imagined carts, some of which were hand powered.

The earliest ancestor of the two wheeled bicycle was the Draisine, invented roughly 1818.

It took almost a half century for people to realize that you could put pedals on a wheel to make it go. Notice that this early design doesn’t have gears. This illustration is from 1868.

Once people realized that a vehicle of that sort could travel quickly, they started experimenting with different designs, before settling on two wheels of similar size with gears on the rear. This drawing from an 1887 German encyclopedia.

Conclusion

All of the factors I listed are involved but the non-obviousness of bicycles might have been most important. It didn’t occur to anyone that a two-wheeled-geared vehicle would work better than a horse until the late 19th Century. But once that idea got into people’s heads, they began experimenting and developed efficient bicycles in a few years.

What about evolutionary biology?

My interest in this topic comes from thinking about biological evolution. Both technology and organisms evolve gradually through a trial-and-error process. Major jumps are uncommon. Some organisms and human inventions become extinct when something better comes along.

Israel Ramirez

· 1y

Can you think of any examples of things that have evolved over time, but cannot be proven to have been caused by natural selection/evolution?

Human technologies evolve in ways that resemble biological evolution but don’t involve natural selection. I want to highlight that fact because it helps us understand the evolution of living things. * The very earliest invention of a device typically performs poorly, much as the very first living things barely survived. * Like organisms, technologies evolve gradually through a series of small steps, each one making a modest improvement. * People improve technologies through a trial-and-error process analogous to mutation and natural selection. * Some technologies are abandoned just as some species become extinct. Other technologies evolve very little over time (the garden hoe is an example) much like living fossils. * Innovations typically make small improvements in existing technologies; just as biological mutations typically improve fitness only slightly. This chart illustrates the evolution of computers, illustrating several of these points. The height of the chart shows a measure of performance, speed of calculation. You can see that performance improves gradually with no sudden jumps anywhere on this chart even though the underlying machinery changed substantially (starting with electromechanical devices which evolved into integrated circuits). Software improved gradually as well over this era. The first computers were programmed by switching wires. Later, people created ways to store instructions electronically. Eventually, computer languages were invented. These languages evolved into ones that were more powerful or friendly to programmers. Just as primitive living things, like bacteria, continue to live today, modern versions of older languages remain important. Microsoft still promotes a version of the 1964 Basic language (VBA) and databases still use versions of the 1974 SQL. (I used these professionally until I retired.) Here’s some other examples of gradual technological evolution: You might have been told that the light bulb was invented by Thomas Edison or (if you are British) Sir Joseph Wilson Swan. But the reality is that light bulbs existed years before them, and their inventions needed a lot of improvement. This chart lists early developments through 1910. A hundred years later, electric lighting continues to evolve. The same story applies to automobiles, supposedly invented by Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler, and Wilhelm Maybach. Instead, it’s a story of gradual improvements, leading to increased complexity, comfort, and performance. This chart shows gradual improvements in solar electricity, plotted as cost per unit energy. Again, improvements are gradual. The chart’s title mentions Wright’s Law which was originally applied to the gradual reduction in the cost of airplane manufacture. This chart depicts the same concept for electric vehicles. Those examples are from modern times, but early technologies also evolved gradually. This chart illustrates how older steel-making technologies were gradually replaced by newer ones. The replacement was gradual because the earliest versions of each technology had flaws that needed to be corrected. Multiple ways for making steel existed simultaneously, just as mammals exist alongside amphibians and reptiles. This chart summarizes the evolutionary history of mousetraps. I encourage you to open the link for the original paper which shows the specific designs mentioned in this diagram. Even the very earliest technologies, stone tools, went through an evolutionary process of gradual improvement. There’s another analogy to biology, the evolution of diversity. The earliest living things were simple microbes. Today the Earth is filled with a great variety of living things, ranging from tiny bacteria, to dandelions, giant sequoia trees, hummingbirds, whales, and much more. The earliest electronic computers were mainframes; big boxes that did mathematical calculations and not much else. Nowadays, computers exist as desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, and other devices. My automobile has one, as do my TV and hearing aids. That diversification is still going on.

My answer is based on this excellent article. I didn’t have any original ideas.

Footnotes

I'm so surprised that there are so many interesting answers that hardly touch on what seems to me the obvious answer.

The Enlightenment, starting about 300 years ago, was a tectonic shift in human development. Plenty of brilliant people made connections and developed coherent understandings of how things in the world worked before then. But the idea that you ought to go the other way - try to disprove things rather than prove them. Tie hypotheses to theories and come up with experiments to prove them wrong. Eliminate variables. Publish results and methods so that others can try.

This method didn't do much for religion or philosophy or ethics, but it did a hell of a lot for science. As it gained steam, it provided a reliable, scientific basis for advances in technology. People built bridges before the Enlightenment, but if they tried to build one differently than the ones that were already up, there was a good chance it would fall down. But with the physics to understand materials and the math to manipulate the physics, you could design a different kind of bridge that you knew in advance would not fall down.

There were ingenious technologies and great technical achievements before the Enlightenment, but until this current tick of human history, there was never a large and growing and accessible body of theory to enable new technology.

Time for a scientific rewind:-

10 years ago, in 2007, a scientist discovered enzymes that could convert any blood type to O, as almost everybody can tolerate O blood types. Produced by bacteria, these molecular machines could theoretically change any blood type to O. ZymeQuest, a startup company from Massachusetts, is now developing a device that hospitals can use during blood shortages.

9 years ago, in 2008, liquid ethane was identified in a lake on Titan. Cassini was a spacecraft that was sent to Saturn, which was a big deal on its own. But discovering liquid ethane was major! This makes Titan the only body in our solar system beyond Earth known to have liquid on its surface. Scientists thought that Titan would have global oceans of methane and ethane, but they found that instead of these oceans, there are thousands of large lake-like structures on Titan.

8 years ago, in 2009, element 114 was confirmed. A beam of calcium atoms slammed into a plutonium target, producing a pair of element 114 atoms for the second time in human history. Years earlier, the Russians had made the claims about producing element 114, and it turns out they were right. But to their disappointment, it only lasted one tenth of a second.

7 years ago, in 2010, self replicating life with synthetic DNA was created. Treating genetic code as software, bioengineers at the J. Craig Venter Institute created the first self-replicating, synthetically designed life in May. The organization's researchers created a genome entirely on computers, even adding special watermarks such as the DNA-ified names of 46 researchers who worked on the project and a web URL. They then printed the DNA in chunks, allowed the pieces to self-assemble in a yeast cell and witnessed an organism "boot up" after a few hours.

6 years ago, in 2011, alarming firsts happened in the Arctic. The ozone hole over the Antarctic is nothing new, although scientists expect it to disappear later this century. But this year, an Arctic counterpart emerged for the first time, thanks to unusually cold temperatures in the stratosphere plus lingering ozone-destroying pollutants. Arctic sea ice also melted — either to its lowest summer extent on record at that time.

5 years ago, in 2012, NASA’s Curiosity Rover landed on Mars. In 2012, Mars received a new visitor! NASA’s biggest, most sophisticated explorer of its kind landed safely onto the surface of Mars. This was a huge accomplishment to all the engineers at NASA.

4 years ago, in 2013, scientists succeeded In growing a variety of mini-organs. Mini organs grown in the lab, called "organoids," provide scientists with new ways to test drugs and examine diseases in a human context. In that year, Australian scientists grew mini human brains, each the size of an apple seed. Yuuckkkk!

3 years ago, in 2014, researchers discovered cells that might cure diabetes. They’ve figured out a way to turn human stem cells into pancreatic B cells- the same cells that are destroyed by the body’s own immune system in type 1 diabetes patients. Wow!

2 years ago, in 2015, researchers discovered a new phase of carbon. Researchers at the University of North Carolina discovered a new phase of carbon, called "Q-carbon" that could have important implications for developing new types of electronic display technologies. A "phase" is a distinct form of the same material, with diamond and graphite two carbon phases joined by Q-carbon. The new phase gives researchers the ability to create a diamond at room temperature and ambient atmospheric pressure.

A year ago, in 2016, a mysterious and elusive “Planet Nine” was supposedly discovered in the solar system. We gained more evidence that another planet lurks beyond Pluto, dubbed “Planet Nine.” Through mathematical modeling and computer simulations, researchers predict the planet has nearly 10 times the mass of Earth and would take 10,000 to 20,000 years to make one full orbit around the Sun.

We still haven't reached the end of this year, but even then we have made tons of progress. India launched a record of 104 satellites in a single mission! India has created history by successfully launching 104 satellites on a single mission, overtaking the previous record of 37 satellites launched by Russia in 2014. Proud of us Indians!

We have made so much progress in just a decade. Image how much progress we have the potential to make in the next decade or so!

Hopes are still up for humanity

Sources:

From Stem Cells to Dinosaur Mummies

Cassini Top 10 Science Highlights – 2008

Top Scientific Breakthroughs of 2009

Top Scientific Breakthroughs of 2010

11 Biggest Science Stories of 2011 | Discoveries & Events

The Top 10 Science Stories of 2012

The Biggest Scientific Breakthroughs Of 2013

Breakthrough of the Year: The top 10 scientific achievements of 2014

The 7 greatest scientific breakthroughs of 2016

India launches record 104 satellites in single mission - BBC News

If it was created earlier, then by definition it wouldn’t “modern”, now would it?

The advancement of technology is an exponential process, and the pattern we observe with the pace and magnitude of change is exactly what we would expect of any exponential process.

And anything that depends on building upon pre-existing components to make new ones, where there is sufficient complexity that multiple components are involved, and where the individual components are created by something that ALSO reproduces itself exponentially, will always end up being an exponential process, at least until it hits a limit imposed on it by the laws of physics.

People had sheetmetal and wire made of copper, other metals, glass and ceramic containers, and cotton, silk and varnish for insulating wire. Glass and ceramic insulators would have been easy to make. Armorers could make small moving parts. Blacksmiths could make iron cores and laminations. Alchemists almost a thousand years ago had acid, gold, silver, lead, mercury and copper sulfate

If an alchemist had put copper and zinc or other dissimilar metals into acid, in some effort to transmute base metal to gold, he might have noticed bubbles whenever the plates made contact outside the acid. He might have noticed zinc eaten up, or metal transferred from one electrode to another. That might have suggested experimenting with all sorts of metals. Plating of gold onto another metal would have been an instant commercial success. I don't believe the ancients had batteries, as is claimed based on fragments of old broken vases in Baghdad, but with all the parts and materials in use by alchemists nearly a thousand years ago, it could have happened.

If batteries were in regular use, other phenomena like electromagnetism might have been noticed within a few years as happened in our timeline. They already had the skills and materials to build electromagnets, telegraphs, motors and generators and lots of 19th century electrical equipment.

As soon as someone tried putting a number of cells in series, like Volta's 19th century "crown of cups," they would have discovered electric shock, and would have found it interesting both for medical quackery and for a new form of torture. If they connected a number of large cells in series, they could have demonstrated an electric arc, which would have seemed miraculous. It would have been an interesting alternate history if development of batteries and current electricity had preceded research in static electricity as happened in our timeline.

Edited to add: purified zinc, from calamine, was made by the ton in India hundreds of years before it was common in Europe. It would have had to travel the Silk Road a thousand years ago. It became plentiful in the 1700s in Europe. Batteries could have been made with other metals plus copper, but zinc provided more voltage with fewer cells. Copper and acid were readily available 1000 years ago in Europe.

Modern medicine is not merely a body of knowledge, but a highly complex way of thinking about the world, which is the cumulative result of millennia of human thought.

It seems like common sense to us that a bout of fever and vomiting, for example, might have a direct causal link with something that we've eaten, but it took many centuries for human beings to develop the kinds of thought patterns that make a connection like this possible. We not only had to figure out that the way in which food is prepared and ingested can affect our health, but also had to develop some basic knowledge of how our bodies digest what we eat. On top of this, we also had to find way of communicating this knowledge among each other. There is an entire linguistic system behind medical science which we did not just pull out of thin air.

There is a general assumption that, because influential scientific discoveries have such a profound effect on our lives, there is a kind of teleology to science where all discoveries fit neatly onto a predictable historical timeline that we call 'Progress.' Many of the most influential discoveries and inventions simply don't happen in this way. Rather, they are the result of centuries of experimentation and serendipity, and are often highly unexpected to most people at the time. In 1872, for example, Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, made the remark that, "Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction". Of course, it wasn't that Pachet was somehow anti-science, or an 'opposer of Progress,' but rather that the idea that there were tiny organisms, invisible to the naked eye, that caused diseases in humans, seemed so absurd and far-fetched to the Victorian mind as to seem like fiction. In other words, until it was discovered, no one could have even conceived of germ theory as a plausible explanation. Now, of course, because we've lived with the results of Pasteur's work for over a century, it seems like perfect common sense that there are such things as germs that cause diseases. Many of us, therefore, hold the assumption that this discovery was somehow predictable, and part of a neat historical trend.

Basically, the history of medicine, and history in general, is not some kind of predictable trajectory towards latent ideals, but a messy, haphazard, mind-blowing and highly unpredictable affair, which only really looks to have some kind of pattern to it once its written in books. In fact, I think it's actually thoroughly remarkable and highly unlikely that medical science has reached the level of sophistication we see today.

Where have YOU been?

10 Greatest Scientific Discoveries and Inventions of 21st Century - ISB Glasgow

• gravity waves detected / verified.
• liquid water pockets on Mars.
• robotic body parts.
• actual tissue from a T. Rex, not just fossilized bone.
• getting closer to an HIV cure.
• (who gives a shit about Dark Matter).
• cancer gene sequencing.
• reproduction of human organs.
• artificial hydrocarbons produced form CO2 and water.
• face transplants

And one I’d add:

Microbiota Transfer Therapy alters gut ecosystem and improves gastrointestinal and autism symptoms: an open-label study … literally improving a shitty future by transplanting poop.

The ability of human beings to make scientific progress has demonstrably relied on the contributions of untold millions of people since humans have emerged as a separate type of animal reliant on the capabiity to accumulate knowledge, remember it, and communicate it to other humans long before any written language evolved. Humans are not the fastest animals in nature or the strongest. They have had to rely on knowledge to feed themselves; observe the behavior of edible plants; how to trap faster and stronger animals; and how to teach these knowledge (science) based skills to others including their own children. We know that food production involved hundreds/thousands of years of observation and experimentation. That making and using fire was incredibly life changing for the early humans leading to longer lives and useful pottery and metal. The ancient Egyptions knew the earth was round and that it was approximately 25,000 miles around because they had learned to compute and infer results they could not prove directly. Scientific progress has always relied on collaboration of many; we sometimes erroneously credit a single person with the advance of knowledge that has been built on thousands of years of observation, experimentation, and careful written description. What has been the more important scientific development: the development of agriculture or the ability to predict the seasons? Without understanding the season cycle, would there be a reliable capability to grow food and store surplus production for use during the winter? Without observing the season cycle’s apparent repetition, would there be a compelling need for a calendar? These incredibly important advances in human knowledge were essential to the abiity of human beings to accumulate and use all the scientific advances that have followed. In some special way, all of us have been and continue to be contributors to knowledge.