[ExI] [tt] instilling ambition

Mike Dougherty msd001 at gmail.com
Mon Jan 21 03:04:23 UTC 2013


On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 6:57 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> same thing, using the same technologies for 100k years?  The modern Ohlones
> had not one thing that they couldn't have had 100 millennia ago: they had no
> metallurgy, they made homes and boats out of reeds, they made spear points
> out of flint and used those to fish in San Francisco Bay.
>
> Why didn't they ever want something else?  Why did the Europeans break out
> and invent stuff, but the native Americans generally did not?  How does a
> society reach equilibrium, or technological stagnation?  Can we even imagine
> reaching some kind of equilibrium now, short of a singularity?

Perhaps they didn't reach "peak reeds" or flint scarcity?

Was European conquest of the rest of the world driven by resource
acquisition to further fuel resource acquisition? Arguably the only
reason technology exists is to do more with less... because at some
point the energy equation says you must or you'll die.



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