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Mt Everest had its first documented climb in 1953. The first person went to space in 1961. It's kind of crazy to think about how "new" mankind's spread over the world is. My father was already a teenager the first time someone climbed Everest, and in his twenties by the time someone went to space. If we start the "modern era" as roughly coinciding with the telecommunications age (ie the dawn of the cross-continental telegraph in the1860s), it's less than two consecutive human lifetimes old. Everything is new.

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This reminds me of Terence McKenna’s last video interview that I watched for the first time in entirety last night. His “novelty theory” basically says that things will become exponentially more complex until the rate of change is so high that we’ll have to talk about how weird it is. It does feel like we are reaching the pinnacle of things somehow.
First deep ocean dive to Mariana Trench in 1960, Apollo 11 was in 1969 … and yet, if there were not massive decentralized systems (Internet, Bitcoin, Nostr…) it would feel our generation really lost all energy to push forward the physical limits, isn’t it?
The extremely rapid pace of technological development since the late ‘40’s has been notable. Especially in certain forks of those achievements that were attacked or inexplicably “abandoned”. Like early fervor in steam engineering gave way to hydrocarbons…early advances in photovoltaics went underground for decades, a fervor in anti-gravity experiments literally went silent overnight, hydro-carbon extension experiments (col-fusion) became anathema the moment they went public, many verified individuals designing engines that run on water were openly attacked/killed. Scientific achievement in just our lifetimes is a dark-darpa whole of “what can be opted vs what can be co-opted”. image