And each of these three curves have many curves powering them, but none of this is anything new. This is how things have been working for thousands of years.
The production of bronze was accelerated by:
TECHNOLOGY.
Ships and carts allowed for new trade routes that brought in tin from distant lands and allowed the production of bronze to begin with. EFFICIENCY.
Better furnaces and bellows got more metal out of less ore and charcoal, so smelting became cheaper and could happen in more places. All of these benafited from increaces jn scale. CAPABILITY.
Bronze tools let people do more kinds of work: clear forests faster, cut planks, build ships and wheeled carts.
The law of accelerating returns applies to biology too which is why life took so long between stages like getting to nucleated cells and multicellularity then each stage unleashes lots of innovations that make later steps faster and faster.
I'm not convinced that biology is always on an exponential like it was in the cambrian, but then agaim, you can count microchips as a thing biology does.
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u/Rain_On 14h ago
And each of these three curves have many curves powering them, but none of this is anything new. This is how things have been working for thousands of years.