[Sir Kenyth]

Originally posted by Talthyr Malkaviel: quote: Originally posted by Sir Kenyth: The problem with humans Magik is that our knowledge increases are exponential, not incremental. Back then science was a lot simpler and very few people found a necessity for it. Our potential was well ahead of our progress. Just living day to day in your 40-50 year life span was enough trouble for most, and schooling was seen as a waste of valuable work time. Now we live longer and have more time to learn, but the amount we have to learn is so much greater! What your average Joe with a moderate intellectual hunger knows today would have ranked as an elite education back in the day. When do we reach a saturation point? When does our progress catch up with our potential? When will we simply not live long enough or have the capacity to effectively absorb the prerequisite knowledge and skills to even make any advances? I wonder how we will contend with this. So far, specialization by science/engineering professionals has helped. Even today you can't have too broad of a knowledge and remain cutting edge.

Yes, but then you could go back to a similar argument as to what Magik was saying, to us now we see that our life span has increased greatly, and our knowledge, and geting near our potential bacjk then.
Imagine 600 years from now, people are sitting around discussing how we managed to get around with such a short life span, and such crude technology, and the people back then may have thought their technology as advanced as it will get.
We may still have an abundance of potential, and be hugely far away from reaching it, but I suppose only time will tell. [/QUOTE]I think we'll reach our maximum age pretty soon. Most of the problems were health related issues and not age related back then. Heart disease, obesity, and cancer are the only major health issues left in countries like the US. The real deciding factor of age is "maximum productive age" as far as discovering advances go. That hasn't increased much as of late. Most people still retire by age sixty. Most people start to get dulled senses and lose thier mental edge by age seventy. So the extra few years we glean with current medical advances really don't add much to productivity. Another problem humans have is we also don't breed effectively anymore, evolutionarily speaking that is. Physically and mentally superior people tend to have LESS children on average. This is presumably because they have less time due to thier pursuits and they also tend to want to raise fewer children so they can maximize thier success (child and parents). I'll be curious to see what comes of these issues.