How often do you hear the phrase: “Time has begun to fly faster. “Before, I had time to do everything, but now once, twice, and the day is over.” Surprisingly, scientists have found evidence that the human development cycle has indeed accelerated. And the explanation for all this is the law of acceleration of history. And if we consider not humanity as a whole, but each individual individual, then these rules will be applicable for a short human life.
Definition
Many students fall into the exam when they hear the question: "What is the law of accelerating history?" According to social science, this topic is held in the eighth grade, they are already engaged in political science at institutes. We will help the students and figure out how to give the right answer.
Social society, like a factory, is constantly increasing the pace of production. Since the time of primitive people, we have been striving somewhere, discovering and finding something. Studying the history of our world, scientists came to a very funny conclusion. It turns out that each new stage of human development is much faster than the previous one. This is the law of accelerating history.
Recall that, in terms of time, capitalism was shorter than feudalism, which existed for almost 3 centuries; in turn, it was shorter than slavery. This is also confirmed by archaeologists who studied the structure of earth layers. They indicate that the longest stage of mankind was the primitive system, which conquered people for two million years.
We derive a concrete concept of what the law of acceleration of history is. The definition is as follows: each subsequent stage of humanity is much shorter than the previous one.
Example No. 1
Consider specific cases of our lives. Everywhere we can meet the law of acceleration of history. Examples are hidden in the modern world. Behind the scenes it is called the era of information. Here's a trend: how much information was available to a person 20 years ago? Most of us remember this period very well. There was one channel on TV, newspapers were brought twice a week, and the hottest gossip of the city was discussed in lines to the store.
What has changed today? For some 20 years, which in translation into human history is a small grain of sand, the flow of information has doubled 120 times. Not just twice as much, but 120 times as much! And that's not all. This trend will continue even further, and every 20 months the amount of information that falls upon us will be proportionally doubled.
Thus, we can assume that it will be with us in 100 years. The amount of all kinds of data entering the human brain will increase 1200 times! He will either explode, or turn into a cyborg.
Example No. 2
With each era, new inventions, tools and weapons. So, the tool existing in the primitive system called a chopper (made from specially processed pebbles) has served for millions of years. And throughout life we can improve the shovel several times.
The new world is only one thousandth (0.001) of world history. This is a tiny stage during which an incredible amount of social, cultural, economic and political change has occurred.
Evidence
Evidence of the real existence of this concept is how the law of acceleration of history manifests itself. Our grandparents born at the beginning of the 20th century experienced a huge number of events. The First World War, the collapse of huge empires, the rebuilding of society, the Second World War, an industrial breakthrough, a technological breakthrough, the collapse of society again. Now the world is on the brink, a new large-scale war may be unleashed. Over the past hundred years, three stages of the development of civilization have passed on the planet: agricultural, industrial, and post-industrial. And these are 4 generations.
What happened before? Cro-Magnons existed for 1600 generations, after them another 1200 lived without leaving the caves. The era of writing has survived 240 generations, and 22 books have already been printed.
The time spent between the first invention of an object and its real use in life is also being shortened. So, paper was invented in China, but they began to write on it only 1000 years later. The first steam engine was launched in 1868. But he was too small, and for 80 years people could not figure out what to do with him before he became the basis for the movement of cars. The phone was developed for 50 years, the plane - 20, the transistor - 3, and the fax began to be used 3 months after the first project. Isn't that the law of speeding up history?
Refutation No. 1
With the development of society in the past, everything is clear. There is more than enough evidence about how the law of acceleration of history manifests itself. But what awaits humanity in the future? What should happen in order for us to move to a more advanced level? Or is the apocalypse still true? It is difficult to answer these and other questions, and in connection with this a lot of controversial issues arise.
We are talking about the development of mankind, using the data that science has today. But all this applies only to a small part of the world - Western countries, including North America, and partially central Europe, and some Asian countries. Most states on the world map are at the level of primitive concepts about the achievements of scientific progress. They push technology in, but they don’t show how to manage it. They are given money to develop vaccines against deadly diseases, and 80% of the world's population cannot even read.
Many scientists insist that the law of accelerating history is just a curtain, with the help of which it is easier to express and explain the unknown. The rate of change is a constant value when compared not with short decades, but with centuries of slow evolution.
Refutation No. 2
The law of accelerating history is a great topic for philosophers. Reflecting on the past, one can predict or assume what humanity will come to in the future. Academician Sergei Kapitsa in one of his last articles raises the question of why it seems to us that time begins to move faster.
In his opinion, it all depends on the number of people on the planet. So, in the Paleolithic period, about 100 thousand people lived on Earth. The era lasted a million years. How many of these thousands were geniuses? 2, 3 or 10, what could come up with something completely new? And how many people live now? Seven billion! One hundred thousand is just the population of a small town. What percentage of gifted people account for our century? Therefore, it seems to us that the development process is proceeding faster.
Waiting for a new
History stubbornly insists that something is about to change. Since the time to move to a new level has been reduced, it means that it is logically necessary to assume that it will come very soon. It is interesting to know what will happen in 100 years? Will the planet change?
Sometime in the 70s of the last century, one scientist deduced the formula for the demographic increase in population on Earth. According to these data, we should have been 10 billion by 2010. But epidemics and pandemics take hundreds of lives in order to somehow level the fragile balance of nature. Perhaps we are already on the way to something new, to a new life and new problems. As you know, population growth is not as sharp as 10 years ago, it has stabilized, which means that a certain stage of the transition has already taken place.