If that's true (and I hope it is, because it means things go very well for humanity), we're still one of the first generations to see major change _within_ our short lives. For millions of years, technology and tools stayed roughly the same from generation to generation. I'm 25, and the technological progress since I was born is mind-blowing.

> we're still one of the first generations to see major change _within_ our short lives.

One could argue that people were seeing major technological/scientific/philosophical/cultural changes within their lives at least as far back as the Enlightenment (and I'd argue much further back than that), and what has actually changed is just that the number of people affected by those changes has grown (perhaps exponentially). Likewise in the future the rate of change we're so impressed by now may look laughable, and that's even ignoring the possibility of significant lifespan extension in the future!

Lets accept that the rate of change of technology during the enlightenment was as rapid as the last 100 years (it wasn't but lets accept it) - that was two centuries ago, these prints are 200K years ago, that's 3 orders of magnitude older.

There have been points in our history where technology/knowledge has advanced quicker than the baseline but the last two-three centuries (and particularly the last one) have been exceptional.

Whether that rate of change is sustainable for another century I don't know, I'd like to hope so since it'd mean humans are doing pretty well.

But if you took someone born in 1880 (a century before me) and they lived 90 years they'd have seen the invention of flight, the invention of the motorcar, the electrification of the world, the invention of wireless, the invention of TV, the invention of the internet, the invention of antibiotics, the invention of synthetic materials, the invention of the telephone, the first heart transplant, the invention of the nuclear bomb, the discovery of the structure of DNA and literally thousands of other technologies and discoveries in one human lifespan).

At no other point in human history has a single life span seen so much*.

Only if we populate the galaxy. Which isn't that hard if we try. But even then we lived at the origin of the galactic species. Pretty special.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

The Universe is a lot bigger than our galaxy though. Why is it more special to live near the beginning of humans populating the galaxy than, say, living near the beginning of humans populating that new subdivision they're developing out at the edge of my town?

Because the galaxy is a lot bigger than that subdivision, too.

Populating the galaxy isn't that hard? Care to explain?

If you had todays technology and 100 million years to do it it wouldn't be particularly hard. The hard part is getting things done within our lifetime, but that doesn't matter for something like populating a galaxy. Slow ships are just fine, humans can reproduce on the ship. High failure rate and those ships being huge and expensive isn't a problem if you have thousands of years of production to make them.

Probably a lot less time than that if we decided that is what we wanted to do.

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/scie...

The past 200 or so years have included the invention of the lightbulb and the first trips to our moon and other planets. Given how long we’ve been on the planet, I think this is indeed a special time and future historians will always look upon this era that way. They’ll probably refer to it as when humanity started walking, or spoke its first word.

Def, as far as we know, we're just a little slope upward.

And I'm not sure what the Y axis is even measuring.