One reason we shouldn’t be too surprised that most scientific progress is recent, years-wise is that a very simple model of scientific progress might be that you need X people (or X smart, literate people etc) thinking for Y moments to have a Z% chance of coming up with a scientific insight.
And if you measure time anthropically rather than geologically, estimates suggest that >~20% of people who have ever lived were born after 1650. The fraction is likely higher if you measure by human-moments rather than number of humans (since dead infants don’t make many scientific insights), and higher still if you only count literate or otherwise knowledgeable humans with ample free time.
One reason we shouldn’t be too surprised that most scientific progress is recent, years-wise is that a very simple model of scientific progress might be that you need X people (or X smart, literate people etc) thinking for Y moments to have a Z% chance of coming up with a scientific insight.
And if you measure time anthropically rather than geologically, estimates suggest that >~20% of people who have ever lived were born after 1650. The fraction is likely higher if you measure by human-moments rather than number of humans (since dead infants don’t make many scientific insights), and higher still if you only count literate or otherwise knowledgeable humans with ample free time.
Yeah I crunched the numbers on this and the majority of human life years came after about 1300 (obviously very roughly)