If the earth is supposedly 4.6 billion years old and human's have been around for a lot more than 6 thousand years than how come we are not so advanced? ( we invented car's, planes, cellphones, computers and many more in just 100 years)

The growth curve is an exponential: the rate of growth is proportional to the amount of growth that has already happened. We probably only made the critical developmental advances that allowed us to work together as a team about 100,000 years ago - before that, everybody had to start again from scratch. So what we are seeing is an exponential curve starting from negligible 100,000 years ago and growing since.

Modern humans have been around for about a million years. Now, how do you think you would do if you were plonked down in the middle of an uninhabited continent, with a wife, no clothes, no tools, nothing, and had to survive?

Well, you would be a lot better off than the first humans, because you would know about fire and the wheel, two discoveries which took a long time to come about, and you would also know how to write, so you could pass on your knowledge. But think about what you would need to learn just to clothe yourself, and how long it would take.

Every invention, every discovery, has been handed down from one generation to the next. We learn the things we do as children because of the vast amount of knowledge that has been handed down to us, and everything we do builds on that knowledge.

I think we haven't done so badly.

1) What have *you* invented?


2) 35,000 years ago, humans invented a flute. Since then, they have probably spent most of their time playing on it.


3) "The technological singularity is the theoretical future point which takes place during a period of accelerating change sometime after the creation of a superintelligence.

In 1965, I. J. Good first wrote of an "intelligence explosion", suggesting that if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways unforeseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. The first such improvements might be small, but as the machine became more intelligent it would become better at becoming more intelligent, which could lead to an exponential and quite sudden growth in intelligence.

In 1993, Vernor Vinge called this event "the Singularity" as an analogy between the breakdown of modern physics near a gravitational singularity and the drastic change in society he argues would occur following an intelligence explosion. (Vinge 1993) In the 1990s, Vinge popularized the concept in lectures, essays, and science fiction. More recently, some prominent technologists such as Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, voiced concern over the potential dangers of Vinge's singularity.(Joy 2000)
Robin Hanson proposes that multiple "singularities" have occurred throughout history, dramatically affecting the growth rate of the economy. Like the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the past, the technological singularity would increase economic growth between 60 and 250 times. An innovation that allowed for the replacement of virtually all human labor could trigger this event.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil argues that the inevitability of a technological singularity is implied by a long-term pattern of accelerating change that generalizes Moore's Law to technologies predating the integrated circuit, and which he argues will continue to other technologies not yet invented."
Source and further information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Most of human history was based-upon the goal of simply surviving. We've only been advancing technologies for the past couple centuries. We'll have ruined this planet for human civilization within another couple of centuries. But don't worry, the Earth will be fine without us!

maybe we are really advanced! imagine how many generations it might take for a fish in the ocean to slowly develop legs and become a reptile who can walk on land who changes and grows a brain and thin skin and walks upright and who discovers all kids of simple things that you and i take for granted (e.g., go survival camping for one week and you won't take anything for granted again!). the thing that's really catapulted the development of mankind is *communication*. with the advances in communication today, i can't wait to see what the earth will be like in 2109. oh, well, maybe i won't see them. but, maybe i will if we keep changing so much!

We love the freedom from responsibility that ignorance provides.

One thing I came across has to do with the sociopolitical system. China should have been way more advanced than it was, they had made a lot of discoveries and were way ahead of Western civilization at one time, but quickly fell to the back. Why?

Because of their highly authoritarian structure that did not promote individual advancement or reward creativity and inventiveness.

you know, ive wondered that before...maybe we were reset somewhere in time.

Simplistically use the business approach.... how many manhours are used on the earth today verses the days of adam and eve... each day at the beginning it was 2 mandays/day ... now its 2 billion mandays/day thinking how to make things better .. conbine that with all the other reasons above on how we are doing it better its awesome....

Because until we understood electricity all those things were blocked from us. Once we gained the understanding of electricity we gained the ability to make all the inventions you mentioned.

According to Native American oral tradition and history, there has been at least four previous "Ages of Man". We know that men were able to make great stone monoliths, pyramids and obelisks without modern technology. Perhaps their science and technological advancement contributed to the cataclysms that brought about their extinction.

Plato says that his was about the 4th civilization to rise up out of the ashes. We HAVE been there before. And stories of 'speaking stones' (cell phones?) and flying baskets (balloons? Heavier than air craft?) indicate that they were fairly advanced. We had our big jump because we allowed individuals the political and economic freedom to learn and explore whatever they liked. That's really a rarity in history.

aybe we're not the first civilization on this world. Others amy have come and gone over billions of years. WEho knows? Who cares. We are ruining this one real quick.

When we're born, we're easily frightened, and we allow ourselves to be guided by our fears. We develop habits that reinforce those fears, as we are creatures of habit. All of those habbits are bad, and so inhibit our process of evolution.

Certain key or break-through discoveries and inventions enable other discoveries and innovations. For example; The many different types of electrical appliances we have today had to "wait" for electricity to be harnessed. Likewise, cars and planes had to wait for the internal combustion engine to be invented.

Because people are creatures of habit and we're more prone to doing what's comfortable. Studying and facing failure in pursuit of academic success isn't comfortable and that's what it takes to go even further with any given advancement.

A small correction.Man's origin traces back to 1 million years instead of around 6 thousand years.
Nice question and it holds a great topic to debate upon.
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When you say "How come we are not so advanced?",I'd say that yes, we were and we are.It depends on what we are channelizing our effots and energies and where we are investing.You can't expect us to have a research breakthrough in the field of nano-technology or medical science when we are dedicated to upgrade our weapons,wage wars and go on mass slaughter.After that, is there anything left in our hand to invest for the sake of advancement?
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The structures Egyptians built 3,500 years ago,is hard to imagine in today's date .Even with the most advanced Cranes and earth movers,we won't be able to move one stone out of that heap to that height as they did so,building an entire pyramid is just out of question.Many ancient architectural marvels from Europen,Middle east and Aisan countries give today's architects a tough time to figure out the design parameters.
Scientists like Galileo,Nicolaus Copernicus,Euclid,Pythagoras and Legends like Leonardo da vinci and Sir Isaac Newton were not born in last 100 years,but their works have helped us to make it to somewhere we are now.It takes right effot in right track.The truth is,technology was advancing in every age,but the works and the knowledge weren't carried to the next era.It was buried along with the fall of civilization.
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Modern day's enlightment started with the Industrial revolution way back in the 18th century and that paved way to so many inventions and discoveries,but after about a 250 years,it seems as if a saturation point has arrived.Now the question arrives why?It's because,we don't think the way those people thought.They were striving to get out of the darkness, and achieved feats one after another,but we think that we have achieved it all, as we have many material comforts at our easy reach.It may be because, people wait for others to take initiative and don't do it themselves.
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In a nutshell, most of the time we are off-track and if by any chance we get on the track,we just sit over there instead of moving forth.

Civilization after civilization have risen and fallen. We lived with the other species of man, giants, and even dragons. But we only have a small knowedge of our own history. We have forgotten. Over and over and over again. Soon, we will forget again and start anew.. from wood and stone.

I believe the Bible is true and it shows that the Earth is only about 6000 years old:

"There is an intensifying controversy in the church all over the world regarding the age of the earth. For the first 18 centuries of church history, the almost universal belief of Christians was that God created the world in six literal days roughly 4,000 years before Christ and destroyed the world with a global Flood at the time of Noah.

But about 200 years ago some scientists developed new theories of earth history, which proposed that the earth and universe are millions of years old. Over the past 200 years Christian leaders have made various attempts to fit the millions of years into the Bible. These include the day-age view, gap theory, local flood view, framework hypothesis, theistic evolution, and progressive creation.

A growing number of Christians (now called young-earth creationists), including many scientists, hold to the traditional view."
~Answers in Genisis

The layers of Earth do not suggest "millions of years" that most scientists believe:

"A common argument against the Bible involves varves—rock formations with alternating layers of fine dark, and coarse light sediment. Annual changes are assumed to deposit bands with light layers in summer and dark layers in winter. It is reported that some rock formations contain hundreds of thousands of varves, thereby ‘proving’ the earth is much older than the Bible says.[9] But the assumption that each couplet always takes a year to form is wrong. Recent catastrophes show that violent events like the Flood described in Genesis can deposit banded rock formations very quickly. The Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington State produced eight metres (25 feet) of finely layered sediment in a single afternoon![10] And a rapidly pumped sand slurry was observed to deposit about a metre (3–4 feet) of fine layers on a beach over an area the size of a football field (cross-section shown on the right: normal silica sand grains are separated by darker layers of denser mineral grains like rutile)."

~http://www.trueorigin.org/walkergeo01.asp

We are so advanced we keep destroying ourselves. Advanced is just an 8 letter word.

Knowledge builds off itself, at an exponential rate. Makes you excited to see what the future holds doesn't it?

We keep destroying what we've built up - it's called "war". So we keep having to start over.

How much further would we be if the library at Alexandria hadn't been torched?

How much further would Germany be if they hadn't thought it necessary to invade Poland and all that?

our brains have developed within the past 200 years.

I suggest you read "the Greatest Show on Earth" by Richard Dawkins...or "Idiot America" by Charles Pierce.

in the passed 100 years we've systematically tapped into huge reserves of energy, that is coal and oil.

here's a visual aid: http://dieoff.org/Olduvai.gif