Could one really really smart person eventually recreate all technological advancements granted immortality?
Let's say we left one single very smart guy (not necessarily with the knowledge: they may be able to understand hard stuff when taught it, but not know it already) alone on a copy of the earth. That person is also immortal. Could that person, by themselves, gain back all knowledge, maybe also experimental, or even surpass that is already available to us right now, before the planet gets inevitably engulfed by a sun turning red giant?
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/505/
What transmits the information, I don't understand. The rocks just sit there. Don't get it. The guy maybe?
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/505:_A_Bunch_of_Rocks
It can be hard to explain, but basically each row of rocks is a line of input/computation/output not unlike the binary code that flows through the circuits of a processor. It's a different representation of the same kind of work your device is doing right now. And, as you might think, waaaaaay slower.
Yeah, what is slower though. Presumably they mean the rate at which the guy lays the stones, otherwise there's nothing changing over time. It would just be a record.
Right. Think of Cueball laying stones as a CPU, and the rate at which he can finish laying a row and return to the beginning as his clock speed.
Very long lines, then.
Mind-bogglingly long!
ah, so I see the guy has started resorting to the pens that fall
Infinity by its very nature in a sense guarantees all possibilities. Perhaps even a dumb person with infinite time would recreate all technology and beyond.
It reminds me of this disturbing video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbCerMBxUFM
That was incredible. Such a terrifying concept.
"infinity ... guarantees all possibilities" no, no it does not and that is such a common misunderstanding of infinities its kind of annoying.
I.e. The list of all even numbers is infinite and still doesnt include a single odd number. Real numbers are densely infinite and still dont include the imaginary unit or chocolate cake.
If you had infinite time, you still would probably not be able to learn to fly with just your body and still would die if you stopped breathing.
Within boundary conditions of the system.
Wtf is that video...
One person alone on a planet is quite busy with feeding himself and all personal needs.
Not enough time for doing science.
He didn't specify what kind of immortality, so let's assume it's the kind where you don't have to worry about food, water, sleep, or dying
that could make it even worse, bc such a person has no motive to explore and research anything.
Boredom is often enough of a motivator, and nothing stops them from doing those things even though they don't need to.
If they are just reinventing stuff they already know about, then possibly.
If the have to start from scratch and with no prior knowledge then definitely not. Two significant drivers of invention are necessity and interactions with/observations of environmental factors and those will likely be missing.
Eg the role of cowpox in the smallpox vaccine.
there may be other ways to reinvent the same things though
True. But will there be reason to?
boredom
Hopefully boredom will lead to better inventions than flurocarbons and atom bombs.
Or investors and earning calls.
While my initial reaction was "Yes", I think that it's rather "No".
There are massive amounts of things to build and stuff to discover. And almost all of it, especially the physics, chemistry etc. stuff needs experimentation. Plenty of people had died or chronically made it difficult to do anything because of scientific experiments (think of Marie Curie or imagine what happens when you try to rediscover nuclear energy).
In our scenario, we say, that the person is immortal, but it could always happen, that they get stuck with certain illnesses or co. which significantly reduces their possible auctions. at some point they may be so limited, that they cannot do certain experiments at all and get stuck there forever.
This is an interesting take based on the quality of years. But unless the task becomes impossible to, and not just more arduous, the answer should still be yes.
Whether the person enjoys life or not is another question.
Haha. I think we threw that question out when we assumed immortality.
I forgot to say that the immortality I'm talking about also makes it impossible to get challenged by illness and such
Ah, okay! Then my worries don't apply. They may run all kinds of dangerous experiments knowing they'd survive.
As much as people on the internet love to imply they know everything I don’t think the human brain has enough neurons or any sort of capacity to deal with all of that knowledge and expertise to get even close. Even with unlimited time.
Our brains are like hard drives. We know a fair amount but over time, we forget some things to make room for newer things. Some things, we can't access because some part of it was overwritten. Some other things, we can't simply recount at all.
So it'd be an eternity spending time figuring it out, forgetting, misplacing the knowledge, coming to a realization, forgetting again .etc .etc
If they have almost unlimited time, I don't see why not
If you had unlimited time, you would not be motivated to use it efficiently.
If I was immortal and without worldly concerns, I might spend eight years in the throes of a single good book.
I might never decide I'm in the mood to learn CSS.
Let alone invent CSS.
yeah but eventually the boredom would hit you
While I know that infinity means infinity, I think that like fractals we tend to move about one point instead of trending away at random. I wouldn't change radically over time, I would just become a more complex self-similar being.
By themselves? I'm not entirely sure. Some manufacturing processes would be so difficult or physically demanding that they'd require someone to help. But those would be necessary to advance to the next stage of tech...
No matter what you need to do, if you've got enough time, you can build a long enough lever.
No. Think of how big the category of technology involved in keeping the human body alive. Ok our immortal wants to recreate the pacemaker but there is no one else but them around. How would that work exactly? Presumably as an immortal they wouldn't need one. So how would they test it?
Then you add in things that only make sense if there are multiple people in the world. You don't exactly need passenger side airbags if there are no passengers. Tandem bicycles would be strange for this lone immortal to make. Everything involved in childcare from the simple (how to swaddle a baby) to the surprisingly complicated (breast milk pumps) to the obvious (diapers).
I think be smart isn't enough to find the motivation to do something. More harder is the goal and much motivations are need it. Human race actually have evolved during crieses and inventions was maded to fix immediate needs, like market at beginning of trades in the babilonian cities. One single guy left alone even with infinite time can do nothing, or actually, you say about the sun turning a red giant, he will find the way to build a rocket probably a couple of years before that happen, just in time to flew like a rat motivated by survival instinct.
Is the guy still immortal after being engulfed by the sun?
sadly
Did you just start watching/reading Dr Stone?
If not, give it a shot, it's obviously not realistic but it's basically an anime answer to your question lol
the problem with Dr stone is senku already has the knowledge
Probably not if you subscribe to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
given enough time, the lone scientist may display something similar to change between generations maybe
Thinking back about it, it's pretty much Factorio's plot, isn't it?
Hed probably go insane, but maybe? Hed have to run logistics all by himself, so possibly not.
with infinite time, why not
Special productive power of cooperative labour. So, even if intellectual ability was not a limiting factor, I don't believe it would be possible. Can't prove it, though.
I think it's possible given an infinite amount of time that they could recreate any previous human technology, but would they want to?
It might get kind of boring spending every day for thousands of years just trying to recreate old technology.
Are they the last person on earth? If so I can't see anyone wasting too much time building tech meant to assist people who don't exist anymore.
I guess what I'm saying is it's pretty certain they could do it, but only if there were some motivation like saving humanity after an apocalypse
Good point. If there aren't other people, why would you need a printing press?
Or those fire trucks where someone from the rear will steer.
just boredom I guess. what else are you gonna do for infinitely many years anyway?
I'm going to say no. A body immune to life threatening illnesses means they cant properly test medicines and get them right. And if they're not immune, exposing themselves to life threatening illnesses will put a stopper on that when they fail to get their medicines right on tbe first go.
they could be tested on animals though. granted, they may work differently on animals, but they might be smart enough to work something out
I think with infinite time it would probably be possible in theory, but so much of todays technology relies on economies of scale that doing it the same way would not make a lot of sense for a single person.
So A smart person would probably create technology that looks very different from the stuff we are using today