Studying human progress is a pretty new (formalized) thing, and humanity's rate of progress has never been more unbelievable to me. Here's a list of some major events:
4 bya - Last universal common ancestor 600 mya - 1st multicellular organism - Ediacaran fauna 540 mya - Cambrian explosion 300 mya - Carboniferous where coal deposits come from (Lycopods) 66 mya - Non-avian dinosaur extinction 250,000 ya - Homo sapiens 10,000 ya - Crop cultivation 2,600 ya - First coins used as currency 500 ya - 90% of work done by humans and animals (animate power) 400 ya - Coal passes biomass energy source in England 200 ya - Biomass still supply more than 98% of all heat/light 150 ya - World's primary energy (crude oil) extraction started 140 ya - Commercial electricity generation 121 ya - Wright brothers' Kitty Hawk flight 117 ya - Plastic invented 55 ya - Apollo 11 moon landing 35 ya - World Wide Web invented 27 ya - WiFi invented 12 ya - CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing 2 ya - Turing Test undeniably beat by open-source AI models
50 yf - oil and gas reserves run out 90 yf - Uranium-235 reserves run out 120 yf - coal reserves run out ?? yf - Martian colony established ?? yf - All GHG-producing industry moved off-earth
We've had bread for only .00035% of our evolutionary existence. Capatalism (.000065%), electricity (.0000035%), plastic (.000002925%), and wifi (.000000675%). Most things in my daily life are insanely new.
Four things are obvious:
- Predictions into the future with a defined horizon will probably be wrong. Even the natural resource predictions are based on currently known reserves. They keep getting pushed back as new reserves are discovered but there is a not-so-distant upper limit on how far they'll be pushed off
- Building B2B/C SaaS companies feels wrong given where humanity is going
- Making something important for human progress—like energy, food, supply chain, transport, etc. systems—feels right but requires capital
- Maybe building SaaS companies for the capital makes sense
Is this the Builder's Dilemma?
bya = billion years ago mya = million years ago yf = years into the future