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breuleuxtoday at 1:51 PM1 replyview on HN

> We have advanced tremendously over the past 200 years

Would most of that have happened if we hadn't found oil, though?

It's difficult to precisely identify how much of progress is owed to intelligence, and how much is simply energy availability. Energy is intrinsically transformative -- the dumbest of organisms can take over the world in a blitz if they can process available energy better than the others, whereas the smartest of entities is going to be ineffective without fuel. Intelligence can, of course, unlock the capability to exploit new energy sources, but there's still an intrinsic physical distribution of it that's outside of anyone's control.


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tossandthrowtoday at 3:27 PM

Reducing progress to increasing entropy makes it even more clear that making progress will likely become easier, not harder.

Yes, oil was important back then. Now we can augment with wind, solar, nuclear, etc.

And more technologies will come.