> To me, that's as profound as the discovery, if ever, of another intelligent species in the universe.
Err, what?
Edit:
To elaborate, this strikes me as completely ridiculous.
We're only talking about thousands of years, this is not a long time.
Just imagine if every person living in the united states alone were born sequentially, and that the average lifetime were 60 years. There's over 300M people in this country alone. That's what, 18B years? Even hundreds of thousands of years isn't a long time.
If anything's profound it's how quickly things have drastically changed. Not how impressive it is to find art in caves from less than a million years ago.
Person years is a bad metric to compare to time years. You should compare the 18B person years to the about 5 trillion[1] person years that have existed since these cave paintings. Now that’s truly a long time, and shows how slowly these changes really have been. To get from those cave paintings to where we are now would take trillions of years for one person.
[1]: ~100B people ever[2] * ~50 years of life span = ~5T person years.
Err, what?
Edit:
To elaborate, this strikes me as completely ridiculous.
We're only talking about thousands of years, this is not a long time.
Just imagine if every person living in the united states alone were born sequentially, and that the average lifetime were 60 years. There's over 300M people in this country alone. That's what, 18B years? Even hundreds of thousands of years isn't a long time.
If anything's profound it's how quickly things have drastically changed. Not how impressive it is to find art in caves from less than a million years ago.