Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari

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part iv: the scientific revolution

14. the discovery of ignorance

• only in the year 1674 humankind found out about 99.99 % of the organisms on this planet - microorgranisms
• premodern rulers did not spend money on scientific research, as they did not expect to make new discoveries or inventions
• the most important thing in the scientific revolution was admitting ignorance: we don't know everything, and we might even be wrong about some things
• before that, humans thought they knew everything that is important, because their gods knew everything, and the gods told them what is important
• modern beliefs are either "the absolute truth" (in their mind, like the Nazis), or a non-scientific absolute truth (like human rights, which don't have any basis in science)
• theories used to be formulated through stories, now they are formulated through mathematics (a universal language)
• prior to the year 1500, science and technology were totally separate fields. (scientists did not make new inventions. inventions were made by clever but uneducated workers, or by trial and error)
• obsessions with military technology is a new phenomenon. the victors in old wars were not the ones with better weapons, but those with better organization etc.
• it took china 600 years to use gunpowder for weapons. before that, they used it for firecrackers.
• many things were seen as unsolvable and inevitable (like death or lightning). but then we started solving these "unsolvable" problems
• a few scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die from accidents, but their lives could extend indefinitely)
• religions used to be all about what happened to a person after death. modern ideologies (like feminism, capitalism, ...) do not care about death.