It is all too easy to discuss “progress studies”. What is vastly more interesting is how the progress that has already been made has been undone. The spinning wheel, for instance -so often missed in Indo-Aryan studies- has been invented at multiple points throughout history. The U.S. has never matched the engineering achievements of the 1920s and the 1930s. The population of Iraq was smaller in 1800 AD than in 2900 BC. That of Egypt was basically the same in 1900 AD as in the time of Pontius Pilate. The literacy rate of Iran was higher in 900 AD than in 1900 AD, and that of South Italy higher in 100 AD than in 1800 AD (see the book Ancient Literacy). China was no more literate in 1800 than in 1200, despite obvious advancements in book publication technology (this is from a Reddit discussion between A. Karlin and a Medieval historian). The leading question of Earth is not why mankind stopped manned missions to the moon. It is how the Egyptians of the Pyramid Age did not acquire PhDs in astrophysics. Why the Romans never discovered the art of printing. Why the Chinese did not discover a spherical Earth. Perhaps a thought experiment from the world’s most widely read book might be of help.
The whole world had the same language and the same words. When they were migrating from the east, they came to a valley in the land of Shinar* and settled there. They said to one another, “Come, let us mold bricks and harden them with fire.” They used bricks for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky,* and so make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth.” The LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the people had built. Then the LORD said: If now, while they are one people and all have the same language, they have started to do this, nothing they presume to do will be out of their reach. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that no one will understand the speech of another. So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel,* because there the LORD confused the speech of all the world. From there the LORD scattered them over all the earth.
-Genesis, Chapter 11, NABRE
This passage has three interpretations. One is religious, two are secular. The first secular interpretation is the simplest one -men before cities were scattered about and possessed by multiple languages and the construction of a city created a demographic hockey stick in which humanity spread out from the city and created a monolingual sphere (archaeologists genuinely believe this happened during the Uruk period). The second interpretation is another secular one and proposes that man genuinely had one language prior to urbanization, but each time they acquired a monolingual sphere of influence, they created cities that served as demographic sinks and resulted in a panoply of languages spoken in the cities (think New York City today, formerly known as New Amsterdam). The last interpretation is the religious one, and states that God deliberately destroyed progress in civil engineering in order to prevent people from acquiring PhDs in astrophysics -or, worse, microbiology.
Progress is natural in evolutionary history. It requires intelligence to spread one’s genes, so one can only expect that superintelligence might arise in man fairly quickly -the same modules of the brain and heart that can be used to create children can create rovers to the Red Planet. Writing is fairly easy to spread -consider how rapidly it spread in Russia, the Koreas, Soviet Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and, today, large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. It is thus no coincidence that you exist on a planet that holds billions of people, and not one destroyed by a nuclear, chemical, or biological misanthropic catastrophe.
Hockey sticks occur every four seconds. There is always a power grid waiting to be torn down, a Union Carbide plant waiting to malfunction, a nuclear plant waiting to destroy the world, methane waiting to be released from permafrost, and a day when the sheep begin to look up. There is always a tower of Babel waiting to be not built.