abstract
| - For every species bar one, Medieval Stasis is how the world works. Changes in technology and society take hundreds of years, and any existing alien civilizations or elf kingdoms today looks more or less the same as it did a century ago - or will in a century more. For most races in the setting slow change is the norm. The great exception are humans. Somehow these talking plains apes, who have only learned to walk fully upright a few hundred thousand years ago, have mastered technology and civilization in a fraction of the time it took everyone else, despite their incredibly short individual lifespans. Or maybe it is that very brevity that drives humans, the sense that they don't have decades to spare and need to accomplish things now. Extremely common in both fantasy and sci-fi. Amazingly enough, this seems to be Truth in Television, as all human technological development has really only occurred in the last 100,000 years, 5% of the approximately 2 million year lifetime of our genus, accelerating with the advent of agriculture 10,000 - 12,000 years ago and accelerating again with the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution, and having been getting faster since. Aside from language, the world of AD 1500 would have been more or less understandable to someone from 500 BC, but someone from AD 1500 would have had a lot of problems in AD 1900 (radio, relatively advanced guns, trains and early cars, atheism, medical advances...), and someone from AD 1900 would have been completely lost in AD 2000. This accelerating trend is also what leads some to predict The Singularity. A Sub-Trope of Humans Are Special. Examples of Humans Advance Swiftly include:
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