It echoes. The best explanation for this phenomena seems to be that evolution is slow. It takes about 15K years for a mutation to spread through the population. So people, the 'cogs' of history are essentially the same now as at the dawn of civilization.

The biggest change we managed was the invention of writing and libraries. Before that we had civilizations being created and destroyed in a seemingly endless cycle of birth and death, starting from scratch every single time. These days the bits can crash and burn but the rest of the world carries on. Hungary is not much to write about these days but not so long ago it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a power in the old world. All that's left is a few tourist hot spots, salami, and goulash.

A couple of years ago I was fascinated by a reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism* which was made in 200 BC or so. It was depressing to think that the ancients actually built a device with enough precision to build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. 2,000 years later that competence was not to be had.

On the bright side, the ancients wouldn't have had the tech to analyze the Antikythera Mechanism and now we do.

The world now works on many, many cylinders and hopefully they can't all shut down at once.

Once nice thing I see today is that the US is trying to shut China out of its tech stack, so China is developing its own. De novo tech stacks are superior to what they replace, the old stack caters to legacy tech and new stacks just ignore the legacy issue so they tend to be more efficient.

People who aren't in China or the US can pick and choose, mixing and matching (and interfacing) to their hearts' content.

I think we may have finally made civilization resilient enough to survive.

Interesting stuff.

*an advanced analog computer designed to assist in navigation.