Greentext

I don't disagree with your explanation of exponential growth or how it does answer for the speed at which we went from, say the magnifying glass to the hubble space telescope.

However, the exponential growth alone model does have a floor: it presumes that there was some kind of push, drive or want for progress. Like, as if there was a destination we're supposed to end up at and its just a case of how long it took to get there. It excludes the idea that people might not have wanted to.

People didn't want to toil all day in someone else's farm. In smaller numbers, on good land, people didn't have to do very much to get the food they needed. Its only when farming became developed and consistent enough that those living there had the numbers to go kill the people who lived on the good land.

Once we'd been, for all intense and purpose, domesticated by grain, "progress" was inevitable.

Another example would be the industrial revolution. People ask why it was so much faster here in the UK than France. It wasn't because of a desire for progress. Its that French people had a natural aversion to being worked for 12 hours a day in hell-like factories and workhouses. I mean, British people did too but they had mostly just been kicked off the common land they had lived on for centuries. So, they had no other place to go and begging and not having a job for more than three days was made illegal, punishable by being sent to to workhouses. At one points, they had more British soldiers fighting the riots at home than they had fighting napoleon.