[bee_rider]

Squandered implies it was somehow a meaningful loss, at least that’s how I interpreted it.

It was meaningless time. If we’d gotten to our current development level ~5000 years ago, we’d just be writing these same comments next to calendars that had their zero sent to ~7000 years ago.

[melling]

We still wouldn’t be alive 5000 years ago. That part doesn’t change. I think you’re confusing yourself.

Half of Europeans that died during the great plague would’ve benefited, for example. Most people who were born in the past 150 years would still be alive.

let your imagination have a go at it.

[bee_rider]

I’m not at all confused. But we’re somehow talking past each other. Which I probably contributed to too, although that wasn’t my intent, so sorry for the mix up. Anyway, it is just silly chitter-chatter so I think it is not worth sorting out where we’ve missed each other.

[buzzerbetrayed]

You’re taking a radically different past, and then somehow arriving at the conclusion that any part of history that we current know would have still happened.

[melling]

No, I’m assuming we had an advanced civilization 10,000 years ago then assuming continuous progress was made.

I threw out the Great Plague, or something similar, as an example of something that wouldn’t have occurred because science would have addressed these types of diseases. Covid today would be easily treatable in a more advanced society

Clearly history wouldn’t play out the same way. The point is that today’s society would be much more advanced

[batch12]

True, we (the ones reading and writing these comments) would likely never exist if the past was that radically different.