[api]

When you zoom this far out, anything can look possible… or impossible.

This is the same fallacy, but taken toward rather than away from infinite possibility, that underlies things like the Club of Rome’s world models and their limits to growth thesis.

Zoom way out and the details disappear. Look only at aggregate statistics and extrapolate. Do this and you tend to get graphs that go to infinity (this paper) or to zero (limits to growth).

But the details are where things actually happen.

Also look up computational irreducibility, which is kind of another way of approaching what I’m getting at here. You can only treat details in aggregate for systems whose causality is strictly hierarchical. If one detail can change the whole system, every detail must be considered or a simulation is invalid.

Turns out that living systems are like this.

[restalis]

While there are indeed "details" out there that have a great impact on the macro-dynamic, and even pose as blockers, history also provides us many counter-examples. The steel-making process has been invented and reinvented many times and in different places in an (arguably) independent manner. The same for sea-faring, writing systems, laws, and so on. They have all been different but did enabled progress more or less in similar way, and thus - are also details that it's fair to gloss over.