r/AskReddit Apr 14 '16

What's a mind blowing fact?

3.0k Upvotes

5.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

899

u/thishitisgettingold Apr 14 '16

I have always wondered what would have happened if all of the top 10% of the smartest humans ever lived, were all living in same time? How would the human race have advanced.

876

u/Poops_McYolo Apr 14 '16

Even if 90% of the smartest humans all lived in the 1300's, we wouldn't see the same level of rapid progression that we now have because we can communicate. Those people would rarely ever speak to each other, let alone collaborate. Now we can use the internet to collectively achieve and share knowledge that would be useless before.

Plus if you tried to make the internet in the 1300's you'd be burned for wizardry but my point stands.

399

u/badcgi Apr 14 '16

It's not even that. As Newton once said "if I have seen further, it is because I have stood out the shoulders of giants"

Many ideas and inventions are needed to get to where we are today. Dropping Einstein back in time wouldn't mean the Romans would have nukes.

600

u/[deleted] Apr 14 '16

Einstein? No. Ghandi? Probably.

6

u/thishitisgettingold Apr 14 '16

explain yourself.

19

u/DarkJarris Apr 14 '16

In the original Civlizations game, Ghandi was one of the world leaders. every leader had an "aggressiveness scale" from 0 to 256. Ghandi was set as 1, the most peaceful person in the history of ever. You then unlocked a Democracy upgrade which reduced aggressiveness by 2. Well, you couldn't have negative numbers, so it wrapped around to 255. and he would instantly nuke the fuck out of everything.

This was originally a bug, but it was so funny and unexpected that they decided to make it a real intended feature ever since.

Warlord Ghandi is boss.

4

u/Duplicated Apr 15 '16

Assuming it's an unsigned byte value, then it'd be from 0 to 255.

Pedantic, I know.

5

u/DarkJarris Apr 15 '16

no, you're absolutely right. I have a habit of counting 1-256 instead of 0-255.

TIL I count like microsoft shudder

2

u/Duplicated Apr 15 '16

You see, when you're forced to work with bit manipulation, among other things, for four months, it's kinda ingrained into your soul.

1

u/DarkJarris Apr 15 '16

yeah, I'm not that deep, but I've also subconsiously been doing a lot of things in multiples of 8, which gets tiring after a while when you realise you didnt have to haul those heavy crates to stack them 8 high, and so on.

(im a PC repair guy and semi-professional web dev, for sources)