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Author's Note: The core thought experiment in this post—compressing 500 years of history into 5 subjective years to intuitively grasp the visceral pace of an AI takeoff—is directly inspired byDaniel Kokotajlo’s shortform comment.
I. The Second FOOM
Consider this an exploration of another analogy for FOOM (an intelligence explosion). Currently, there is only one widely accepted historical example of a FOOM: the evolutionary leap from the biological replicator to the abstract reasoner (humans)—a central anchor in the classic Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky debate.
But if we anticipate Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) arriving soon, humanity is currently at the precipice of the second great FOOM: the leap from the abstract reasoner to ASI. Therefore, we shouldn't necessarily look at our own history as the explosion itself, but rather as the pre-hyper-exponential runway. By taking that historical path—the long climb from basic abstract reasoning to deep learning—and compressing it, we can simulate what a capability explosion actually feels like. Experiencing 100 years of historical paradigm shifts squashed into a single year is a strong approximation of the sheer rate of change we are likely to live through over the next five years.
Note that I am agnostic on the specific microeconomics of an intelligence explosion, and on the granular details of the FOOM debate (such as the mechanics of "sharp left turns"). Instead, this essay serves as an intuition pump. Whether you believe the pace of AI takeoff will be exponential or something even steeper, examining humanity's collective phase change—and artificially accelerating it to match our current velocity—offers a visceral sense of what compounding takeoff trajectories actually feel like from the inside.
If you zoom out far enough on any graph of human capability—population, wealth, life expectancy, scientific output, energy use—you see the same shape. Flat, flat, flat, then a hockey stick. For roughly 97% of our history as a species—two to three hundred thousand years—the line barely moves. Anatomically modern humans, as cognitively capable as anyone alive today, lived and died in a world where the basic parameters of existence didn't change across millennia.
Then agriculture and writing, roughly 5,000–6,000 years ago. The line tilts upward. Civilisations accumulate: Sumer, Egypt, China, India, Greece, and Rome. Extraordinary accomplishments. But the tilt is gentle. A person transported from Rome in 100 AD to Paris in 1300 AD would have found a world that was, in most respects, recognisably the same. Worse in some ways. Different in detail. But the basic texture of life—how you ate, travelled, communicated, understood the cosmos, died—hadn't fundamentally changed.
Then, roughly 500 years ago, the hockey stick. And not gradually. The curve goes vertical by historical standards, and it never comes back.
The standard explanation for the hockey stick is some combination of the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. These are real, but they're descriptions of what happened, not explanations of why. Why Europe? Why then? Why not Song Dynasty China, which had printing, gunpowder, and the compass centuries earlier? Why not the Islamic Golden Age, which preserved the classical corpus and made advances in mathematics, optics, and medicine that Europe wouldn't match for centuries?
I think the honest answer is that something happened in late medieval and early modern Europe that constituted a phase transition in collective intelligence—not individual brains getting smarter, but a civilisation suddenly able to network, accumulate, distribute, and iteratively redesign its relationship to knowledge in a way that became self-reinforcing. A FOOM. Not on evolutionary timescales, but on human ones. And we should study it the way alignment researchers study the evolutionary transition from pre-human to human cognition—as a case study in intelligence takeoff—except this one has incomparably more data, happened to a collective rather than a species, and left us detailed records of every feedback loop, every failure, and every redesign.
To make the dynamics visceral, I want to compress 680 years—1340 to 2020—into five "years." Imagine you're a scholar who lives through the whole thing but experiences time at roughly 1/136th speed, so each century-and-change feels like a single year. What do you see?
Year 1 (1340–1470) An Old Dream
In January, Francesco Petrarch survives the Black Death. He watches friends die—of plague, of violence, of the general collapse of everything. He looks at the people running Europe and concludes: they're weak, selfish, and ignorant. But the Romans weren't. Somewhere in decaying monasteries and forgotten libraries, there are manuscripts containing everything the Romans knew about virtue, governance, rhetoric, and wisdom. If we recover those texts and raise our leaders on them, we could have philosopher-kings again.
Europe buys this pitch. Real money flows into manuscript recovery. The great book-hunter Poggio Bracciolini discovers Lucretius's On the Nature of Things in a German monastery around March—a Roman poem arguing the universe is made of atoms, the gods don't intervene, the soul is mortal. Two dozen people in the world can read it. You need masterful Latin and a massive vocabulary and there are no dictionaries, no footnotes, no help. But it's there. It's been found.
Libraries get built. Educational programmes get funded. Scholars correspond across Europe, sharing manuscripts, arguing over translations, building informal networks connecting Florence to Paris to Oxford. You feel, if you're in the right circles, an extraordinary excitement: we are recovering the knowledge of a lost civilisation, and it will transform us.
By December, a German craftsman named Gutenberg has built a printing press. He prints 300 Bibles. He doesn't sell enearly enough[1]. He goes bankrupt. The bank that forecloses on him goes bankrupt. His apprentices go bankrupt.
The texture of your intellectual life has not changed. You still read by candlelight, copy by hand, travel by horse. Everything depends on a thin network of scholars who share manuscripts the way people now share PDFs—slowly, selectively, through personal trust.
But the topsoil is building. More books. More scholars. More letters crossing Europe. Something is accumulating, though you can't yet see what it's accumulating toward.
Year 2 (1470–1600) Nova Reperta
“The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.”
― Francis Bacon
In January, Gutenberg's bankrupt apprentices flee their debts, leave Germany, and end up in Venice. Venice is the airport hub of the Mediterranean—the place where you change boats. You print in Venice, you give ten copies to each of thirty ship captains heading to thirty cities. Suddenly the economics of knowledge change completely. Book fairs develop: a thousand printers meet in Frankfurt, each carrying a thousand copies of one title. They trade, everyone goes home with five copies each of two hundred books. There's a market for knowledge now, and the market has network effects.
It's not one revolution. First books—slow, expensive, small batches. Then, around March, pamphlets. Faster, cheaper, nearly impossible to censor. Distribution networks spring up that can move a pamphlet from Wittenberg to London in seventeen days. Luther's 95 Theses spread at a speed physically impossible even a year earlier. The Reformation ignites around April. Half of Europe goes to war over ideas that couldn't have propagated at this speed a season before.
And it's not just intellectual ferment. The wars of religion that follow are enabled by the same infrastructure that spreads ideas. Pamphlet networks coordinate resistance movements, but they also coordinate pogroms. The same printing press that puts Lucretius in the hands of med students puts anti-Semitic tracts in the hands of mobs. The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre—thousands of French Protestants slaughtered in a single night—is coordinated by the same networks Luther used to spread the Reformation. Capability is amoral. It amplifies whatever you point it at.
Meanwhile, the micro-technologies of access are proliferating. Footnotes. Glossaries. Vernacular translations. When Petrarch's generation found Lucretius, you needed decades of classical training to engage with it. By mid-year, any medical student with a vernacular edition and marginal notes can wrestle with the atomic hypothesis. Thirty thousand people can read Lucretius in thirty print editions.
And because those thirty thousand aren't all classicists—they're medical students, lawyers, merchants, people in different countries with entirely different problems—they ask questions nobody predicted. A med student in the 1560s reads about atoms and asks: what if that's how diseases work? A generation discovers the heart is a pump. People take seriously the idea that you could develop a germ theory of disease. The paradigm shift comes from the collision between the corpus and unpredicted questioners.
But the educated princes have arrived, and they're monsters. Cesare Borgia has all the Latin and Greek. He sets fire to half the world. Wars get bigger, funded by newly centralised wealth. The relatively restrained skirmishes of medieval knights are replaced by the brutal machinery of theMilitary Revolution—mobile siege artillery, massed formations of pike-and-shot, and sprawling mercenary armies leaving a wake of localized apocalypse like the1527 Sack of Rome that shrinks the Renaissance capital's population from 55,000 to barely 10,000 in a matter of months.
Machiavelli—raised on Livy, served as ambassador to popes and kings—watches from exile. There's a beautiful letter where he describes wasting his days hunting larks and drinking with countrymen, then going home and putting on his court robes to "hold commerce with the ancients." He loves the classics the way Petrarch wanted him to. But he watches virtuous men lose everything while monsters succeed.
His response: the classics aren't wrong. We're using them wrong. Stop absorbing virtue by osmosis. Treat history as a casebook—five battles by rivers, side by side, figure out what worked.
And then Francis Bacon. Young man in the patent office, watching carpenters bring in a better chisel, a new mechanism. He notices the useful innovations come from craftsmen, not scholars. The Aristotelian apparatus has been studied to exhaustion. His Novum Organum: the instrument of thought itself needs replacing. Use nature as a casebook. Observe. Experiment. Doubt.
Three redesigns of the relationship between humans and knowledge in 130 years: osmosis, casebook, experiment. Each building on the failure of the last.
Bacon also gives us an image I think is equal parts epistemically revolutionary and morally radical. Three kinds of minds: the ant gathers raw material and piles it up without transforming it. Pure empiricism. The spider spins webs from its own substance—beautiful, consistent, disconnected from reality. Pure rationalism. The bee gathers from the world and transforms what it finds into something new. Honey. Something with a purpose beyond the gathering.
The bee doesn't just have a better method. The bee has a telos. The honey feeds the hive. The bee's relationship to knowledge is oriented toward something beyond itself. This is an epistemic distinction on the surface and a moral one underneath.
Just before the calendar turns, an enchanting collection of engravings called Nova Reperta ("New Discoveries")begins circulating across Europe. For the first time, people aren't looking back at classical antiquity as the peak of human achievement. Nova Reperta shows them that they are living in an era of unprecedented progress, visually celebrating the printing press, the magnetic compass, and mechanical clocks. Society has learned to see its own time as an age of invention rather than an age of decline.
Year 3 (1600–1740). A New World
In January, Galileo points a telescope at Jupiter and sees moons. Not an argument from Aristotle—a demonstration. Kepler replaces perfect circles with messy ellipses. Bacon's programme—observe, measure, test—is producing results philosophy never could. The Royal Society is founded around May; the founders explicitly credit Bacon. They, among other innovations, invent peer-review.
But beneath this dizzying surface-level upheaval, an even more radical engine of progress is silently spinning up: what historians call the"calculating paradigm."It isn't just the grand scientific breakthroughs of Galileo or Newton that are changing the world, but the relentless application of mathematics to everyday human affairs.
In the first few weeks of Year 2 (the 1610s and 20s), John Napier introduces the logarithm, miraculously transforming tedious multiplication into simple addition. Days later, the slide rule is invented. By summer, Dutch mathematicians are using triangulation networks to map entire cities, and fortress architecture becomes a precise exercise in applied geometry. By late autumn, Isaac Newton publishes his Principia, definitively hooking up the mechanics of the heavens to the mathematics of earth.
But what the new method sustains isn't only good. The Thirty Years' War erupts around March—the worst catastrophe in Europe since the Black Death. Roughly a third of the German population dies. It's a war made possible by the very infrastructure the FOOM created: bigger armies funded by new financial instruments, equipped with new metallurgy, coordinated by new communication networks, fighting over theological positions the printing press disseminated. The same capabilities that enable Newton's Principia enable industrialised slaughter.
And the colonial empires are expanding. The navigation mathematics—triangulation, cartography, improved instruments—doesn't just map the world. It conquers it. The same calculating paradigm that improves painting and astronomy enables the slave trade. Ships that navigate the open ocean carry Bibles in one hold and kidnapped human beings in the other. By the end of Year 3, millions of Africans have been transported across the Atlantic to work plantations that fund the very institutions—the Royal Society, the academies—where the scientific revolution is being conducted.
We end Year 2 with the Glorious Revolution and a formalized Bill of Rights revolutionising political power and a world that has been thoroughly mathematized—laying the invisible, structural groundwork for a world -unkown to itself - about to change forever
Year 4 (1740–1880). The World Breaks.
In February, Watt improves the steam engine. The contraption from the mines powers factories. You visit one and find it unpleasant—noisy, dirty, full of children working fourteen-hour days. In March, the American colonies break away. In April, France explodes—revolution, regicide, the Terror, Napoleon. He mobilises entire nations: the first total wars, drawing on the full productive capacity of industrialising economies. Death tolls unprecedented.
In the gaps between wars, something worse is happening more quietly. The industrial system is grinding people up. The Irish Famine kills a million and drives another million from their homes while grain is exported from Irish ports—not because there's no food but because the economic system treats human starvation as an acceptable market outcome. Colonialism, now powered by industrial technology, reaches its full horror: the Belgian Congo, the Indian famines under British rule, the near-extermination of indigenous populations across multiple continents.
Then in June, railways. Steam-powered carriages on iron tracks. Within a month they're everywhere. Slavery is abolished. The telegraph arrives in July: instant communication. Distance has either shrunk for travel or ceased to matter for communication. Cities surge and grow over 10-fold in size in a few months.
Darwin publishes The Origin of Species in August. You're descended from apes. You don't believe it. Your children do.
By October, the frontier of knowledge has moved beyond what any single person can follow. Maxwell's equations unify electricity and magnetism. The mathematics is beyond you. For the first time in this story, the era of the person who could hold the whole corpus in their head and see the connections is ending. The corpus has grown too vast. Specialisation is becoming necessary. Something is lost in the narrowing—the Renaissance mind, the person who could see across domains, is being squeezed out by the demands of depth.
In December: the telephone. Electric light. The darkness that structured every human evening since the beginning of the species is banished. You live in a world completely removed from your agrarian past.
Year 5 (1880–2020). The Acceleration.
The changes this year are faster and harder to understand than everything that came before.
And then, for the first time, the capability to end civilisation itself exists. TheCold Waris a decades-long standoff in which the only thing preventing nuclear annihilation is human judgment—the judgment of specific individuals, in specific moments, under unbearable pressure. In October 1962, a Soviet submarine officer namedVasili Arkhipovrefuses to authorise a nuclear torpedo launch during theCuban Missile Crisis. One man. One decision. The bee-work of moral judgment, exercised in extremis, is the only thing standing between civilisation and fire.
But by June the economy is booming. You leave the factory and get a desk job. Your job title didn't exist at the start of the year. In July,humans walk on the moon. You watch on television. You remember that Galileo caused a scandal by looking at Jupiter through a tube. Now there are people standing on another world and you're watching it while eating dinner.
In August, the World Health Organisation declaressmallpox eradicated. You pause. Smallpox killed hundreds of millions across the centuries—a scourge Petrarch would have recognised, cousin to the Black Death that shattered his world. And now it's gone. Not managed. Not treated. Erased from existence by a programme only possible because of germ theory, only possible because a med student read Lucretius and wondered about atoms, only possible because the printing press brought Lucretius to people he was never written for. It took five hundred years, but Petrarch's libraries eventually cured the plague—through mechanisms he couldn't have imagined, on a timescale he couldn't have foreseen, in a form he wouldn't have recognised.
Personal computersappear in September. Something called theinternetconnects them in October. In November, everyone carriessmall glass rectanglescontaining a telephone, a camera, a library, and a map. You pick one up and can't figure out how to use it. A child shows you.
In December—the last month of a five-year story that began with Petrarch weeping over his dead friends—something called "deep learning" starts beating humans at narrow tasks.Then at Go. Then atprotein structure prediction. Then a system can hold conversations and write essays. Then it can pass professional exams. Then it can synthesise across domains you never studied. Then people are using it to write code. By the last week of December, most developers have stopped writing code from scratch.
You pick up your glass rectangle and ask it a question about molecular biology. It gives you a PhD-level answer. You ask it to connect that to urban planning. It does. You ask it to write the synthesis as a policy memo. Done.
You think: I have just done something that, at the start of this story, would have required being one of the twenty-four people in the world who could read Lucretius.
And you think: it's January 1st. Year 6 is about to begin.
It's unclear how many he sold. Ada Palmer said seven, but Gemini says he sold more. But the fact remains he couldn't sell the volume to avoid bankruptcy
Author's Note: The core thought experiment in this post—compressing 500 years of history into 5 subjective years to intuitively grasp the visceral pace of an AI takeoff—is directly inspired byDaniel Kokotajlo’s shortform comment.
I. The Second FOOM
Consider this an exploration of another analogy for FOOM (an intelligence explosion). Currently, there is only one widely accepted historical example of a FOOM: the evolutionary leap from the biological replicator to the abstract reasoner (humans)—a central anchor in the classic Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky debate.
But if we anticipate Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) arriving soon, humanity is currently at the precipice of the second great FOOM: the leap from the abstract reasoner to ASI. Therefore, we shouldn't necessarily look at our own history as the explosion itself, but rather as the pre-hyper-exponential runway. By taking that historical path—the long climb from basic abstract reasoning to deep learning—and compressing it, we can simulate what a capability explosion actually feels like. Experiencing 100 years of historical paradigm shifts squashed into a single year is a strong approximation of the sheer rate of change we are likely to live through over the next five years.
Note that I am agnostic on the specific microeconomics of an intelligence explosion, and on the granular details of the FOOM debate (such as the mechanics of "sharp left turns"). Instead, this essay serves as an intuition pump. Whether you believe the pace of AI takeoff will be exponential or something even steeper, examining humanity's collective phase change—and artificially accelerating it to match our current velocity—offers a visceral sense of what compounding takeoff trajectories actually feel like from the inside.
II. The Renaissance In Five Years
Song Dynasty China had movablebefore Gutenberg. The world preserved and extended the Ages. mathematics. Japan had asophisticated culture and institutions. None of them had Renaissance European sense—not because they were less intelligent, but because the particular cocktail that produced the Renaissance FOOM didn't come together elsewhere. Even in Europe, there was a steam engine in the library of Alexandria, industrial mines in Roman Spain, and a computer in a Greek shipwreck. Something about late medieval Europe had the seed of what I would say was humanity's 'collective intelligence' FOOM - where we were able to network as a species at a certain threshold that caused a phase change in our capabilities.
If you zoom out far enough on any graph of human capability—population, wealth, life expectancy, scientific output, energy use—you see the same shape. Flat, flat, flat, then a hockey stick. For roughly 97% of our history as a species—two to three hundred thousand years—the line barely moves. Anatomically modern humans, as cognitively capable as anyone alive today, lived and died in a world where the basic parameters of existence didn't change across millennia.
Then agriculture and writing, roughly 5,000–6,000 years ago. The line tilts upward. Civilisations accumulate: Sumer, Egypt, China, India, Greece, and Rome. Extraordinary accomplishments. But the tilt is gentle. A person transported from Rome in 100 AD to Paris in 1300 AD would have found a world that was, in most respects, recognisably the same. Worse in some ways. Different in detail. But the basic texture of life—how you ate, travelled, communicated, understood the cosmos, died—hadn't fundamentally changed.
Then, roughly 500 years ago, the hockey stick. And not gradually. The curve goes vertical by historical standards, and it never comes back.
The standard explanation for the hockey stick is some combination of the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. These are real, but they're descriptions of what happened, not explanations of why. Why Europe? Why then? Why not Song Dynasty China, which had printing, gunpowder, and the compass centuries earlier? Why not the Islamic Golden Age, which preserved the classical corpus and made advances in mathematics, optics, and medicine that Europe wouldn't match for centuries?
I think the honest answer is that something happened in late medieval and early modern Europe that constituted a phase transition in collective intelligence—not individual brains getting smarter, but a civilisation suddenly able to network, accumulate, distribute, and iteratively redesign its relationship to knowledge in a way that became self-reinforcing. A FOOM. Not on evolutionary timescales, but on human ones. And we should study it the way alignment researchers study the evolutionary transition from pre-human to human cognition—as a case study in intelligence takeoff—except this one has incomparably more data, happened to a collective rather than a species, and left us detailed records of every feedback loop, every failure, and every redesign.
I was inspired by Ada Palmer's podcast with Dwarkesh to look into the Renaissance more, but I also draw on Works in Progress Magazine research and general historical facts
To make the dynamics visceral, I want to compress 680 years—1340 to 2020—into five "years." Imagine you're a scholar who lives through the whole thing but experiences time at roughly 1/136th speed, so each century-and-change feels like a single year. What do you see?
Year 1 (1340–1470) An Old Dream
In January, Francesco Petrarch survives the Black Death. He watches friends die—of plague, of violence, of the general collapse of everything. He looks at the people running Europe and concludes: they're weak, selfish, and ignorant. But the Romans weren't. Somewhere in decaying monasteries and forgotten libraries, there are manuscripts containing everything the Romans knew about virtue, governance, rhetoric, and wisdom. If we recover those texts and raise our leaders on them, we could have philosopher-kings again.
Europe buys this pitch. Real money flows into manuscript recovery. The great book-hunter Poggio Bracciolini discovers Lucretius's On the Nature of Things in a German monastery around March—a Roman poem arguing the universe is made of atoms, the gods don't intervene, the soul is mortal. Two dozen people in the world can read it. You need masterful Latin and a massive vocabulary and there are no dictionaries, no footnotes, no help. But it's there. It's been found.
Libraries get built. Educational programmes get funded. Scholars correspond across Europe, sharing manuscripts, arguing over translations, building informal networks connecting Florence to Paris to Oxford. You feel, if you're in the right circles, an extraordinary excitement: we are recovering the knowledge of a lost civilisation, and it will transform us.
By December, a German craftsman named Gutenberg has built a printing press. He prints 300 Bibles. He doesn't sell enearly enough[1]. He goes bankrupt. The bank that forecloses on him goes bankrupt. His apprentices go bankrupt.
The texture of your intellectual life has not changed. You still read by candlelight, copy by hand, travel by horse. Everything depends on a thin network of scholars who share manuscripts the way people now share PDFs—slowly, selectively, through personal trust.
But the topsoil is building. More books. More scholars. More letters crossing Europe. Something is accumulating, though you can't yet see what it's accumulating toward.
Year 2 (1470–1600) Nova Reperta
“The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.”
― Francis Bacon
In January, Gutenberg's bankrupt apprentices flee their debts, leave Germany, and end up in Venice. Venice is the airport hub of the Mediterranean—the place where you change boats. You print in Venice, you give ten copies to each of thirty ship captains heading to thirty cities. Suddenly the economics of knowledge change completely. Book fairs develop: a thousand printers meet in Frankfurt, each carrying a thousand copies of one title. They trade, everyone goes home with five copies each of two hundred books. There's a market for knowledge now, and the market has network effects.
It's not one revolution. First books—slow, expensive, small batches. Then, around March, pamphlets. Faster, cheaper, nearly impossible to censor. Distribution networks spring up that can move a pamphlet from Wittenberg to London in seventeen days. Luther's 95 Theses spread at a speed physically impossible even a year earlier. The Reformation ignites around April. Half of Europe goes to war over ideas that couldn't have propagated at this speed a season before.
And it's not just intellectual ferment. The wars of religion that follow are enabled by the same infrastructure that spreads ideas. Pamphlet networks coordinate resistance movements, but they also coordinate pogroms. The same printing press that puts Lucretius in the hands of med students puts anti-Semitic tracts in the hands of mobs. The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre—thousands of French Protestants slaughtered in a single night—is coordinated by the same networks Luther used to spread the Reformation. Capability is amoral. It amplifies whatever you point it at.
Meanwhile, the micro-technologies of access are proliferating. Footnotes. Glossaries. Vernacular translations. When Petrarch's generation found Lucretius, you needed decades of classical training to engage with it. By mid-year, any medical student with a vernacular edition and marginal notes can wrestle with the atomic hypothesis. Thirty thousand people can read Lucretius in thirty print editions.
And because those thirty thousand aren't all classicists—they're medical students, lawyers, merchants, people in different countries with entirely different problems—they ask questions nobody predicted. A med student in the 1560s reads about atoms and asks: what if that's how diseases work? A generation discovers the heart is a pump. People take seriously the idea that you could develop a germ theory of disease. The paradigm shift comes from the collision between the corpus and unpredicted questioners.
But the educated princes have arrived, and they're monsters. Cesare Borgia has all the Latin and Greek. He sets fire to half the world. Wars get bigger, funded by newly centralised wealth. The relatively restrained skirmishes of medieval knights are replaced by the brutal machinery of theMilitary Revolution—mobile siege artillery, massed formations of pike-and-shot, and sprawling mercenary armies leaving a wake of localized apocalypse like the1527 Sack of Rome that shrinks the Renaissance capital's population from 55,000 to barely 10,000 in a matter of months.
Machiavelli—raised on Livy, served as ambassador to popes and kings—watches from exile. There's a beautiful letter where he describes wasting his days hunting larks and drinking with countrymen, then going home and putting on his court robes to "hold commerce with the ancients." He loves the classics the way Petrarch wanted him to. But he watches virtuous men lose everything while monsters succeed.
His response: the classics aren't wrong. We're using them wrong. Stop absorbing virtue by osmosis. Treat history as a casebook—five battles by rivers, side by side, figure out what worked.
And then Francis Bacon. Young man in the patent office, watching carpenters bring in a better chisel, a new mechanism. He notices the useful innovations come from craftsmen, not scholars. The Aristotelian apparatus has been studied to exhaustion. His Novum Organum: the instrument of thought itself needs replacing. Use nature as a casebook. Observe. Experiment. Doubt.
Three redesigns of the relationship between humans and knowledge in 130 years: osmosis, casebook, experiment. Each building on the failure of the last.
Bacon also gives us an image I think is equal parts epistemically revolutionary and morally radical. Three kinds of minds: the ant gathers raw material and piles it up without transforming it. Pure empiricism. The spider spins webs from its own substance—beautiful, consistent, disconnected from reality. Pure rationalism. The bee gathers from the world and transforms what it finds into something new. Honey. Something with a purpose beyond the gathering.
The bee doesn't just have a better method. The bee has a telos. The honey feeds the hive. The bee's relationship to knowledge is oriented toward something beyond itself. This is an epistemic distinction on the surface and a moral one underneath.
Just before the calendar turns, an enchanting collection of engravings called Nova Reperta ("New Discoveries")begins circulating across Europe. For the first time, people aren't looking back at classical antiquity as the peak of human achievement. Nova Reperta shows them that they are living in an era of unprecedented progress, visually celebrating the printing press, the magnetic compass, and mechanical clocks. Society has learned to see its own time as an age of invention rather than an age of decline.
Year 3 (1600–1740). A New World
In January, Galileo points a telescope at Jupiter and sees moons. Not an argument from Aristotle—a demonstration. Kepler replaces perfect circles with messy ellipses. Bacon's programme—observe, measure, test—is producing results philosophy never could. The Royal Society is founded around May; the founders explicitly credit Bacon. They, among other innovations, invent peer-review.
But beneath this dizzying surface-level upheaval, an even more radical engine of progress is silently spinning up: what historians call the"calculating paradigm."It isn't just the grand scientific breakthroughs of Galileo or Newton that are changing the world, but the relentless application of mathematics to everyday human affairs.
In the first few weeks of Year 2 (the 1610s and 20s), John Napier introduces the logarithm, miraculously transforming tedious multiplication into simple addition. Days later, the slide rule is invented. By summer, Dutch mathematicians are using triangulation networks to map entire cities, and fortress architecture becomes a precise exercise in applied geometry. By late autumn, Isaac Newton publishes his Principia, definitively hooking up the mechanics of the heavens to the mathematics of earth.
But what the new method sustains isn't only good. The Thirty Years' War erupts around March—the worst catastrophe in Europe since the Black Death. Roughly a third of the German population dies. It's a war made possible by the very infrastructure the FOOM created: bigger armies funded by new financial instruments, equipped with new metallurgy, coordinated by new communication networks, fighting over theological positions the printing press disseminated. The same capabilities that enable Newton's Principia enable industrialised slaughter.
And the colonial empires are expanding. The navigation mathematics—triangulation, cartography, improved instruments—doesn't just map the world. It conquers it. The same calculating paradigm that improves painting and astronomy enables the slave trade. Ships that navigate the open ocean carry Bibles in one hold and kidnapped human beings in the other. By the end of Year 3, millions of Africans have been transported across the Atlantic to work plantations that fund the very institutions—the Royal Society, the academies—where the scientific revolution is being conducted.
We end Year 2 with the Glorious Revolution and a formalized Bill of Rights revolutionising political power and a world that has been thoroughly mathematized—laying the invisible, structural groundwork for a world -unkown to itself - about to change forever
Year 4 (1740–1880). The World Breaks.
In February, Watt improves the steam engine. The contraption from the mines powers factories. You visit one and find it unpleasant—noisy, dirty, full of children working fourteen-hour days. In March, the American colonies break away. In April, France explodes—revolution, regicide, the Terror, Napoleon. He mobilises entire nations: the first total wars, drawing on the full productive capacity of industrialising economies. Death tolls unprecedented.
In the gaps between wars, something worse is happening more quietly. The industrial system is grinding people up. The Irish Famine kills a million and drives another million from their homes while grain is exported from Irish ports—not because there's no food but because the economic system treats human starvation as an acceptable market outcome. Colonialism, now powered by industrial technology, reaches its full horror: the Belgian Congo, the Indian famines under British rule, the near-extermination of indigenous populations across multiple continents.
Then in June, railways. Steam-powered carriages on iron tracks. Within a month they're everywhere. Slavery is abolished. The telegraph arrives in July: instant communication. Distance has either shrunk for travel or ceased to matter for communication. Cities surge and grow over 10-fold in size in a few months.
Darwin publishes The Origin of Species in August. You're descended from apes. You don't believe it. Your children do.
By October, the frontier of knowledge has moved beyond what any single person can follow. Maxwell's equations unify electricity and magnetism. The mathematics is beyond you. For the first time in this story, the era of the person who could hold the whole corpus in their head and see the connections is ending. The corpus has grown too vast. Specialisation is becoming necessary. Something is lost in the narrowing—the Renaissance mind, the person who could see across domains, is being squeezed out by the demands of depth.
In December: the telephone. Electric light. The darkness that structured every human evening since the beginning of the species is banished. You live in a world completely removed from your agrarian past.
Year 5 (1880–2020). The Acceleration.
The changes this year are faster and harder to understand than everything that came before.
In February, theWright brothers fly.Radioactivity is discovered. Einstein publishesspecial relativity—space and time are not what you thought.Quantum mechanicsarrives and even the physicists aren't sure they understand it. The universe is billions of years old and full of galaxies. You still go to church sometimes.
In April, theglobal economy collapses.Totalitarian ideologiesarise—citing Darwin, citing Nietzsche, citing the death of the God who structured Petrarch's entire world. War erupts, worse in every dimension—cities bombed nightly, industrialised genocide. In May it ends with aweapon that destroys a cityin a single flash.Seventy million dead.
And then, for the first time, the capability to end civilisation itself exists. TheCold Waris a decades-long standoff in which the only thing preventing nuclear annihilation is human judgment—the judgment of specific individuals, in specific moments, under unbearable pressure. In October 1962, a Soviet submarine officer namedVasili Arkhipovrefuses to authorise a nuclear torpedo launch during theCuban Missile Crisis. One man. One decision. The bee-work of moral judgment, exercised in extremis, is the only thing standing between civilisation and fire.
But by June the economy is booming. You leave the factory and get a desk job. Your job title didn't exist at the start of the year. In July,humans walk on the moon. You watch on television. You remember that Galileo caused a scandal by looking at Jupiter through a tube. Now there are people standing on another world and you're watching it while eating dinner.
In August, the World Health Organisation declaressmallpox eradicated. You pause. Smallpox killed hundreds of millions across the centuries—a scourge Petrarch would have recognised, cousin to the Black Death that shattered his world. And now it's gone. Not managed. Not treated. Erased from existence by a programme only possible because of germ theory, only possible because a med student read Lucretius and wondered about atoms, only possible because the printing press brought Lucretius to people he was never written for. It took five hundred years, but Petrarch's libraries eventually cured the plague—through mechanisms he couldn't have imagined, on a timescale he couldn't have foreseen, in a form he wouldn't have recognised.
Personal computersappear in September. Something called theinternetconnects them in October. In November, everyone carriessmall glass rectanglescontaining a telephone, a camera, a library, and a map. You pick one up and can't figure out how to use it. A child shows you.
In December—the last month of a five-year story that began with Petrarch weeping over his dead friends—something called "deep learning" starts beating humans at narrow tasks.Then at Go. Then atprotein structure prediction. Then a system can hold conversations and write essays. Then it can pass professional exams. Then it can synthesise across domains you never studied. Then people are using it to write code. By the last week of December, most developers have stopped writing code from scratch.
You pick up your glass rectangle and ask it a question about molecular biology. It gives you a PhD-level answer. You ask it to connect that to urban planning. It does. You ask it to write the synthesis as a policy memo. Done.
You think: I have just done something that, at the start of this story, would have required being one of the twenty-four people in the world who could read Lucretius.
And you think: it's January 1st. Year 6 is about to begin.
It's unclear how many he sold. Ada Palmer said seven, but Gemini says he sold more. But the fact remains he couldn't sell the volume to avoid bankruptcy