>>11705735Technological and scientific progress revolve not around genius or "great men" despite what many intellectuals (scientists included) fetishize.
It's the capacity to retain experience and transmit it as knowledge to the following generations, so not only they understand and maintain it but they can add on top of it.
If this knowledge isn't transmitted or only partially to new generations for whatever reason (war, pandemic, famines, etc...) then it simply vanishes in few decades so people are even surprised millenia later that it existed, pic related.
A top 20% european high schooler has quantitatively more scientific knowledge than Descartes or Copernic at their peak simply because diffusion of knowledge has exploded at a logarithmic scale. What a kid is spoonfed in school, Copernic had to grind through it with decades of calculations and experiments.
TLDR storing and distributing knowledge reliably has been the major bottleneck of civilization since the beginning of mankind. The use of Gutenberg press made knowledge much more easy to distribute in volume, making it both "antifragile" (as the local greybeards all dying didn't result in a loss of knowledge) and increasing the number of people who could make use of it.
