This is some pretty weird and lowkey racist exposition on humanity.

Humankind isn’t a single unified thing. Individual cultures have their own modes of subsistence and transportation that are unique to specific cultural needs.

It’s not that it took 1 million years to “figure out” farming. It’s that 1 specific culture of modern humans (biologically, humans as we conceive of ourselves today have existed for about 200,000 years, with close relatives existing for in the ballpark of 1M years) started practicing a specific mode of subsistence around 23,000 years ago. Specific groups of indigenous cultures remaining today still don’t practice agriculture, because it’s not actually advantageous in many ways – stored foods are less nutritious, agriculture requires a fairly sedentary existence, it takes a shit load of time to cultivate and grow food (especially when compared to foraging and hunting), which leads to less leisure time.

Also where did you come up with the number 12,000 for “figuring out” the combustion engine? Genuinely curious. Like were we “working on it” for 12k years? I don’t get it. But this isn’t exactly a net positive and has come with some pretty disastrous consequences. I say this because you’re proposing a linear path for “humanity” forward, when the reality is that humans are many things, and progress viewed in this way has a tendency toward racism or at least ethnocentrism.

But also yeah, the point of this meme is “artists are valuable.”