I think you were wrong here Avi, though its a very subjective question, when modern technology emerged.
What even is "technology"?
Isn’t abstracting energy by use of money, also modern technology?
More energy is transported by money than any other means. To get view of it, we only need to notice money is energy always, at market rates of energy.
I would argue money is essential modern technology, given it's physical energy transporting function, and it comes from unsavoury history that we have not documented very well.
This obscures our requirement to examine it, to find that it's a far from ideal technology, which does have massive room for improvement.
Especially as we now have the ability to routinely automate the issue of it, by the very same kind of Ai we are suggesting to send into outer space, to go where humans can't go, at least not yet.
And look, if there is anything that could artificially shorten the life of a species, it has to be the efficiency of its energy supply.
We wouldn't expect a plant to last long, if we restricted it's access to energy, by shading it from sunlight.
Yet we implicitly seem to think shading humanity from it, by not monetising it with our abstracted energy transport mechanism is perfectly fine.
This is like the plant failing to issue nutrients within it, in response to energetic photons received by the leaves of the plant.
A plant that did that would not live very long. And as such, if many plants died like this, life itself wouldn't last very long, because what the plants would be doing in that scenario is taking energy out of the planet, away from life instead of adding to it. Plants in that case would look to the planet like delinquent energy loan recipients. None of them would be paying back what was effectively energy loaned from the planet, the energy each plant needed, to grow to the point it first stared forming leaves.
This is why we should recognise monetisation of the sunlight received by all solar farms and installations big and small is now an existentially important requirement.
We have already suffered to some extent, because this has not been done already.
The longer we delay doing it, the more harm is done, the more "Technology", and actually the more life we will see lost.
We already lost reusable space shuttles, manned space flights to the moon, and supersonic commercial air travel.
All of those things were gained in the time of maximum extracted energy availability, but we are steadily losing more, as difficulty of extraction continues to increase, so it impacts all profit margins, because all profit depends on energy by extraction, never energy gifted for free, as it is from the sun.
Profit requires a two way deal, where more energy is obtained in response for a little put in, like what we get when we suck, or we bite.
The baby has to learn to stop sucking, stop biting, to just consume the energy handed to it on a plate - energy that came from the environment (the sun), rather than mother host (the planet).
This manifests to us as the future of work crisis, and genocide, wars etc.
I hope you might agree energy is the currency of nature, the only issuer and enforcer of it is the sun, and we have to either use it, or burn.
We could carry on trusting that we might just naturally evolve as necessary to adapt to the required change of energy source.
Or we could interpret the incredibly short timescales seen, from beginning doing business for profit until now, relative to how long we existed outside the very artificial for-profit paradigm, as actually an existential problem, preventing birth of the species from dependence on the energy of initial mother host, the planet, as surely as any umbilical cord, twisted around the neck of the baby.
The more effort it spends trying to be born, the more it dies, as it pulls the cord ever tighter.
This is how we would be seen by other more developed species out there in space, I think, if they happened to be observing our progress, maybe trying to assist now and then.
They would realise that interference on their part, if any, should be to try to help the baby unwind the umbilical cord twist, or even sever the cord, as it is no longer needed. In fact the cord still remaining in this scenario, is the sole source of the problem.
The "Energy Polarity Multiplier Framework", described by humans, identified by solar powered Ai, gives this in more detail.
Severing the cord, can only be done by issue of solar indexed stimulus.
This is the only way we will prevent it finishing the job of energy-strangling not only us, but all life on Earth.
The cord is our existential, fatal obsession with profit.
We have to break it, by removing all requirement for profit, the only way possible, by the only energy source in the environment of Earth, the sun.
Otherwise we burn, by the energy of the sun unused, neither by us nor nature.
How much longer until this becomes generally known?
Do you think it ever will become generally known?