I'm certainly not.
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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My great-grandfather grew up with horses and carriages and saw man set foot on the moon and the early days of the internet. He saw the rise and fall of the USSR. What will I see?
What will I see?
The fall of all the rest of us.
Dude i'm fucking genx, i grew up under the threat of thermonuclear annihilation, a destroyed ozone layer, AIDS and more.
We only fall if you fucking roll onto your back and let it happen
There is no individual. There is only network. System. Systems create. They output. They produce. They produce well and tremendously when the system is healthy. Make the system healthy for once. I mean again.
It’s why a lot of sci-fi written in the 1900’s takes place in like the 90’s and 2000’s. Writers thought that we would keep on exponentially advancing and have Mars colonies and flying cars by now. They could have never predicted that interest in space exploration would have waned, like people stopped caring about the space shuttle, and that the actual technological revolution took place in the computing space.
To be fait, a lot of sci fi does involve very advanced computing, like HAL in 2001.
And some even got the cyberpunkiness almost right (Johnny Nmemonic swung so hard!). I think for every visionary piece, we have 100 lost contemporary 'trash' (not trash, more like a picture of the spirit of the time) that has already been lost.
I mean Star Trek was pretty wickedly ahead of it's time for all of the creator's shortcomings. Still can't believe that teleporting doesn't kill you every time.
Has it ever been proven in any of the shows that the transporter didn't kill everyone that used it and just made such prefect copies that no one realized?
Like it created an extra copy of Riker and there was the tragedy of Tuvix. Though I'd say the former is evidence that it is new copies but the latter might be evidence against it, since they each had memories of their time merged when they separated. Actually, that whole incident kinda brings into question what's going on for a transporter to accidentally merge two people and not in a "horrible teleportation into a wall accident" way and then somehow de-merge them.
i think a lot of people simply couldn't have imagined computers back in 1900. that is simply because computers are a rapid qualitative progress instead of just a quantitative one.
No one predicted phone addiction
It's weird reading work by authors like Asimov, where people travel between planets as a matter of routine, and we have sentient robots, but not mobile phones.
My Great Grandfather lived that change. He went from walking, horses and buggies, steam engines, with no telephones or electricity, to sitting on a couch next to me and watching the first Apollo moon landing. He saw more insane changes to this world than we will ever probably see. But.....
It took 2 world wars and millions of dead to drive all that change in that time period of one life. War is the great driver of technological leaps. I'm not sure I feel the need to drive tech advances that fast at the cost of all those lives. Slow and steady might be a better path to travel.
Still, within my lifetime, which much like my Great Grandfather I'm nearing the end of, there have been great changes that everyone just takes for granted. The internet has caused a great disruption in the world. You have access to nearly all the information this world has in an instant. No matter where you are. No more going to a library to look up outdated information in a card catalogue. You can talk to nearly anyone on this planet at any time. When I grew up, we had a party line we shared with 5 other families. And using that phone was expensive. You got billed for each phone call for the duration of that call. You can do business with almost every business on this planet directly. Or Amazon/Walmart/Temu yourself to death if you want. All we had as the Sears or Wards catalogue to mail order from. And then you waited a month to get your order.
You can affordably travel to London, Paris, Tokyo, and nearly everywhere else in a matter of hours. There are re-usable space rockets now. And while the stars might still be just out of reach, there is nowhere in the solar system we can't go if we really want to. The planets are ours for the taking as soon as we want them. Even true self driving cars are a solid possibility now.
Those are just a few of the things I've seen change. And there are many more. But we seldom notice and just take them for granted.
War is the great driver of technological leaps
Maybe for capitalist countries because an external threat is the only motive that will get the bourgeois to fund science instead of consolidating power, but the USSR and Chinas rise were during peaceful times.
Even their technology was driven by war. No human civilization has been immune that. Maybe in story books, but never in the real world.
Technical development in non-capitalist societies is suppressed by war. Kalashnikov wanted to design farm equipment. Instead he designed weapons. Ask any scientist if they're working so they can develop X before , let alone as part of a war effort, 99% of them will say no. Ask the politicians why they are funding that research, and you will get a very different answer.
We had flight before airplanes! Why do people just ignore lighter than air travel lmao. Yes, planes are more impressive, but it wasn't like BAM plane BAM rockets.
I don't consider anything true aviation before the squirrel suit.
And look at how much life has changed in America from 2015-2025! We went from an imperfect democracy where civil discourse was possible to an authoritarian shithole filled with millions and millions of fascist thugs who are somehow still functioning in daily life despite very clearly being psychotic beyond the help of even the best psychiatrists. Oh, and rich people pay less in taxes, facts no longer exist apparently, people are having psychotic meltdowns caused by hallucinating AI that will eventually replace half of all entry level jobs, and science and education are going back to the 1800s! Soon RFK Jr will legalize lobotomies again because his brain worm made him do it.
~~we are creators~~ We enjoyed a short period of exponentially increasing complexity due to a massive amount of 'immediately free' energy afforded us through the burning of fossil fuels.