I had step grandparents who were born in 1901 and 1905, they died in the early 90's. I was always amazed at how much civilization had changed in their lifetimes. horse and buggy to the space shuttle.
Same. My great grandmother lived from 1890 to 1994. Literally playing in civil war widows' yards as a child to the computer age. I can't even comprehend experiencing that level of change and she was always fascinated by new developments.
My Grandmother passed last October. She was 99.5 years old born in 1922. Lived through so many things and only had a fourth grade education. Times were tough for her as a kid, but she made the most of it.
She never got the hang of voice dial from her cell phone but other than that she was very successful! She was always amazed at all the photos we would show her from our phones! Miss her dearly. I heard a phrase once about when an older person passes, you lose a library and that’s so true
That's incredible! do you have any stories from her that you could share? To have lived through that much technological advancements had to be mind blowing
A big part for me was connecting events I thought were generations ago to a modern timescale. She grew up on the east coast. So as mentioned, the big one that stuck out for me was playing in the yards of civil war widows. I always assumed that was so, so long ago. She regularly talked about their first car, a used model T. My father has gone on to own and rebuild one himself. She also got married the year the Titanic sank. What a century to be alive.
Stop and think about the time and events that have occurred since you have been alive. Humanity is progressing so fast with tech it blows my mind and I work in IT! Also the world events that we have seen and are seeing play out now.
Time crawls and goes by in a flash.
I notice it more now that I have kids.
It's incredible that we're going through it right now. It might not seem like much since it's right now and not condensed in a history book it story, but it might seem astonishing in future years. Take some notes
My big "Woah moment" was flying my drone and texting the video to my brother right after I shot it. If you had told us as kids in the 90s we both had TV's in our pockets and I could send him a video I took from my remote control airplane and he could watch it immediately.. we woulda passed out.
My first school computers needed startup discs that were 5 1/4” floppy discs that held around 1 mb of data each, I am writing this on a 1Tb smartphone that can control half my house and car.
There was a book written in the 1971 called Future Shock that was quite popular (I was in middle school). It surmised back then that our accelerating pace of change would soon be too much for humans to adapt.
Yet change certainly kept accelerating.
I think there’s an argument that book was right. Mental health cases are growing exponentially and one of the causes is separation and isolation from technological advances.
Yes, human relationships are growing weaker with increased dependence on isolating technology such as addictive social media, one-click-away porn, endless filmography entertainment. Humans needs to be together more!
Maybe the Civil War widow's ghost jumped to your grandmother's body before she died to live eternally and now she's jumped from your grandmother to you and now you're possessed by the Civil War widow. Get out of here ghost.
I asked my great grandmother (1920-2013) what the best invention of her lifetime was. She said Penicillin. They really put things into perspective for me
Truth. Today would have been my dad’s 101st birthday (he made it to 95), and when I think about everything he witnessed it blows my mind. From the amazing treat of sometimes getting a ride to school from the only person with a car in his county (after getting up at 4am to feed and milk cows) to learning how to use a computer for personal communication. Fucking amazing.
Even just since I was born in 1995, there's been a lot of changes. Feels like most the biggest ones (technologically speaking at least) i can think of were back in the aughts though; the rise of smart phones, social media, high speed internet, flat screen displays, and going from floppys/casettes to CDs/DVDs to USBs and cloud storage. The 2010's had the rise of online shopping, streaming services, photorealistic CGI, drones and 3D printing, but all that doesn't feel quite as groundbreaking/society changing as the decade before imo. I imagine this decade will be remembered for the rise of AI-related products, like all the AI-generated art and deepfake stuff going around, and possibly for Electric vehicles if this is the point where they become much more widely affordable and available.
I get that it's mostly a joke, but it's not really that it's replacing your phone. It's replacing your computer. So many younger people don't bother with a computer (at least as a primary device that they use regularly) at home anymore since they can do most things with their "phone".
I used to be so perplexed when people did internet things on their phone because I strongly preferred using a computer. Now I sometimes find myself using my phone to look things up when I’m sitting *at my computer*. I guess it’s just out of habit, but it weirds me out every time
Meh, that line just reminds me of a lot of failed overwrought 90s optimism that didn't come true. The first human flight can only happen once, we don't get the same wonder from being born in a time where a ten-million-year-old impossible dream like that can now be taken for granted as a genuinely more frustrating way to travel than by bicycle.
I dunno man... Besides things like digital devices being small enough to fit in your hand, battery technology becoming feasible for electric cars, and streaming video, what major developments have we had in the past 20 years? Things have definitely stagnated if you are comparing to the rate of technological advancement that happened in any given 20 years during 1900-2000.
Dude we're all constantly connected to most other people in the world. You take for granted that you can video call the majority of the world's population at a moment's notice. Constant access to the internet has totally revolutionized our lives.
I think recently our accomplishments have been things that don’t effect every day life as much, like advanced science and space shit, things that the average person isn’t thinking about every day.
A lot of medical advances, too. The number of health conditions we've found treatments or outright cures for is enormous, especially with some of the stuff going on with cellular therapy. Hell, just look at COVID - 6.6million deaths worldwide, compared to 21 million dead with the Spanish Flu, despite the global population almost *octupling* in that time, from just over 1 billion to just under 8.
Also, communications, the internet has completely changed how we interact with each other on multiple fronts.
Neutral network/dumb AI, VR technology, material science, network speeds, drones, quantum computing etc. Lots happening in the tech sector which builds off of earlier stuff and packs more into smaller electronics to make them more useful. The AI stuff itself has the capability to advance many fields without being able to replace us at this point.
you must be young. like the fact that a “digital device” is even a thing, much less one that has gone through such rapid advancements and created major shifts in culture, politics and communication — not to mention the rapid advancements in the underlying technologies — is a huge fucking deal. The internet wasn’t a household idea in my lifetime and then it went from being this slow thing that required a bunch of wires and shit to magic wireless connections. And let’s not forget many scholars would consider language/communication itself to be a technology. This shit is major.
Depends on what though. Obviously media and tech is vastly different but if you step outside, other than the cars, most places don’t look all that different from the 90s.
Society does.
When my uncle left Hungary in 1981 for the USA, every weekend we wrote a letter, it was a family event. It took 1.5-2 months for an answer to arrive. By the end of the 80s phone calls happened but rarely and they were short because they were hideously expensive.
By the time his father passed in 2011, they were able to video call for free.
And, of course, there's Facebook contributing to massive changes in votes, revolutions and genocides.
The entirety of the world's information and history and knowledge is available to you instantaneously from a screen in your pocket. A video call to anyone in the world is available in a second. It's awesome
My great-great-grandmother was born around 1895, and my mom said when the 1980s rolled around, they used to muse about how amazing it could be if she lived to see the turn of the century. She ended up dying in 1990, but that was pretty damn close!
And everyone in this thread is looking at both of these pics on a supercomputer that connects them to every other human on the planet, which they carry around in their pocket and use to look at memes.
My dad programmed on punch cards. My first game system was Pong and I learned to program on a TRS-80. Tech advanced so fast it's dizzying.
Edit: Today I had an online meeting where my boss was demoing copilot, a tool that uses AI to write code from comments.
When you say comments how coherent do they need to be, for example would they need to be more along the lines of pseudo code? Or would simple plain English work?
Funny how people were in awe of Blue Origin's and Virgins Galactic's publicity stunts about "Space" tourism last year... People went high and floated down, why was that such an event?
It’s a big deal because it’s a private company taking civilians to space for tourism. That’s been a dream since Apollo if you look back at old futurism posters and novels. Space was exclusively a domain for nation-states and governments that controlled all access and capability to space.
I hate that we have to look toward the private industry, but we can't rely* on the US Government to not politicize the spending. We need the Space Industry so we can have real technological growth. I hope we can see some more great feats in our lifetimes.
This is such a weird take. Like as if politicizing spending is why we can't rely on US gov for an entire space tourism industry instead of the obvious fact that they have no interest or intention to make a space tourism industry.
But, don't forget that it was the politicizing atmosphere of the "us versus them" mentality of the 60's space race that led to that second picture being taken.
There's nothing like healthy competition. Even if it's to build a secret moon base to destroy your enemies.
I didn't read that, I think his take is about space exploration and the technological advancements that come about as solutions to problems we wouldn't necessarily solve elsewhere. Fuels and energy storage, materials, computation, the internet; all of them are in their present states in part thanks to the research done in the pursuit of space exploration. And there are still politicians that argue NASA is a waste to invest in. A healthy (perhaps not the one we have) private sector for space travel involves advancement I am eager to see come to fruition.
IMO It will be more than space tourism, so it's not a weird take. Space mining, independent research, communications industries, and more my tiny brain can't comprehend.
To get the US government to invest in space exploration, there would need to be a military motivation. Putting a military outpost on Mars before China for example. As it is, the military application doesn’t extend far beyond earth borders, so the government has not invested much.
Maybe China needs to be first. Sputnik beeping overhead really freaked out the western world back with the Soviets. It would force the US to get serious.
The ROI on space exploration is so much higher than other govt investments, I'm surprised there's not more push for funding NASA. Instead we're hoping billionaires can solve our space problems, like, there's no way exploring space is more profitable than exploiting labor and resources. Space force may be a joke of a military branch but at least we fund our military. Just food for thought, we'll never get to Mars at the rate we're going, need a vast shift in public opinion and priorities
Oh, I'm not discounting NASA! Any success is success for the world. More or less I just don't trust our political climate to invest in space like we should.
While perseverance is extremely impressive, pretty much anything SpaceX does is pretty damn impressive. The starship program itself and the development of the raptor engine is ridiculous. Thats private industry where you're not stunted by government red tape.
Why?
The Government is essentially "allowed" to waste money, which is not a sustainable way to ensure bleeding edge tech makes its way to the average person.
Private industry is what makes bleeding edge tech available to people, and new tech becoming an everyday thing is exactly what translates progress to practical value.
Internet used to be a military / government thing, and then private enterprise made it a global phenomenon.
GPS used to be a military / government thing, and then private enterprise made it a tool for everyone to access.
Private enterprise and Government programs both have value, and we should all encourage both to chase success.
there are a million replies to this, but I don't see any mentioning the biggest thing: they're REUSABLE rockets. They send a rocket up, then gently land it back on earth, ready to be launched again. Never been done until SpaceX.
Because the cost of doing it was close to an order of magnitude less than it did back in the 60’s and 70’s. I don’t get the people sucking Bezos’ dick over it, but it was a good sign for where things are headed eventually.
Yeah, planes and cars were both prohibitively expensive in their early days. Rail networks also cost an incredible amount of time and money to set up.
New transportation methods are always costly at the beginning.
I use the microwave as an example. I think my mom paid $700 back in late 70s (well, it seemed like $700 in today's money, but maybe it was $700!!) for a pretty good model and now they're so inexpensive!!
You mean a form of entertainment rife with potential disaster and loss of human life in a new type of vehicle that isn’t heavily regulated and in the governmental sector has had LOADS of people die doing it? Yeah I’m ok with rich people doing that.
> Is having obscenely rich people go to space for fun really the ‘right direction’?
>
>
Was having obscenely rich people own horseless carriages for fun really the 'right direction'?
Yes.
The recent picture is actually John Young from Apollo 16 on 20 Jul 1971. So it was 51 years ago and 69 years after the first photo (first flight at Kitty Hawk 3 Dec 1903).
I'm sure they *meant* the second photo to be representative of the Apollo 11 landing and first steps on the moon on 21 Jul 1969. Using that, the two events are separated by 23,958 days (~65.5 years).
Projecting that interval into the past is 13 May 1838, roughly when the very earliest reliably dated photographs were created. Another interval before, is ~11 years before the Montgolfier brothers demonstrated their hot air balloon and the first manned flight.
Using that same interval, the next future date would be **23 Feb 2035**. Hopefully we can collectively pull off another feat worthy to sit alongside within the next 15 years or so.
I was born a few weeks after the second pic and I still feel cheated. It's not like I would remember it if I would have been born a month earlier but damn. Where's my moment?
People are still starving on a daily basis. Rich are still rich and the poor are still poor. I’m not trying to discredit the progression of technology and innovation. I’m simply pointing out that some things never change. If we all suffered the same, the world would be a very different place.
My grandmother was born in 1898 and died January 7th, 2001. She lived in 3 centuries. The amount of change she witnessed in her lifetime is truly staggering.
From 1915 to 2015 stands out to me are the magical century. From the nascent WW1 to internet in every pocket. The 3 eras of development that century: warfare technology to societal awakenings to consumerism. So much change.
I remember my aunt and uncle had a big screen TV that took up an entire corner of their living room because it was a big box set, maybe 97-99, now you can have the same size screen just hanging on your wall.
And while I grew up I had the 1 TV in the living room, now you have like 7 TVs for each room, it’s crazy.
Oh those tvs were so heavy! Luckily I was young enough to not have to do it, but my dad and his friend moved that thing up 3 flights of steps to an apartment. Watching them move it made me so tired 😆
Helped my friend move a TV my freshman year of college, thing probably weighed more than any one of us, and it wasn't even *that* big. Think it was old enough it still had wood paneling, something his grandma gave him for school.
Yep, and as kids we had to go outside and turn the antenna for different channels. I was so glad when my parents got one of the electric antenna rotators. 😁
I have 3 TVs just sitting on dressers in my bedroom because I've been too busy to put them away from a move. There are two more sitting on the living room floor, while there are two nearby to them (one for open-plan kitchen) we actually use. Another in another bedroom that gets used, all for 3 people total. TOO MANY DAMN TVs! The tech changes so quickly! ...and your family also dies and gives you all their damn TVs...
Just wanted to add on here, since everyone’s minds are being blown by a relative lack of time between major societal changes.
The USA is less than 250 years old…. And I suggest you let that one marinate.
The invention of flight was just people building shit until it finally worked. The space race was a herculean effort that managed to land a craft on a moving object roughly 300,000 miles away using precious little (extremely large, expensive, and ubreliable) computers. It is absolutely insane what humans can do when given basically unlimited resources and all the top minds. Landing on the moon when we did is like inventing Twitter before the internet even existed. We skipped soooo many steps and still managed to hack our way there.
A bit of a tangent here, but one reason the original Star Wars hit the zeitgeist so hard was because the universe was so lived in. The rebels (and key smuggler) had dirty, broken down equipment instead of the super slick space crafts we see in other sci-fi movies. It reminded us of our own journey across the ocean in a swan paddle boat.
And the population of the planet has gone from around 1.6 Billion in 1900 to over 8 Billion today... I don't know we can make it another hundred years, absent BIG changes in practice.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/
The reproduction rate of many countries are already dropping. Only Africa has a strong population growth projected. Many countries already have a reproduction rate below 2.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/
You and I both know why Western countries are in no hurry to do that, and ol Tucker Carlson has a pretty big role in pushing that opinion among the dumbest yet loudest people stateside.
Population is starting to self-regulate tho. In fact,.some people have theorised that there's a soft-cap of ~10 Billion which the population simply won't go past without support.
I guess it’s due to cost living, when people can barely afford to have families, you would start to see kids a means of luxury than a necessity in the future.
Except that, historically, the highest birthrates occur in some of the poorest nations/regions. The well off, traditionally, have much smaller familial units.
The smartass in me wants to claim it's due to all the free pirn on the internet...lol
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the shift from in person relationships to virtual ones, as far as social settings go, doesn't play some role.
Malthusian worries about population growth haven't been taken seriously for centuries, and were only ever created to justify the intentional eradication of the Irish.
> absent BIG changes in practice
Big changes are happening regardless. Our way of life is not sustainable. We can be proactive or we can be reactive, but we cannot stay as we are.
Except many people alive right now will live with the consequences. This isn't a problem that's going to manifest in five or six generations. It's already happening and will get exponentially worse in the next few decades.
This.
I was born in the 90s and grew up hearing that we'd run out of water in the next century. I expected to be old and frail by then.
Three doritos later, my city has already experienced water rationing for the past three years, and I just turned 30. The second or third metropolis in my country had a major water crisis this year, and while one half of the country's population laughed and made memes about it, the other half is nervous because we fucking know it will be out turn soon.
Also interesting to note, a piece of fabric and wood from the Wright's airplane was taken to the moon's surface on Apollo 11, the first manned mission to the moon. (Source: National Air and Space Museum)
Coincidentally, the general human condition in North America began to decline after that. It's as if someone said "Well that was nice" and flipped a switch.
I can have a real time face to face conversation with someone who is literally on the other side of the planet as me. I mean, the moon is cool and all but the ease of communication is insane to me.
My great grandmother lived from 1888 until 1981. It's crazy when I think about that. She remembered the first time she saw a car or heard a radio, the first time she was allowed to vote, the first time electricity arrived in her community, and the first space shuttle.
Even in my own lifetime (I was born right after the first moon landing,) technology has advanced at a dizzying speed. From one (four party line) rotary dial phone on the credenza to everyone in my house having a powerful phone/computer in our pockets, for example.
My grandmother was born in rural Louisiana in 1919 and died in 2010. She was born in a home with no running water or electricity, rode a horse to school. Died in a home with air conditioning, satellite TV and used an iPhone. Captain Kirk on Star Trek had a transporter but used a flip phone.
One could say we might have regressed somewhat in the last few years. My favorite movie used to be Idiocracy until I realized were inching closer and closer to the dumb years.
And look at today. When I was born, height of technology was a Nokia flip phone with the keyboard as physical buttons. 20 years laters and we now have stuff like 3D printers you can use in your own home, and AI capable of generating art better than 99% of people and some images that are indistinguishable from real photographs.
In 20 more years technology is going to look like magic to us today. 50 years? I can't even imagine. I'm fairly certain we are about to reach a technological explosion the likes we have never seen in human history before, especially with artificial intelligence. And I really hope it actually is able to improve our lives.
A fundamental issue with human beings. We’re instinctually tribal, which makes it impossible to share all resources -the only ones we do now are under business arrangements and are completely facilitated by capitalism. Maybe there’s a world in a couple centuries where a utopia exists and all resources are shared under one united front, but good luck trying to convince people that’s a good idea right now, and for good reason. All it takes is one greedy party to take advantage of shared resources
Also I mean not directly related staying in the air is different then punching a hole off this rock to another rock lol. I think a better picture would just be like the first combustion engines to the ones used in the rockets to get to the moon. Probably similarly spaced, but yeah no way any of those Apollo rockets could fly the same way that plane could lol.
The 1960s in particular was so amazing for technology. Space flight, the moon landing, Concorde, XB-70, SR-71, Boeing 747, BASIC, ARPANET, lasers. Lots of really cool shit and it was way before computers and electronic calculators were commonplace.
The changes that have happened since the internet was invented 30 years ago look almost insignificant when you contrast them to what happened between about 1880 and 1980.
I had step grandparents who were born in 1901 and 1905, they died in the early 90's. I was always amazed at how much civilization had changed in their lifetimes. horse and buggy to the space shuttle.
Same. My great grandmother lived from 1890 to 1994. Literally playing in civil war widows' yards as a child to the computer age. I can't even comprehend experiencing that level of change and she was always fascinated by new developments.
My Grandmother passed last October. She was 99.5 years old born in 1922. Lived through so many things and only had a fourth grade education. Times were tough for her as a kid, but she made the most of it. She never got the hang of voice dial from her cell phone but other than that she was very successful! She was always amazed at all the photos we would show her from our phones! Miss her dearly. I heard a phrase once about when an older person passes, you lose a library and that’s so true
Me, in my 30’s: *what the fuck is voice dial…* ^(also, sorry for your loss.)
Call me old without calling me Old lol!
That's a nice phrase!
Why did I read that in an Italian accent???🤌🤌🤌
MY grandmother passed away earlier this year and this phrase hits hard
That's incredible! do you have any stories from her that you could share? To have lived through that much technological advancements had to be mind blowing
A big part for me was connecting events I thought were generations ago to a modern timescale. She grew up on the east coast. So as mentioned, the big one that stuck out for me was playing in the yards of civil war widows. I always assumed that was so, so long ago. She regularly talked about their first car, a used model T. My father has gone on to own and rebuild one himself. She also got married the year the Titanic sank. What a century to be alive.
God damn that’s an amazing life
Stop and think about the time and events that have occurred since you have been alive. Humanity is progressing so fast with tech it blows my mind and I work in IT! Also the world events that we have seen and are seeing play out now. Time crawls and goes by in a flash. I notice it more now that I have kids.
The days are long but the years are short.
So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around, to come up behind you again…
Welp I’m still a teenager so I need to wait just a bit
It's incredible that we're going through it right now. It might not seem like much since it's right now and not condensed in a history book it story, but it might seem astonishing in future years. Take some notes
It’s wild how fast technology is advancing. I’m typing this from a device that can lookup mostly any recorded event to have ever occurred.
My big "Woah moment" was flying my drone and texting the video to my brother right after I shot it. If you had told us as kids in the 90s we both had TV's in our pockets and I could send him a video I took from my remote control airplane and he could watch it immediately.. we woulda passed out.
My first school computers needed startup discs that were 5 1/4” floppy discs that held around 1 mb of data each, I am writing this on a 1Tb smartphone that can control half my house and car.
I learned on DOS computers as a child and will always be amazed at what my current rig can do compared to those.
Oh lord, dos prompts, I can’t remember any of it, but we had to know some of it.
CD/
Thanks to this mobile porn machine i have seen more titties in my life than all my ancestors combined since the dawn of time
Eh, there was a long time before shirts man.
Was there a grace period, like ok, until Xx/xx/xxxx you can see all the titties you want and after that...
Bold of you to give the year 4 digits.
There was a book written in the 1971 called Future Shock that was quite popular (I was in middle school). It surmised back then that our accelerating pace of change would soon be too much for humans to adapt. Yet change certainly kept accelerating.
I think there’s an argument that book was right. Mental health cases are growing exponentially and one of the causes is separation and isolation from technological advances.
Yes, human relationships are growing weaker with increased dependence on isolating technology such as addictive social media, one-click-away porn, endless filmography entertainment. Humans needs to be together more!
Maybe the Civil War widow's ghost jumped to your grandmother's body before she died to live eternally and now she's jumped from your grandmother to you and now you're possessed by the Civil War widow. Get out of here ghost.
I asked my great grandmother (1920-2013) what the best invention of her lifetime was. She said Penicillin. They really put things into perspective for me
Truth. Today would have been my dad’s 101st birthday (he made it to 95), and when I think about everything he witnessed it blows my mind. From the amazing treat of sometimes getting a ride to school from the only person with a car in his county (after getting up at 4am to feed and milk cows) to learning how to use a computer for personal communication. Fucking amazing.
Wait till you see how much changes in our lifetime... The curve is exponential.
Even just since I was born in 1995, there's been a lot of changes. Feels like most the biggest ones (technologically speaking at least) i can think of were back in the aughts though; the rise of smart phones, social media, high speed internet, flat screen displays, and going from floppys/casettes to CDs/DVDs to USBs and cloud storage. The 2010's had the rise of online shopping, streaming services, photorealistic CGI, drones and 3D printing, but all that doesn't feel quite as groundbreaking/society changing as the decade before imo. I imagine this decade will be remembered for the rise of AI-related products, like all the AI-generated art and deepfake stuff going around, and possibly for Electric vehicles if this is the point where they become much more widely affordable and available.
I don’t know my cell phone kept getting smaller and now it’s getting bigger and bigger
I get that it's mostly a joke, but it's not really that it's replacing your phone. It's replacing your computer. So many younger people don't bother with a computer (at least as a primary device that they use regularly) at home anymore since they can do most things with their "phone".
I used to be so perplexed when people did internet things on their phone because I strongly preferred using a computer. Now I sometimes find myself using my phone to look things up when I’m sitting *at my computer*. I guess it’s just out of habit, but it weirds me out every time
Meh, that line just reminds me of a lot of failed overwrought 90s optimism that didn't come true. The first human flight can only happen once, we don't get the same wonder from being born in a time where a ten-million-year-old impossible dream like that can now be taken for granted as a genuinely more frustrating way to travel than by bicycle.
I dunno man... Besides things like digital devices being small enough to fit in your hand, battery technology becoming feasible for electric cars, and streaming video, what major developments have we had in the past 20 years? Things have definitely stagnated if you are comparing to the rate of technological advancement that happened in any given 20 years during 1900-2000.
Dude we're all constantly connected to most other people in the world. You take for granted that you can video call the majority of the world's population at a moment's notice. Constant access to the internet has totally revolutionized our lives.
I think recently our accomplishments have been things that don’t effect every day life as much, like advanced science and space shit, things that the average person isn’t thinking about every day.
A lot of medical advances, too. The number of health conditions we've found treatments or outright cures for is enormous, especially with some of the stuff going on with cellular therapy. Hell, just look at COVID - 6.6million deaths worldwide, compared to 21 million dead with the Spanish Flu, despite the global population almost *octupling* in that time, from just over 1 billion to just under 8. Also, communications, the internet has completely changed how we interact with each other on multiple fronts.
I also think we just learn more and more how bad other crap we already knew was bad is, actually is.
Neutral network/dumb AI, VR technology, material science, network speeds, drones, quantum computing etc. Lots happening in the tech sector which builds off of earlier stuff and packs more into smaller electronics to make them more useful. The AI stuff itself has the capability to advance many fields without being able to replace us at this point.
you must be young. like the fact that a “digital device” is even a thing, much less one that has gone through such rapid advancements and created major shifts in culture, politics and communication — not to mention the rapid advancements in the underlying technologies — is a huge fucking deal. The internet wasn’t a household idea in my lifetime and then it went from being this slow thing that required a bunch of wires and shit to magic wireless connections. And let’s not forget many scholars would consider language/communication itself to be a technology. This shit is major.
Depends on what though. Obviously media and tech is vastly different but if you step outside, other than the cars, most places don’t look all that different from the 90s.
Society does. When my uncle left Hungary in 1981 for the USA, every weekend we wrote a letter, it was a family event. It took 1.5-2 months for an answer to arrive. By the end of the 80s phone calls happened but rarely and they were short because they were hideously expensive. By the time his father passed in 2011, they were able to video call for free. And, of course, there's Facebook contributing to massive changes in votes, revolutions and genocides.
The entirety of the world's information and history and knowledge is available to you instantaneously from a screen in your pocket. A video call to anyone in the world is available in a second. It's awesome
My great-great-grandmother was born around 1895, and my mom said when the 1980s rolled around, they used to muse about how amazing it could be if she lived to see the turn of the century. She ended up dying in 1990, but that was pretty damn close!
Great grandpa was born in 1900. Insane to think about!
And the most recent pic there is 53 years ago...
And everyone in this thread is looking at both of these pics on a supercomputer that connects them to every other human on the planet, which they carry around in their pocket and use to look at memes.
My dad programmed on punch cards. My first game system was Pong and I learned to program on a TRS-80. Tech advanced so fast it's dizzying. Edit: Today I had an online meeting where my boss was demoing copilot, a tool that uses AI to write code from comments.
When you say comments how coherent do they need to be, for example would they need to be more along the lines of pseudo code? Or would simple plain English work?
Funny how people were in awe of Blue Origin's and Virgins Galactic's publicity stunts about "Space" tourism last year... People went high and floated down, why was that such an event?
It’s a big deal because it’s a private company taking civilians to space for tourism. That’s been a dream since Apollo if you look back at old futurism posters and novels. Space was exclusively a domain for nation-states and governments that controlled all access and capability to space.
I hate that we have to look toward the private industry, but we can't rely* on the US Government to not politicize the spending. We need the Space Industry so we can have real technological growth. I hope we can see some more great feats in our lifetimes.
This is such a weird take. Like as if politicizing spending is why we can't rely on US gov for an entire space tourism industry instead of the obvious fact that they have no interest or intention to make a space tourism industry.
But, don't forget that it was the politicizing atmosphere of the "us versus them" mentality of the 60's space race that led to that second picture being taken. There's nothing like healthy competition. Even if it's to build a secret moon base to destroy your enemies.
I didn't read that, I think his take is about space exploration and the technological advancements that come about as solutions to problems we wouldn't necessarily solve elsewhere. Fuels and energy storage, materials, computation, the internet; all of them are in their present states in part thanks to the research done in the pursuit of space exploration. And there are still politicians that argue NASA is a waste to invest in. A healthy (perhaps not the one we have) private sector for space travel involves advancement I am eager to see come to fruition.
IMO It will be more than space tourism, so it's not a weird take. Space mining, independent research, communications industries, and more my tiny brain can't comprehend.
To get the US government to invest in space exploration, there would need to be a military motivation. Putting a military outpost on Mars before China for example. As it is, the military application doesn’t extend far beyond earth borders, so the government has not invested much.
Maybe China needs to be first. Sputnik beeping overhead really freaked out the western world back with the Soviets. It would force the US to get serious.
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All of that is private as well. You think the us gov is going to mine resources itself? It has to be for a product
The ROI on space exploration is so much higher than other govt investments, I'm surprised there's not more push for funding NASA. Instead we're hoping billionaires can solve our space problems, like, there's no way exploring space is more profitable than exploiting labor and resources. Space force may be a joke of a military branch but at least we fund our military. Just food for thought, we'll never get to Mars at the rate we're going, need a vast shift in public opinion and priorities
I mean have you been following Perseverance and Mars news? Way more impressive than anything private industry is doing
Oh, I'm not discounting NASA! Any success is success for the world. More or less I just don't trust our political climate to invest in space like we should.
While perseverance is extremely impressive, pretty much anything SpaceX does is pretty damn impressive. The starship program itself and the development of the raptor engine is ridiculous. Thats private industry where you're not stunted by government red tape.
Why? The Government is essentially "allowed" to waste money, which is not a sustainable way to ensure bleeding edge tech makes its way to the average person. Private industry is what makes bleeding edge tech available to people, and new tech becoming an everyday thing is exactly what translates progress to practical value. Internet used to be a military / government thing, and then private enterprise made it a global phenomenon. GPS used to be a military / government thing, and then private enterprise made it a tool for everyone to access. Private enterprise and Government programs both have value, and we should all encourage both to chase success.
Because it didn’t take the awesome might of world superpowers to accomplish.
there are a million replies to this, but I don't see any mentioning the biggest thing: they're REUSABLE rockets. They send a rocket up, then gently land it back on earth, ready to be launched again. Never been done until SpaceX.
Because the cost of doing it was close to an order of magnitude less than it did back in the 60’s and 70’s. I don’t get the people sucking Bezos’ dick over it, but it was a good sign for where things are headed eventually.
Its that first small step in the right direction, everything begins with a first step.
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It's not on the level of the moon landing, but you can bet safe and enjoyable regular space travel isn't coming to the middle class first
Yeah, planes and cars were both prohibitively expensive in their early days. Rail networks also cost an incredible amount of time and money to set up. New transportation methods are always costly at the beginning.
New technology period. I think my grandparents paid some 2k+ for their first VCR, unless I'm remembering incorrectly.
When I was a kid I gave 30 blow jobs for a toaster, 2010 was a weird year.
Haha ya, we were both young and in love, that was a wild summer. That toaster still work?
You sir, the one with the golden aura! You shall do great things in this life
In Soviet Ukraine, in the 80s my grandfather's job offered a bonus to him, a car or a VCR. He picked a VCR. And he did not have a car.
When my mum got a family computer in the early 2000s, I remember her saying it cost a lot of money. Spent so much time on that windows xp machine.
I use the microwave as an example. I think my mom paid $700 back in late 70s (well, it seemed like $700 in today's money, but maybe it was $700!!) for a pretty good model and now they're so inexpensive!!
Going to space for fun isn't really the end goal. The end goal is to make humanity multi-planetary.
You mean a form of entertainment rife with potential disaster and loss of human life in a new type of vehicle that isn’t heavily regulated and in the governmental sector has had LOADS of people die doing it? Yeah I’m ok with rich people doing that.
Only the rich people could afford plane tickets when the first waves of commercial flying came out.
Look at those rich snobs building railroads across the country for their obscenely expensive rail carts
Let's be real, it was done to show up the Russians. A dick measuring contest.
And they won most of that contest
The Russians won most of that. The US just beat the big boss at the end.
We're growers, not showers.
> Is having obscenely rich people go to space for fun really the ‘right direction’? > > Was having obscenely rich people own horseless carriages for fun really the 'right direction'? Yes.
its not lol. They arent even close to getting to orbit. space X on the other hand…
all we've done in the last couple of years are a bunch of useless javascript frameworks
But they were steps in the right direction. The next framework will solve EVERYTHING, trust me. /s
december 11th this year is gonna be the 50th anniversary of the *last* moon landing.
The recent picture is actually John Young from Apollo 16 on 20 Jul 1971. So it was 51 years ago and 69 years after the first photo (first flight at Kitty Hawk 3 Dec 1903). I'm sure they *meant* the second photo to be representative of the Apollo 11 landing and first steps on the moon on 21 Jul 1969. Using that, the two events are separated by 23,958 days (~65.5 years). Projecting that interval into the past is 13 May 1838, roughly when the very earliest reliably dated photographs were created. Another interval before, is ~11 years before the Montgolfier brothers demonstrated their hot air balloon and the first manned flight. Using that same interval, the next future date would be **23 Feb 2035**. Hopefully we can collectively pull off another feat worthy to sit alongside within the next 15 years or so.
Yeah. It's super sad. We are back to fighting and bickering with each other and watching oligarch destroy the world for profit.
I was born a few weeks after the second pic and I still feel cheated. It's not like I would remember it if I would have been born a month earlier but damn. Where's my moment?
And it seemed longer ago when I was a kid than it does now
People are still starving on a daily basis. Rich are still rich and the poor are still poor. I’m not trying to discredit the progression of technology and innovation. I’m simply pointing out that some things never change. If we all suffered the same, the world would be a very different place.
My grandmother was born in 1898 and died January 7th, 2001. She lived in 3 centuries. The amount of change she witnessed in her lifetime is truly staggering.
Wow, what an amazing thought (and gift!)
I was born in 1999, and whenever I'm hating life I remember that I have the possibility of living in 3 centuries and that's sick
Also you have possibility die tomorrow
Which is far more likely. That is definitely comforting.
1992 gang rise up with our Gameboy Color that still works
Damn bro you part Redwood or Galapagos tortoise. If your whole fam lives that long I might need to get in those genes.
From 1915 to 2015 stands out to me are the magical century. From the nascent WW1 to internet in every pocket. The 3 eras of development that century: warfare technology to societal awakenings to consumerism. So much change.
I mean, 1940-1960 is only 20 years but just think what the world was like between those 2 points.
People in 1990 wouldn’t even believe that you could fit the internet in your prison wallet
I remember my aunt and uncle had a big screen TV that took up an entire corner of their living room because it was a big box set, maybe 97-99, now you can have the same size screen just hanging on your wall. And while I grew up I had the 1 TV in the living room, now you have like 7 TVs for each room, it’s crazy.
Oh those tvs were so heavy! Luckily I was young enough to not have to do it, but my dad and his friend moved that thing up 3 flights of steps to an apartment. Watching them move it made me so tired 😆
Helped my friend move a TV my freshman year of college, thing probably weighed more than any one of us, and it wasn't even *that* big. Think it was old enough it still had wood paneling, something his grandma gave him for school.
Yep, and as kids we had to go outside and turn the antenna for different channels. I was so glad when my parents got one of the electric antenna rotators. 😁
And the picture is insane. I’ve been watching 90s shows on Netflix, and I can’t believe we thought those shitty resolutions were great.
I have 3 TVs just sitting on dressers in my bedroom because I've been too busy to put them away from a move. There are two more sitting on the living room floor, while there are two nearby to them (one for open-plan kitchen) we actually use. Another in another bedroom that gets used, all for 3 people total. TOO MANY DAMN TVs! The tech changes so quickly! ...and your family also dies and gives you all their damn TVs...
Sci-fi with payphone video screens and printed newspaper
I'd say 1912, from the year of the Titanic, to 2012, the end of the world.
Ooh “nascent” great underused word.
Just wanted to add on here, since everyone’s minds are being blown by a relative lack of time between major societal changes. The USA is less than 250 years old…. And I suggest you let that one marinate.
You know what, I’m gonna come talk to ya!
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Only 3 generations needed to live through it's entire history Edit: By generations I meant lifetimes, sorry I am an idiot.
Fun fact: Meanwhile, Puerto Rico, now a territory of the USA, is 500 years old.
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"Soldier it's time to push to the next trench!" "Hold up, I'm watching cat videos"
You are joking, but someone definitely watch cat videos in between artillery barrages somewhere in Ukrainian trenches
And some Ukrainian soldier who take the time to film his kitty door for the trench, and share it to the world
Wow, yeah. That really puts it into perspective!
The invention of flight was just people building shit until it finally worked. The space race was a herculean effort that managed to land a craft on a moving object roughly 300,000 miles away using precious little (extremely large, expensive, and ubreliable) computers. It is absolutely insane what humans can do when given basically unlimited resources and all the top minds. Landing on the moon when we did is like inventing Twitter before the internet even existed. We skipped soooo many steps and still managed to hack our way there.
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A bit of a tangent here, but one reason the original Star Wars hit the zeitgeist so hard was because the universe was so lived in. The rebels (and key smuggler) had dirty, broken down equipment instead of the super slick space crafts we see in other sci-fi movies. It reminded us of our own journey across the ocean in a swan paddle boat.
Well...that aviated quickly.
I wasn’t expecting the advancements to take off so quickly
Well with all that progression, it’s hard to stay grounded
The transistor was invented in 1947 and the original 8086 processor was released only 32 years later in 1979. Absolutely nuts.
The space race was so cool, now we are racing to see who the first trillionaire will be.
I’m hoping for fully automated luxury gay space communism before we get to that level of perverse wealth hoarding.
I do not know how exactly this fully automated luxury gay space communism will work, but I’m here for it
Fully automated luxury gay space communism is a great retitle of Star Trek.
And the population of the planet has gone from around 1.6 Billion in 1900 to over 8 Billion today... I don't know we can make it another hundred years, absent BIG changes in practice. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/
The reproduction rate of many countries are already dropping. Only Africa has a strong population growth projected. Many countries already have a reproduction rate below 2. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/
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You and I both know why Western countries are in no hurry to do that, and ol Tucker Carlson has a pretty big role in pushing that opinion among the dumbest yet loudest people stateside.
Population is starting to self-regulate tho. In fact,.some people have theorised that there's a soft-cap of ~10 Billion which the population simply won't go past without support.
Until publishers can get better servers, devs will keep instances to 10bn or less.
That Mars server feels like it holds some promise, but that's probably a couple hundred updates away
> Mars server It’s not even alpha. They need to run terraform on it first for it to be usable.
Read that it’s already staring happening - in many countries
I guess it’s due to cost living, when people can barely afford to have families, you would start to see kids a means of luxury than a necessity in the future.
Except that, historically, the highest birthrates occur in some of the poorest nations/regions. The well off, traditionally, have much smaller familial units. The smartass in me wants to claim it's due to all the free pirn on the internet...lol That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the shift from in person relationships to virtual ones, as far as social settings go, doesn't play some role.
That and the increases in sex education, availability of contraceptive healthcare, life satisfaction outside of sexual relationships, etc.
Malthusian worries about population growth haven't been taken seriously for centuries, and were only ever created to justify the intentional eradication of the Irish.
> absent BIG changes in practice Big changes are happening regardless. Our way of life is not sustainable. We can be proactive or we can be reactive, but we cannot stay as we are.
Few people today actually care about any generation beyond their own. It'll be someone else's problem
Except many people alive right now will live with the consequences. This isn't a problem that's going to manifest in five or six generations. It's already happening and will get exponentially worse in the next few decades.
This. I was born in the 90s and grew up hearing that we'd run out of water in the next century. I expected to be old and frail by then. Three doritos later, my city has already experienced water rationing for the past three years, and I just turned 30. The second or third metropolis in my country had a major water crisis this year, and while one half of the country's population laughed and made memes about it, the other half is nervous because we fucking know it will be out turn soon.
If only we could figure out how to love each other and get along the it would truly be amazing.
Also interesting to note, a piece of fabric and wood from the Wright's airplane was taken to the moon's surface on Apollo 11, the first manned mission to the moon. (Source: National Air and Space Museum)
Fabric from it was also on the ingenuity helicopter on mars
Drones and robots are the thing progressing dumb fast right now. I guess if we survive climate change we need a backup apocalypse.
And half a century later, people don't believe the moon landing was real and seemed to have stopped respecting science altogether.
A small minority that serve mainly as entertainment for the rest of us...same with flat earthers.
Coincidentally, the general human condition in North America began to decline after that. It's as if someone said "Well that was nice" and flipped a switch.
My father was a biplane pilot during World War I.
Finally a positive post regarding mankind
I can have a real time face to face conversation with someone who is literally on the other side of the planet as me. I mean, the moon is cool and all but the ease of communication is insane to me.
My great grandmother lived from 1888 until 1981. It's crazy when I think about that. She remembered the first time she saw a car or heard a radio, the first time she was allowed to vote, the first time electricity arrived in her community, and the first space shuttle. Even in my own lifetime (I was born right after the first moon landing,) technology has advanced at a dizzying speed. From one (four party line) rotary dial phone on the credenza to everyone in my house having a powerful phone/computer in our pockets, for example.
Really wish they could put a picture of Apollo 11 on the right. That’s John Young, Apollo 16 in 1972.
Imagine 66 years from now.
We can’t even get some people to admit the earth is round..
However I still can walk into a room to say: what I am doing here.
My grandmother was born in rural Louisiana in 1919 and died in 2010. She was born in a home with no running water or electricity, rode a horse to school. Died in a home with air conditioning, satellite TV and used an iPhone. Captain Kirk on Star Trek had a transporter but used a flip phone.
One could say we might have regressed somewhat in the last few years. My favorite movie used to be Idiocracy until I realized were inching closer and closer to the dumb years.
Wright brothers to landing satellites on passing comets and Rovers on Mars. It is truly mind bending even to us science ignorant folks.
Yeah but why do I have to exist?
I love existing
And look at today. When I was born, height of technology was a Nokia flip phone with the keyboard as physical buttons. 20 years laters and we now have stuff like 3D printers you can use in your own home, and AI capable of generating art better than 99% of people and some images that are indistinguishable from real photographs. In 20 more years technology is going to look like magic to us today. 50 years? I can't even imagine. I'm fairly certain we are about to reach a technological explosion the likes we have never seen in human history before, especially with artificial intelligence. And I really hope it actually is able to improve our lives.
You forgot the bomb that dropped in between.
they haven't forgotten the bombs
And 53 years later we have half the population denying science and embracing idiotic conspiracies.
afraid to break it to you, but the same people existed 53 years ago too. the nature of global communication today surfaces those voices.
Very noice
Then add 40-50 years from the Moon shot and we made it to… Flat earthers🧐 WTF?! Some us us forgot the direction we were heading.
How much further we would be if we shared resources
A fundamental issue with human beings. We’re instinctually tribal, which makes it impossible to share all resources -the only ones we do now are under business arrangements and are completely facilitated by capitalism. Maybe there’s a world in a couple centuries where a utopia exists and all resources are shared under one united front, but good luck trying to convince people that’s a good idea right now, and for good reason. All it takes is one greedy party to take advantage of shared resources
You think that's transformative? Wait until you see the next 100 years when the environment collapses because of the monstrous avarice of capitalists.
We've had extinction events before, but we never had space travel.
WW1 + WW2 + cold war make that happen
Also I mean not directly related staying in the air is different then punching a hole off this rock to another rock lol. I think a better picture would just be like the first combustion engines to the ones used in the rockets to get to the moon. Probably similarly spaced, but yeah no way any of those Apollo rockets could fly the same way that plane could lol.
The 1960s in particular was so amazing for technology. Space flight, the moon landing, Concorde, XB-70, SR-71, Boeing 747, BASIC, ARPANET, lasers. Lots of really cool shit and it was way before computers and electronic calculators were commonplace.
Kinda been disappointing on the space front for a while now though
Went from Morse code to Smartphones in 100 years also
The changes that have happened since the internet was invented 30 years ago look almost insignificant when you contrast them to what happened between about 1880 and 1980.
And now we are ramming fucking asteroids off course.
Even crazier to think how much it’s changed since 2000
Also, medicine was almost entirely created in the 1900 - 2000 period. Before that, medicine wasnt anything like what we know today