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And since then - We have found ways to make all travel worse for comfort, more expensive, and more necessary.
With internet, mobile phones, computers, travel seems to be way less necessary than before
I was referring to the city planners as @EtherWhack@lemmy.world correctly surmised.
I also have worked from home* for almost two decades. But the non-work travel is still stained by the horrible planning in most urban sprawls.
* For various strange definitions of “home”. From a campground to an RV on a lake, and apartments in Switzerland to rotting farms in Alberta.
I dunno for some years now city planners and their education has had increased focus on public transit, walkability, 15 minute cities and whatnot.
I’d say combined with the car centric design being worse in the say 50’s, 60’s and so on and those times having no real means for remote work and less opportunities for communication remotely, I don’t think we’re at the worst point.
Not in Canada. Not in the US.
Over here we are actively gutting existing bicycle infrastructure to please the right wing morons
I mean weren’t we all talking about our own areas?
I don’t think I understand your point here.
I was talking about my experience which is 80% in North America. Your points do not apply in North America as we have actually been getting worse for non-car travel in most cities since the 90s.
And that’s without even mentioning the atrocities that are considered inter-city or city-rural travel.
I was just saying that the developments aren’t true for my area. The area wasn’t specified in the start so that’s why I mentioned it
Travel is much, much cheaper than it used to be.
more necessary
I haven’t had a commute in over a decade
I think they’re referring to how vehicle-centric planning for cities is more common (as opposed to walking or human-powered locomotion, like biking or skating)
That’s mainly the US though. Here in the Netherlands they are planning cities with the intent to discourage car use as much as possible.
Also Canada where the majority of my experience comes from. If I could see some my taxes going towards a Euro-style infra for moving people and things I would be a much happier person overall.
Move to Europe and you will get that change immediately
We actually did live in switzerland back in 2020 (I know, schengen is not EU) and were about to lease a home in France, but someone in my family fell ill and I had to come back to Canada.
The transit, grocery , pharmacy, and cultural access was amazing to us, even in times when locals were complaining of severely limited services.
But it’s also become less necessary as we have much improved telecommunications. I regularly work with people halfway around the world from my house.
Ditto. But the rest of the travel we do need to do to interact with people, amenities, and services, is still worse than it should be due to poor inter-city and city-rural transit. At least here in Canada. My time in Europe showed me how bad we really have it. Even with the unavoidable foibles that happen in the best of cases/countries.
Yeah. The small town I used to live in had trolley service to the nearest city about 20 miles away before they tore it up for a highway.
I solve this problem by rarely leaving my home.
And destroyers.
Just a few months into its reign, the US regime intends to ruin decades of progress in science and space exploration:
On May 30, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced a plan to cancel no less than 41 space missions — including spacecraft already paid for, launched, and making discoveries — as part of a devastating 47% cut to the agency’s science program. If enacted, this plan would decimate NASA. It would fire a third of the agency’s staff, waste billions of taxpayer dollars, and turn off spacecraft that have been journeying through the Solar System for decades.
Shutting down a working, completely functional mission like New Horizons, in particular, that may just be on the cusp of a huge discovery - it has seen signs of a new, second “ring” to the Kuiper Belt - is the ultimate repudiation of the American self-image as explorers of the frontier. And all of this at a time when the Chinese are just about catching up to “the West” in space science prowess.
As a kid, I never understood what the Romans were trying to say with their Janus myth. Turns out that Orange Janus is simply the god of endings.
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it’s the vehicle of nostalgia hitting the wall between the past and the future
And only 30 years after that, we’re surfing the interwebz, sailing down the data highway at the speed of light. I’m running out of metaphors to chain together…
And just 20 years later we have destroyed the concept of truth. What a time to be alive.
Then the inherent contradictions of capitalism really started to hit, quantitative change passed to qualitative change and progress grinded to a halt and science and technology are regressing now in the imperial core.
Quality into Quantity Time
otoh, people in both eras used gas powered cars, telephones, telegraphs, and manual typewriters. They could both go to movies, ride trains, and take ocean voyages.
A person from 1903 would need a few days to adapt themselves to 1969 technology.
But someone from 1969 coming into 2025 would be lost. Most people in 1969 didn’t use credit cards, and had never seen an ATM. They used rotary phones and antenna TV.
No, most people in 1903 lived not that much differently from the Medieval times. Urbanization was still low then. An average person from 1969 would adapt to 2025 much faster then an average person from 1903 to 1969.
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.
No one predicted phone addiction
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.
Yeah, there definitely are some waved away elements that are basically magic. I’m just binging TNG now, but I saw the Lower Decks tribute to many-a transporter incidents.
I mean if you can transport and not at the same time (the copy version), it is not hard to think that once that buffer is cleared on the one side, it’s game over man.
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.
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We also created nukes and religion. So there’s that too.
Praise atom
Bunch of real hoopy froods there
Check out those prosperity churches. They are like nukes for grifters. They are like gambling on getting free shit with god while the priest gets filthy rich in gods place.
My grandmother was an adult through that 66-year period. Lived to be 99. She rode to town on a horse as a kid and took trips on jets before she died.
Forget the moon. We’re all within a few generations of the first people who had access to indoor toilets on a mass scale.
India basically introduced toilets in a single generation.
According to this article, in 1993, 70.3% of the Indian population did not have access to toilets. By 2021, the number dropped to 17.8%. So literally more than half the population of India got access to toilets within 30 years.
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.
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.
I feel like the pictures over-exaggerate the difference a bit. The wright flyer was literally made by two people in their spare time while the space program was around 4% of all federal spending and had almost half a million people working on it in some capacity.
Science!
