And look at how much life has changed in America from 2015-2025! We went from an imperfect democracy where civil discourse was still 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 the rich pay less in taxes, facts no longer exist apparently, people are having psychotic meltdowns caused by hallucinating AIs that will eventually replace half of all entry level jobs, and science and education and environmental destruction are going back to the 1800s! Soon RFK Jr will legalize lobotomies again because his brain worm made him do it. Oh and then there’s the mass suffering being inflicted on legal, law abiding migrants the likes of which the world has never seen (in the U.S), medicaid and food stamps and obamacare subsidies being ripped away, the pell grant being gutted…
it’s the vehicle of nostalgia hitting the wall between the past and the future
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.
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.
It’s easy to see why people thought we would be a lot more futuristic by now.
i have a little tablet in my pocket that gives me access to the sum total of all human knowledge and can contact anyone else more or less anywhere on/around the planet for instant voice communication.
We can take organs out of dead people and put them in living people and have them survive.
I can be anywhere on the planet within 48 hours
We have cars that can drive themselves
We have robots being controlled live(ish) on mars
We have planes that can stay airbourne indefinately
And there’s many more examples
I can be anywhere on the planet within 48 hours
Challenge accepted.
We’re futuristic as shit.
It’s just the future sucks
I always thought those scifi stories where companies basically rule everything were overblown, but you just see it changing to that in real time.
God I hope I get accepted into the Apple burbclave
With the exception of smart phones, most of the things that make the now bad were unrelated to the tech
Climate change is happening because changing the way the world gets its energy is slow. Fossil fuels way predate flight
Lack of social cohesion is due to the car allowing us to isolate ourselves in sparse suburbia rather than to live in neighbourhoods
Wars are older than humanity but are affecting fewer of us now than in the past, though things were even more peaceful a couple of decades ago
The capture of almost all the value of labour by the owner class could probably have happened anyway, it started before computers, perhaps it was accelerated by computers
We’ve had a lack of social cohesion way less time than we’ve had suburbia.
I think the lack of social cohesion is due to the fragmentation of our media. Before the turn of the century everyone watched the same TV, heard the same music, and got their news from the same places.
Now we’re all so siloed that we don’t have shared cultural base so even people in cities aren’t cohesive.
And the group today with the most social cohesion are the folks who all watch Fox News religiously.
Unfortunately, we’re cyberpunk futuristic instead of whatever futuristic flavor the Jetsons were doing.
Families taking vacations to Venus and swimming in the seas of Europa futuristic?
We still have ways to go
We killed our trajectory by shutting down nuclear investment.
We killed our trajectory by shutting down nuclear investment.
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.
Gotta love capitalism breeded innovation.
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.
Science!
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.
In 1861 Russia abolished serfdom.
In 1961 Gagarin reached space.
It’s just barely implausible a person born a serf could have seen their descendant explore space.
Also the atomic bomb.
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.
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…
Sorry if it’s already been pointed out but they just kind of skipped over boats
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.
Don’t forget the weird rocks that, when refined and enriched, it gets a bit of… well you know…
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.
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
