And yet I watched a crap film the other week where somebody went back in time 20 years, and the only difference was everyone had flip phones instead of smartphones.
So the era of progress is over.
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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And now there are flat earthers and anti vaxxers. Everything going backwards.
Sorry if it's already been pointed out but they just kind of skipped over boats
~~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.
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...
Shit is happening so fast that shows like The Boys feel dated the moment the new season comes out.
Pre covid actually feels like another era entirely.
it's the vehicle of nostalgia hitting the wall between the past and the future
Science!
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.
Honestly the first aviation was a human jumping. It didn't happen until about 3000 BCE. Much later than you'd think. Until then we always kept one foot on the ground. Those ancient humans that did persistence hunting? Yeah, turns out it was technically power walking.
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.
This is because of the socio-political dimension of things. It’s not just that people just randomly changed their minds, so much technological innovation is driven by war or the threat of war.
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.
Or there are phones or cybernetic radio implants but they're just a way to make phone calls.
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.
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.
Still find it absolutely amazing the moon landing happened in the 1960s, back when the Boeing 707 was popular. just amazing what humanity can achieve with the right priorities
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.
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