And now everything feels stuck again
Science Memes
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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Right? The last 25 years we have reached almost nothing, i mean we had evolve in medicine, batteries, electric cars and so on... But noone of it change your life, the last humanity great achivment was internet
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?
But what if...
I'm certainly not.
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 No more going to a library to look up outdated information in a card catalogue.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.
Don't forget the weird rocks that, when refined and enriched, it gets a bit of... well you know...
And fifty years later we still mope around in low earth orbit. Progress has slowed down a lot since the billionaires took over.
Fifty years later we have reached mars with drones and created space probes to expand our knowledge of space.
Actually, we first landed on Mars with the Viking series of probes in 1976. Then there was a whole lot of time where we didn’t do anything before we started again with Mars in the late 90s.
A man named Peter, who had escaped slavery, reveals his scarred back at a medical examination in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, while joining the Union Army in 1863.
Yup, that's far alright:
Side note: ICE now has a bigger budget than the FBI, DEA and Bureau of Prisons put together.
What was the justification for that budget?
That immigrants are literally an invasive military force that is destroying the US
The Babylonians knew a * b = 1/4 * ( (a+b)^2 - (a-b)^2 ), and used tables of 1/4 * x^2 to do multiplication by addition. It took three thousand years for Napier to discover modern logarithms. The slide rule was invented eight years later.
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.
One of the Wright brothers managed to live to see the end of WWII. Imagine the weird janky flying machine you and your dead brother designed in a bicycle shop in Dayton is being used to decimate Europe while boats full of the things are redefining naval warfare across the whole of the pacific before one drops a weapon so powerful that it becomes the basis of mutually assured destruction
That looks like the 14-bis from Santos Dumont in the picture. He did not live enough to see WW2, but he ended up helping design planes for WW1 and got terribly depressed about it, commiting suicide later.
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.
Just a nitpick, the fastest transportation for thousands of years were boats.
Forget the moon. We're all within a few generations of the first people who had access to indoor toilets on a mass scale.
And since then - We have found ways to make all travel worse for comfort, more expensive, and more necessary.
Travel is much, much cheaper than it used to be.
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.
And now we have self-driving cars that are able to kill people without human intervention 👍