this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 235 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (34 children)

And fifty years later we still mope around in low earth orbit. Progress has slowed down a lot since the billionaires took over.

[–] StaticFalconar@lemmy.world 112 points 2 days ago (21 children)

Fifty years later we have reached mars with drones and created space probes to expand our knowledge of space.

[–] floo@retrolemmy.com 111 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] altphoto@lemmy.today 37 points 2 days ago (8 children)

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:

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 24 points 2 days ago (8 children)

Side note: ICE now has a bigger budget than the FBI, DEA and Bureau of Prisons put together.

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[–] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 26 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Don't forget the weird rocks that, when refined and enriched, it gets a bit of... well you know...

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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?

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[–] W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 64 points 2 days ago (12 children)

It’s easy to see why people thought we would be a lot more futuristic by now.

[–] PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@feddit.uk 37 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

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

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

I can be anywhere on the planet within 48 hours

Challenge accepted.

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[–] Bo7a@lemmy.ca 73 points 2 days ago (18 children)

And since then - We have found ways to make all travel worse for comfort, more expensive, and more necessary.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

Travel is much, much cheaper than it used to be.

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[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 41 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] narwhal@mander.xyz 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 28 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 49 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Forget the moon. We're all within a few generations of the first people who had access to indoor toilets on a mass scale.

[–] exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 30 points 2 days ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 45 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (6 children)

Just a nitpick, the fastest transportation for thousands of years were boats.

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[–] thatradomguy@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago (4 children)

We also created nukes and religion. So there's that too.

[–] Fleur_@aussie.zone 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)
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[–] SpecialSetOfSieves@lemmy.world 37 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[–] simsalabim@lemmy.world 37 points 2 days ago (4 children)

And now we have self-driving cars that are able to kill people without human intervention 👍

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

But what if...

[–] phdeeznuts@mander.xyz 3 points 1 day ago

I'm certainly not.

[–] rustydrd@sh.itjust.works 21 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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...

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

And just 20 years later we have destroyed the concept of truth. What a time to be alive.

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[–] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 28 points 2 days ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] samus12345@sh.itjust.works 19 points 2 days ago

I've thought from time to time about how being able to see significant societal change in a person's lifetime is a very recent phenomenon. For many thousands of years, things stayed pretty much the same from birth to death unless you happened to live though a significant event. It's neat that I've gotten to witness change in a way that one would have to time travel to experience in the past, but monkey's paw, the change isn't always good...

[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 38 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Feels like we're going backwards now with like anti-vax stuff. A lot of tech seems to be getting worse for users, too, like IoT gadgets that stop working for remote reasons

[–] truxnell@aussie.zone 38 points 2 days ago

We create tech these days to extract maximum value from the populace, not so much to make lives better

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