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

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:

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

But what if...

I'm certainly not.

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...

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.

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...

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