They saw the invention of air travel and space travel within 70 years. As far as they were concerned, nothing was too extraordinary.
Really was a marvelous run, too bad we just kinda quit shortly after we got to the nearest solar body. We send drones for recon to mars and asteroids and deep space now but haven’t made huge leaps in some time.
The promised lunar bases and Martian colonies are so far out still… the Jovian colonies/shipyards are still pure sci-fi dreams at this point
thanks Reagan! Oh and USSR for dropping out of the race. Luckily the Los Angeles engineers were able to use their trophy wives in porno to keep paying the bills instead.
Yeah, almost like something happened in the 70s that put the breaks on most scientific and social progress in the west.
Make no mistake, that is the future that we were entitled to, but which was stolen from us by capitalists and despots.
The old sci-fi writers weren’t wrong in their aspirations for us, we were wrong for letting our futures be taken away from us.
They thought automation would drastically reduce the amount of work someone needs to do to survive, instead of just increasing corporate profit and leading to layoffs.
and it should have reduced the work as predicted
The only reason we aren’t approaching Star Trek utopia is because of the unchecked greed fostered by our systems of capitalism.
There is no reason that, in a world of finite necessary work, increased automation shouldn’t have freed us from the constraints of some of that work.
The fact that it hasn’t isn’t indictment of automation, it’s indictment of unchecked capitalism.
Star Trek’s utopia came after economic collapse and a third World War, in that order. So we actually seem to be on track so far.
Yep. Kill your masters, or youre killing yourself (and also literally every other living thing becauae climate change)
There is no third option. I mean, you could ask shitty Jeff to give it all up and srop, just fucking stop, and be an aging beach himbo and fuckerberg to just run a cringe mma gym and maybe contribute to an obscure Linux GUI a couple times a year. But they won’t. Don’t think they can.
I wish we were exploring space more!
The monkey paw curls. We get entitled pricks, destroying labor protections to build so much wealth they’ve bought everything worth owning on the planet and still yearn for more.
I wish we had robots to do our work!
Another finger curls. Wealth inequality cripples the working class. Corporations consolidate to the point that everything is profit driven… locked behind paywalls or subscriptions. The only publicly available art and literature are made by robots.
I wish we could all communicate with each other!
The last finger curls, and paw crumbles to dust. Democracies around the world flounder as their populations are brainwashed by greedy CEOs in the news and media…taught to fear their neighbors and mistrust those politicians who haven’t been bought and paid for. Online, they’re bombarded by misinformation campaigns on every topic until they live in different realities. Diseases and pestilence once vanquished through science and cooperation return when science isn’t trusted and cooperation with your fellow citizens is viewed as betrayal to your tribe. The world now burns, and it, too, crumbles to dust.
This timeline sucks, yo.
Oooh oooh do conservatism next!!! It’s gotta be something along the lines of “nothing but jacking off, usually in seclusion with other men since 1848” I’m sure you’ve got something spicier in store though
Let’s look at which legislators have held progress back since we landed on the moon and it’s almost exclusively one party…
Democrats would rather lose to Republicans than risk a third party gaining traction. Make no mistake, there’s a mustache-twirling villain capitalist party, and a “I swear I’m trying, please vote for me on this most important election evar” capitalist party.
Our most recent chance at lasting real change was the rail strike. Before that it was Bernie Sanders. They’re doing it on purpose and playing leftists for fools.
This both sides are the same shit is so old now
If you truly can’t tell the difference between them, I don’t know what will help you now.
It is the distant future of the year 2024. Our intrepid hero uses her pocket computer to argue that the world is flat.
I enjoyed how in Foundation novels they had mathematics that could predict the outcome of the future, had intergalactic travel, had personal shields, and a bunch of other fancy shit, but they were still using tapes to record information.
For those of you born after, or near the turn of the century, you don’t understand how magical the year 2000 was. It was a completely different eon, and seemed so futuristic. Conan O’Brien had a whole gig about In the Year 2000. The term “2000” was used to indicate something was fancy, or ultimate, or high-tech. 2000 was the future, and therefore amazing. We did have a sense of optimism though, that is nowhere to be found nowadays.
I loved it when he would continue to do it after the year 2000 had passed, without changing the format.
Didn’t they switch to 3000 at some point? Feel like I remember Andy saying it
That sounds familiar. I don’t recall if it was a one time bit or recurring though.
Tbf, we still do use tape to record information. For archival, magnetic tape is still far and away the undisputed king of high density storage. We’ve got single tape cartridges in the 60TB range.
They just completely suck for regular access so they’re limited to archival only
I remember the show “Beyond 2000” or that 2020 was going to be this magical date that all things happened in.
I’m actually super mad at the stagnation in the way of life.
The first manned flight was 1903, Apollo 11 was in 1969. I’m still going to work by chasing an exploding machine on four round dinosaurs, the same way someone in 1969 would. I still get hungry and homeless the same way someone in 1969 would. I have an 8 hour, five day work week just like someone in 1969 did.
This is bullshit.
On the other hand who cares when you can’t even afford housing or healthcare?
first successful manned powered flight was in 1903. People have been killing themselves by strapping into gliders for centuries. there was also that French guy who flew in a hot air balloon in the 1800s.
Also, fuck the wright brothers.
they were patent trolls, essentially. tried to patent the entire concept of an airplane, and tried to sue Curtiss over him creating a plane that actually didn’t use the technology they had patented.
WTF, stagnation? The internet is transforming our daily lives constantly.
Within your example, at least your four cylinders aren’t spewing lead and smog into your lungs and is massively more efficient. If someone runs a red in front of you, you are much more likely to survive. It can go much longer without any overhaul or tune up. You aren’t having to regularly manually adjust your valves. When you panic brake, you no longer have to pump your brakes. Your car is adjusting breaking to motivate roll over by vectoring brakes too. For other people, they have cars that can largely drive themselves, avoid combusting any gasoline at all, and are more likely to avoid some accidents altogether with automatic emergency braking.
Going outside that, you have pervasive data connectivity, cheap high definition 100" screens, watches that would put the computers of 1969 to shame, a massively improved prognosis for many diseases notably including a whole bunch of cancers, brain implants that help Parkinson’s patients have better motor control. Air conditioning is much more likely to be available, affordable, and effective.
Different areas have certain difficulty curves, basically moving a car is constrained by physics, the heavier than air flight and rocketry similarly have physics challenges that reared their heads quickly. Massive medical, computing, electronics, and connectivity have happened over the last 50 years, as well as a huge number of other advances I’m not thinking about. We have a number of issues that we haven’t fixed, or really can’t be fixed by tech.
