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.
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.
Damn those Vikings, they’re always first
We reached Mars with probes 50 years ago. I’m not in any way trying to denigrate the amazing achievements of the Mars rovers. But the fact remains that a human crew could have done all that and more (like drill a hole) in a few weeks at best.
Actually the rate of major mission launches and new “firsts” was highest in the late 60s/70s, slowed significantly in the 80s/early 90s, and resumed at a moderate and consistent pace from the mid-90s until today (although today missions became far more complex and focused on detailed science rather than just achieving things).
Thats because the only good progress now is up or positive on the stock markets.
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.
No one predicted phone addiction
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.
To be fait, a lot of sci fi does involve very advanced computing, like HAL in 2001.
Sorry if it’s already been pointed out but they just kind of skipped over boats
Science!
And since then - We have found ways to make all travel worse for comfort, more expensive, and more necessary.
Gotta love capitalism breeded innovation.
more necessary
I haven’t had a commute in over a decade
I think they’re referring to how vehicle-centric planning for cities is more common (as opposed to walking or human-powered locomotion, like biking or skating)
That’s mainly the US though. Here in the Netherlands they are planning cities with the intent to discourage car use as much as possible.
Also Canada where the majority of my experience comes from. If I could see some my taxes going towards a Euro-style infra for moving people and things I would be a much happier person overall.
But it’s also become less necessary as we have much improved telecommunications. I regularly work with people halfway around the world from my house.
Ditto. But the rest of the travel we do need to do to interact with people, amenities, and services, is still worse than it should be due to poor inter-city and city-rural transit. At least here in Canada. My time in Europe showed me how bad we really have it. Even with the unavoidable foibles that happen in the best of cases/countries.
Yeah. The small town I used to live in had trolley service to the nearest city about 20 miles away before they tore it up for a highway.
I solve this problem by rarely leaving my home.
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.
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.
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.
Just a nitpick, the fastest transportation for thousands of years were boats.
Just a nit pick, but you could run faster than sail boats, so they’re only faster for long distance
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 👍
We invented, and rejected, life-saving vaccines.
We also created nukes and religion. So there’s that too.
Check out those prosperity churches. They are like nukes for grifters. They are like gambling on getting free shit with god while the priest gets filthy rich in gods place.
Fossil fuels are a hell of a drug.
The Brooklyn Bridge and the battle of Little Bighorn happened the same year. And there were Native Americans who fought in the battle that were still alive to see man walk on the moon. So in the span of one lifetime we went from Custard’s last stand, to one giant leap for all mankind.
Custard’s last stand
Doubtlessly took place in a cath lab.
