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...

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

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.

And now there are flat earthers and anti vaxxers. Everything going backwards.

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.

Sorry if it's already been pointed out but they just kind of skipped over boats

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.

~~we are creators~~ We enjoyed a short period of exponentially increasing complexity due to a massive amount of 'immediately free' energy afforded us through the burning of fossil fuels.

And now everything feels stuck again

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:

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.

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

And yet I watched a crap film the other week where somebody went back in time 20 years, and the only difference was everyone had flip phones instead of smartphones.

So the era of progress is over.

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

There is no individual. There is only network. System. Systems create. They output. They produce. They produce well and tremendously when the system is healthy. Make the system healthy for once. I mean again.

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.

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 👍

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

Orville Wright (of the Wright brothers) also only died 21 year prior and was able to fly on a jet before his death.

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.