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...

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.

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 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 now everything feels stuck again

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.

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

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...

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.

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...

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

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

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.

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.

~~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.

MFW I’m in a technology singularity racing full bore toward its conclusion.

Now picture it without fossil fuels giving us a 100:1 EROEI

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.

Science!