alt Hacker NewsI can't imagine what it would have been like to grow up with horse and carriages only to see us landing on the moon before you die. That's some serious societal whiplash.
I do like to imagine future generations looking back on the era of the internal combustion engines with absolute horror.
"You won't believe this, but for like 200 years, any time a person wanted a machine to move stuff, those apes would carry around tens of gallons of some crazy toxic combustible fluid which they'd spray into a heavy block of metal then bung 20,000 volts of electricity through it to make it explode. Just to spin a wheel! Then they'd pump the poisonous fumes out from the rear of the machine like a cloud of evil flatulence. Into the same air they breathed! There were literally billions of these machines all over the planet. Everyone owned one! There was so much of it, the planet started getting hotter! It was crazy!!"
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Tech changed at a much faster and drastic pace then compared to now. Another example the first ever nightclub opened and ran from the early 1870s until 1910. The Haymarket Historical Marker https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=121028
That will pale in comparison to how future generations view plastics.
Imagine if we ate and drank out of lead paint containers constantly for decades before discovering their health impacts. That's basically what has happened with plastics.
Indeed.
Here's one for you: There's a 10–15% chance, even barring radical life extension tech, that I'll live long enough to see the moon completely disassembled by von Neumann replicators.
I'm envy of people of the past having real freedom in their lives. I wouldn't be surprised that future generation would envy of us, who have the freedom to move fast anywhere.