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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.
We have even figured out aviation on mars so thats kinda cool :D
No no, it’s cooler than that. We tried out aviation on Mars to make sure we figured out how to do aviation on Titan.
Goddamn that’s so fucking cool
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.
And 59 years after landing on the moon we’ve just been watching Space X rockets explode instead of going back on rockets NASA proved it could engineer with slide rules and drafting tables.
The reason why spaceflight stagnated for 50 years is because IT came in the middle of it.
All the smart people went to build computers instead of rockets, and now we have smartphones and the internet.
Now that IT is stagnating (enshittification), smart people will probably go back to spaceflight.
All the smart people went to build computers instead of rockets, and now we have smartphones and the internet.
I work in software, most of my peers are not spacefaring material. The issue is budget and ability/desire to do things that are bold instead of sending robots up there.
It’s easy to see why people thought we would be a lot more futuristic by now.
i have a little tablet in my pocket that gives me access to the sum total of all human knowledge and can contact anyone else more or less anywhere on/around the planet for instant voice communication.
We can take organs out of dead people and put them in living people and have them survive.
I can be anywhere on the planet within 48 hours
We have cars that can drive themselves
We have robots being controlled live(ish) on mars
We have planes that can stay airbourne indefinately
And there’s many more examples
Phones can also video call, lead you to just about anywhere you want to go on the planet, and store millions of pictures/videos/writings of a person’s personal history. Unprecedented.
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:
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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…
And just 20 years later we have destroyed the concept of truth. What a time to be alive.
And now we have self-driving cars that are able to kill people without human intervention 👍
Truly the pinnacle of efficiency
And now there are flat earthers and anti vaxxers. Everything going backwards.
And since then - We have found ways to make all travel worse for comfort, more expensive, and more necessary.
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
We create tech these days to extract maximum value from the populace, not so much to make lives better
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.
Say what you will about the USSR (and I certainly will) but they did develop and industrialize incredibly quickly.
Then the inherent contradictions of capitalism really started to hit, quantitative change passed to qualitative change and progress grinded to a halt and science and technology are regressing now in the imperial core.
Quality into Quantity Time
The chariot lasting as high tech for 3800 years has some part to do with the dark ages…
Most modern historians consider “The Dark Ages” to be a myth.
Even if that weren’t the case you are talking about 500 years out of nearly 4 centuries.
This is also an extremely ‘Western’ centered POV. While Europe was in the “Early Middle Ages”, cultures around the world were thriving. The ‘Byzantine Empire’, The Tang dynasty in China, The Maya Civilization etc. Innovation happened all over the world, not just in Western Europe.
The dark ages weren’t dark. Humanity didn’t just stop for 1000 years, you know?
Western history classes gracefully ignore things like the chinese empires, the golden ages in the arabic world (which oh so happened to be to be during the “dark ages” of Europe and saw science flourish there) and anything that happened on the american continent prior to colonialization (not like we know too much about it given the colonizers’ rampages and targeted cultural destruction). Let alone African history, Indian, South-East Asia, Australia…
Same of course with religions. But watching that Martin Luther movie three times was definitely important I guess, cause it “changed the whole (!) world”. I fucking hate all of this bullshit.
Sorry for the rant.
Dark ages didn’t happen is the issue with your point. There were many new technologies developed and progress being made.
Only thing I, as a European, know about MLK is that “I have a dream” speech and that he has something to do with rights for black people in America. My memory stops there.
Funny enough, in Catholic religion class I learned more interesting things about history than in history class itself. My teacher made sure we knew about other religions, how all of them are connected, how they developed, what some did while others went crusading, etc. Best teacher I’ve ever had.
Only thing I, as a European, know about MLK is that “I have a dream” speech and that he has something to do with rights for black people in America. My memory stops there.
Unless this is a joke and I’m just being dense, I believe Natanox was talking about Martin Luther, and not Dr. Martin Luther King Jr (MLK).
I asked my teacher why we were so christianity-centric in the class, we literally never talked about things like Shintoism, Islam and more. She then loudly proclaimed to the class that I “wanted to have an extra (!) block about FOREIGN religions” (of course causing 90% of the class to scream at me - bullying was rampant there anyway). She then smiled at me in the most fucking dense way possible to basically say “see, nobody wants that” and from then on ignored all my protests and just left, ignorantly smiling like the idiot she was.
We proceeded to not learn anything about them, therefore the only influence we had (since it was the countryside) were the news talking about islamic terrorists.
Also same about MLK of course. He existed and he had a dream, end of history.
Even within Europe, there was significant scientific progress during said dark ages. It’s extremely obvious by just looking at a 9th century building to those from the 14th century (especially churches). The latter require profund knowledge of mathematics/civil engineering. We went from tiny windows in 2m thick brick walls to vast, airy Gothic cathedrals (although those did take a couple of centuries to actually finish).
Although to be fair, that knowledge did largely come to Europe from the scholars of the Arabic world.
Orville Wright (of the Wright brothers) also only died 21 year prior and was able to fly on a jet before his death.
Imagine how much pressure that jet pilot was under. The guy who literally invented flying is your passenger
Eh, there were a dozen different guys that invented flight (or were close to it) around the same time. The Wright Brothers were just the ones to successfully defend their patent
The technology had just progressed to a point where fixed-wing flight was viable, so the invention became inevitable
