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>This is an incredible time to be alive.... Yea? Why, because we have almost completely fucked up our home planet and will have to abandon it in few years. And

• dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Imagine that you were living in a time when all the great people that we learned about in the history classes were alive. > Those were incredible times to be alive... No such time existed. Its not like "the past" all happened at once, or even in one lifetime. > How many great people, how many great writers, how many great singers and poets of the current times do you imagine students after fifty years will be learning? Probably lots, many of which we're overlooking because of either excessive familiarity (in terms of art) or insufficient perspective to appreciate impact (in terms of science and technological inventions.) Lots of the people of the past we read about and hold up today, whether in artistic or technical fields, weren't recognized in their own time. Our time is, likely, no better at recognizing those among us who will be viewed as notable in the future.
• ygjb-dupe 10y ago
  > Why, because we have almost completely fucked up our home planet and will have to abandon it in few years. Yes, we did. I don't know that we will have to abandon it, but we do know that human civilization is on the precipice of change, largely in part due to our relentless pace of technological process and reduction in global inequality. Setting aside income and wealth distribution on an individual level, most technology available to humans is more broadly available to humans across the globe than at any time in history. We failed to improve away from fossil fuels for largely economic reasons, and have caused irreparable damage to our ecosystem as result. That doesn't mean we haven't done incredible things along the way, and it doesn't mean that human civilization is going to come to an end, it simply means that it will change. > Imagine that you were living in a time period when electricity was invented. There is the rub. Electricity wasn't invented, it was discovered. From the conventionally excepted discovery of electricity to the invention of devices which can be used to generate and distribute electricity, development of modern infrastructure and advances, and the most recent experimental batteries (and if you don't think batteries are experimental, take a good look at Samsung's recent failures), we have been on a 2500 year journey (the first documented history of electrical phenomen was the triboelectric effect, and documented in amber by ancient greeks) to get where we are. We have vastly improved our understanding of how electricity works, but we haven't yet mastered it. We probably will never stop finding new and interesting ways to capture new forms of energy with the express goal of generating electricity, and it is almost certain that we haven't begun to imagine the different ways it can be used. Along the way, we have used electricity to improve virtually every aspect of human life. > Can you imagine how people felt when they saw the first cinema? Yes, approximately. It suspect it felt as amazing and futuristic as the first time I connected to a BBS. It probably felt approximately the same way it did when I got my first internet connection, and decoupled my ability to learn from my (at the time) poor financial circumstances. > When they heard voices that came across the town? Yes, because I remember the first time I had a video call with my girlfriend when I was on a business trip. > When they saw the first locomotive? Yes, because I watched with glee as the Challenger shuttle took off, and then confusion and sadness when the Challenger accident unfolded in videos played on the news (I was 8 at the time). > Imagine that you were living in a time when all the great people that we learned about in the history classes were alive. Education in the sciences and the arts is more accessible than at any time in human history, in large part due to the advent of the internet. Think of all of the great people who will emerge over the next few generations! > How many great people, how many great writers, how many great singers and poets of the current times do you imagine students after fifty years will be learning? Has it occurred to you that the reason that we don't know all of the great minds and great artists that have emerged in the last century largely because the glut of invention, ingenuity and art has drowned our ability to single out greatness? The great contemporary achievement is not that we have somehow failed to live up to our potential and there are no longer great people, it is that we have reduced the barrier to achievement so dramatically that almost anyone simply needs to try to have the opportunity to succeed in the way that only a select few were able to in the past. In what era could the child of a refugee grown to build one of the greatest technology empires we have seen? Steve Jobs is and will be one of our contemporary greats; his story of building Apple, being pushed out, building a new empire, and triumphantly returning to control of Apple and leading it into a golden age is quite literally legendary (seriously, it's an amazing story, even overlooking Jobs behaviour, personality, and all the dramatic license that my summary takes! Do you really believe that it was 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae or is it just a beter story when you leave out the Thespians and Thebans?). In what era could the child of an upper middle class family build an means of connecting more than one billion people each day? Mark Zuckerberg is and will be one of our contemporary greats. If Elon Musk achieves even a fraction of his dreams, he will be renowned in history as one of the most important contemporary great people. Whoever gets the credit for colonizing Mars may go down in history as the reason there still is a human species, depending on how the next century plays out :) If you think we live in boring times, you would do yourself a service by taking some time out to explore what happened to your sense of wonder, and maybe try living without the modern conveniences invented in the last 30-100 years, even for a week.
• EdSharkey 10y ago
  > It is an extremely boring time to be alive. It is <whatever adjective> time to be alive that you choose it to be. The fact that you aren't teary eyed with joy about today's endeavors just tells me that you've got a laundry list of historical achievements you want to make before you croak it. Oh, what, you expect all that striving and effort from the rest of us? Spend your precious time contributing (beyond tossing out criticism), try to sing the praises of good things when you get the chance, and you might not be filled with regret in your later years.
  • babyrainbow 10y ago
    > Spend your precious time contributing (beyond tossing out criticism), try to sing the praises of good things when you get the chance, and you might not be filled with regret in your later years. No. Any fool can sing praises. But instead, try to criticise and question every one of those supposedly good thing that gets thrown in your way. Or else you might not have a later year at all... The reason we are in this mess in the first place, is that there were too many to sing praises and too few to look beyond the immediate future, and all those voices that did look beyond the immediate future and warned about it, were overwhelmed, and were looked down as you now look down on me and my comment...
    • EdSharkey 10y ago
      I get it, you see yourself as the watchman on the tower. You're telling people to not be suckers, sheep, etc. Wake up, don't look at the bright and shiny, there are REAL problems here. Am I hearing you correctly now? Griping, by itself, is repulsive. Getting grumpier because others are turned off by you doesn't help. In my opinion, rather than doubling down on the grouchiness, the best thing you can do is flip the script; turn off the complaints and retort with leadership or ideas on how you'd improve things. I doubt you're as skeptical and questioning as you think you are, though. You use lots of hyperbolic language which makes me think you've bought into a lot of hype.
      • babyrainbow 10y ago
        As I see it, there is nothing in your comment that is worthy of a reply. So not bothering.