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Yeah, going from horse drawn carriages, mercury cures and cloth biplanes to antibiotics, atom bombs, the invention of the computer and landing on the moon: tota

Yeah, going from horse drawn carriages, mercury cures and cloth biplanes to antibiotics, atom bombs, the invention of the computer and landing on the moon: totally in the same class as ... better batteries and being able to look at porn on a packet radio equipped nerd dildo instead of a magazine. You can say "shit" and "fuck" all you like; it won't help you: 1919->1969 vastly eclipses 1969->present in all ways. Any one of dozens of breakthroughs in 1919-1969 (atom bombs, digital computing, spaceflight, antibiotics ....) eclipses all subsequent ones.

scarejunba 7y ago
No way, man. You've started with the conclusion and now you're satisfying yourself. That's fine but it's not even close to the right conclusion. Gives me chills, all the remarkable breakthroughs. Crispr is serious stuff. Mapping the human genome. A permanent human space settlement. You can be as cynical as you want but that's more a personal failing than humanity failing. Edit: And hahaha, I just checked the news and guess who won the Nobel for Chemistry? "Better batteries" as you so flippantly put it.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  A lot of the dismissal is just something like "arrivalism". Like, the atom was harnessed in 1950, so it gets that date, never mind that reasonably safe designs took another 30 or 40 years. Computers existed, so never mind the massive cost decreases and capability increases that made them available and useful to many more people. Treat the arrival dates as the period society takes to integrate the technology and we are still in the transistors window. (I think this is a reasonable point to make in the context where I started off talking about 50,000 years)
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  >Gives me chills, all the remarkable breakthroughs I certainly got a laff from this line. So many remarkable things ... so many wonders ... which boil down to lithography and networks. I wonder what you would say if you didn't have your nerd dildo. "We have flat screen TV now! Totally as important as nuclear weapons!" >I just checked the news and guess who won the Nobel for Chemistry? "Better batteries" as you so flippantly put it. Yep; emphasizing my point at how out of gas our degenerate era of both scientific and technological development is. Let's compare to the Nobel for the Haber–Bosch process, without which, there'd be about 5 billion fewer living people.

scarejunba 7y ago

No way, man. You've started with the conclusion and now you're satisfying yourself. That's fine but it's not even close to the right conclusion. Gives me chills, all the remarkable breakthroughs. Crispr is serious stuff. Mapping the human genome. A permanent human space settlement. You can be as cynical as you want but that's more a personal failing than humanity failing. Edit: And hahaha, I just checked the news and guess who won the Nobel for Chemistry? "Better batteries" as you so flippantly put it.

maxerickson 7y ago
A lot of the dismissal is just something like "arrivalism". Like, the atom was harnessed in 1950, so it gets that date, never mind that reasonably safe designs took another 30 or 40 years. Computers existed, so never mind the massive cost decreases and capability increases that made them available and useful to many more people. Treat the arrival dates as the period society takes to integrate the technology and we are still in the transistors window. (I think this is a reasonable point to make in the context where I started off talking about 50,000 years)
scottlocklin 7y ago
>Gives me chills, all the remarkable breakthroughs I certainly got a laff from this line. So many remarkable things ... so many wonders ... which boil down to lithography and networks. I wonder what you would say if you didn't have your nerd dildo. "We have flat screen TV now! Totally as important as nuclear weapons!" >I just checked the news and guess who won the Nobel for Chemistry? "Better batteries" as you so flippantly put it. Yep; emphasizing my point at how out of gas our degenerate era of both scientific and technological development is. Let's compare to the Nobel for the Haber–Bosch process, without which, there'd be about 5 billion fewer living people.