6 ms·

Anyone else find it extremely coincidental that of all the millions of years of human civilization we could have existed in we all just happen to find ourselves

• a_t48 6y ago
  Wouldn't someone at the start of the industrial revolution also think themselves in the most exciting period?
  • arthur_sav 6y ago
    No, no. This time is different.
    • bear8642 6y ago
      Can't tell if you're being earnest or funny. Care to say why?
  • usefulcat 6y ago
    I definitely think of the first ~7 decades of the 20th century that way. If you were born in 1900, you would (most likely) have witnessed: the internal combustion engine, human flight (from nothing to faster than the speed of sound), a major world wide economic depression, two world wars, the invention of nuclear power, major social and legal changes in the '60s (in some places at least), and the exploration of space, starting from nothing and most likely including humans walking on the moon. Or another way to look at it: during the N years I have lived, how much has the the world changed compared to the period of time between 1900 and 1900 + N? Though on reflection, I guess this is probably the sort of thought experiment that becomes more interesting as one gets older..
• montagg 6y ago
  Well, someone had to be there.
• dehrmann 6y ago
  Two things to remember: barring a dark age, there will always be technological innovation, and the human population is at it's peak, so we're more likely to make advancements.
  • treespace89 6y ago
    I picture the peak when the moons of Jupiter are full with a thriving civilization. One trillion strong under one government. Building the ships that take humanity to other stars. How small we will look to them.
    • TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      I picture the peak when the entire universe is teeming with life, but looks empty to very simple creatures like us.
      • morlockabove 6y ago
        Seems awfully convenient that the universe would look identical to us in particular, as opposed to any other observer. Or being computronium.
• dtwest 6y ago
  By some estimates, current living humans make up 7% of the total number of people who have ever existed. Additionally, many during the last 200 years probably thought they were in the most exciting period of technological innovation. When you factor this in the probability of existing during such a period seems much higher than coincidental.
  • CRConrad 6y ago
    Then again, they were all correct (in a way): They did live in the most exciting period of technological innovation there had ever been... So far.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• d_tr 6y ago
  Luck confirmed for me. I feel very grateful and at the same time sad about the advances I won't witness.
• runawaybottle 6y ago
  It’s not the most exciting time. many centuries ago you could discover new humans living a different way. We can’t really do that anymore unfortunately.
  • drewcoo 6y ago
    You still can today but "leaving your bubble" is not common.
    • mantap 6y ago
      How many countries are there where people don't wear jeans?
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• obastani 6y ago
  One thing to keep in mind is that there are way more people alive today than ever before. According to Google, there have been about 108 billion humans alive, and 7.7 of those are alive today. So, your chances of living during the "most exciting period" is better than 7%! In any case, much more likely than any other period in human history.
  • cbozeman 6y ago
    I would like to skip the clock ahead about 500 years, but I'm afraid of arriving in a desolate tomb world. I feel like it wouldn't be that hard for a person from today, especially someone who keeps up with scientific and technological progress, to quickly get up to speed with the world of 500 years from now... but I might be wrong.
    • gryn 6y ago
      In case of time travel to the future (or the past) what you should be worried about are all the other aspects: the social landscape, language, ...
      • cbozeman 6y ago
        If Michael Crichton's Timeline is to be believed, I should be worried about disease, at least for the past... although there's no reason I couldn't contract COVID-2519 and die...
  • maxeonyx 6y ago
    However, if you expect that in the future the population will keep growing by orders of magnitude, what does that imply? A) you're just in an unlikely position B) the population will rapidly shrink and never recover C) this is the most "interesting" time in history, and there are so many simulations of it by the people of the far future that we are more likely to exist in this time.
    • sellyme 6y ago
      D) This is the most interesting time in history so far, and the correlation with population will hold as population grows. Although echoing the opinions of many other commenters, I believe the early 20th century probably takes that crown.
• cbozeman 6y ago
  By Jove, Northington! Look yonder at yon contraption! A beast of iron and stream that can pull yet more buttloads [0] than a team of a hundred horses doth speed along tracks at a brisk pace of 80 miles every hour! Yes, yes... quite right, Wigglesbarton. Truly we live in an age of wonders! Well, I must away to beat my servants. Cheerio, old boy! [0]: Actual unit of liquid measurement, eq. to 126 gal.
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  Neither. throughout most of history that would have seemed to be the case, because you can't compare to the future, only the past. And it's just as likely to be a misleading perception today as it would have been at any earlier time.
• psyc 6y ago
  I’m not sure how to think about it philosophically. Reminds me of the anthropic principle. But as a graphics / game programmer I am elated to have lived through the evolution from monochrome to 4K TrueColor. And beyond? Still unclear on whether 10 bit color is a real thing, and if it is why it isn’t a bigger deal with gamers.
• retsibsi 6y ago
  Where (when) else could we be? If all these lives exist (/will exist/did exist), what does it mean to say that you are living a particular one? Who else could be living it?
• dilyevsky 6y ago
  Most exciting so far
• varvar 6y ago
  That's just mostly viral hype thinking, maintained sometimes by key people in the industry through the press, because it drives money to them and willingness to work for less in certain cases. The decades around 1900 were more innovative than what we've been experiencing the last decades. And yes you can find people thinking the same thing way back in history, with the difference is that now it's been psychotically amplified by mass media, and it is actually annoying. In popular press, and when people have things to sell, they do not include historical facts, because then they cannot drive the hype to new degrees, if they the include historical facts. You may think that they have done their homework when they say "never before in history" but they have either never checked or deliberately ignored history. I've had people I know, and the press swearing up and down that 'this time it's different' since the 90s when it comes to 'A.I' for instance. I'm sure older guys can go back even earlier and remember 'the impending A.I revolution'. Sweet money in that hyped narrative. If you think that "this time it will be different" - congrats they got into your brain, and they do not care that they have done it just 10 years prior. With enough repetition of the same information, and the way the human memory works - it doesn't really matter. You will help them every time by reliably assuming that someone else cared enough to check history before saying that something is "historical", "first time", "never before in millions of years of human civilization". They haven't, and it doesn't matter for their goals. One of these times something will eventually happen. Until then PR money, clickbaits, VC money, startups.. the whole classical techno-utopian centrifuge.
• koonsolo 6y ago
  I don't agree. I was born in 1979, my dad was born in 1944, and my son in 2009. If you look at all of our youths, the biggest difference is between my dad and me, not between me and my son. My dad grew up without TV, 1 person in the street had a radio. Later cars arrived. When you look at my youth, we had computers, but internet arrived when I was 18. My son watches TV, plays computer games, watches star wars, etc. Not that much has changed. Sure they have smartphones and social media, but the difference are details. The biggest impact of computers is already passed us, and happened probably between 1970 and 2000
  • jodrellblank 6y ago
    Not sure I agree with your disagreement; I'm thinking the biggest practical differences in youth would be non-computing and a generation or two earlier - indoor light, central heating, hot water on demand, electric washing machines and vacuum cleaners and motor cars and so on. I don't know which generation it would be but my mom's upbringing in a house with only fires for heating the house and water, and my grandma spending most of her life on cooking and cleaning and my other grandma being from the "make do and mend" tradition of making their own clothes and adjusting hand-me-down clothes, to a world now where sewing is a hobby and household chores much less effort seems a much more significant change than having a TV or not. Or the other way, a generation later; your dad - TVs did exist in the 1950s; Richard Feynman was born in 1918 and his memoirs include fixing radios as a young lad around 1930; that your dad had no radio in the 1950s isn't because they didn't exist, and he could have raised you with no TV and no radio too. My grandad, my dad, and to a small extent myself, grew up in a world where electronics and radios were things made of discrete components which you could build and repair, where chemicals (including explosive things) were things you used in everyday life, could buy from the chemist, played with if you wanted. We all grew up with schooling based on books and paper. At least my dad and I used cassette tapes, film cameras, clockwork oven timers, digital and analogue watches, push-button TVs and radios, microscopes, Meccano, and a world where going down the street left you completely uncontactable. I don't have children, but if I did they would grow up in a world where the only device is a computer, the computer works by magic and is not repairable. By that I mean all the light and sound bleeping toys of the 1980s, audio tape players, CD players, VCRs, film cameras, timers, are all subsumed into computers. Drawing is a thing you do on a cheap tablet, constructing is something you do on Minecraft, research is something you do on Google, and you always have cellphone signal and there's always a world on the other end of it never a ring and no answer. Games are computerised, drones exist mostly to bring a video image back to a smartphone, everything is or has a camera, all storage for audio, video, pictures is digital and copious and portable, all communication is wireless, cellular and ubiquitous. And we grew up in a world where talking to someone else outside the local area was rare - a phonecall was a reasonably expensive luxury, and you would only phone people you knew or companies. Your son watches star wars, but he doesn't exist in a world where if he misses Star Wars at the movie theatre he has literally no way to watch it until it's out on tape. In the 1980s and 1990s only my cousins had a VCR and they only had a handful of films, many recorded from TV. Now films are everywhere - in second hand shops, on Amazon to be delivered next day for $2, on download sites, on YouTube, on NetFlix and Prime and Hulu; he lives in a world where Star Wars is roughly indistinguishable from any other moving picture available on a screen - that it's a movie isn't anything special. Recipes no longer come in books they come in Google results. Games no longer come on boards and cards they come on screens. They don't have to, but in our youths they almost couldn't. Now they do by default. I say the biggest impact of computers to date is always on communication, which I understand was earlier in the USA than in the UK, but for me dates to 2000 exactly; that's the time when talking to other people outside the local area on forums and IRC became normal and commonplace, the time when downloading information took over from other forms of obtaining it. It didn't have to be fast, it only had to be unmetred and not disrupt others using the phoneline. After that, smartphones and always-on-data from circa 2012, always on became always on you.