I've previously worked on self driving cars, and spaceships. Over my career, it doesn't feel like anything's changed more than incrementally. A lot of the expensive technologies I worked with professionally are now starting to appear in consumer electronics, though, and that's really cool. It seems like modern breakthroughs come from "Elon Musking" existing technology into being cheaper and better, and then "Apple-ing" it into a mainstream commodity.
There's a good chance that it will also be around for a while in regards to spare parts and such:
> The Lindy effect (also known as Lindy's Law[1]) is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, it is also likely to have a longer remaining life expectancy.
How much garbage is on the radio today? From the last decade? From the last generation?
Music hasn't gotten worse, but we're still listening only to the good stuff. Pantera will be around another generation at least, my grandchildren's grandchildren will likely still listen to The Beatles. And starship captians will undoubtedly invite the wives of dignitaries to onboard Mozart recitations en route to the boring interstellar negotiations of their husbands.
I hope gender roles will have progressed more by then, though technological progress is often more rapid than social change.
Your parent comment "interjected" gender roles into the discussion in a jarring and frankly outdated way. Not sure why an obscure TNG reference makes you immune from all criticism?
Things like synthetic biological manufacturing. The decoding and understanding of the basic biologic software that runs our cells and bodies.
I'm convinced a huge breakthrough is on the horizon, that will nudge us down the correct path of building AGI, based on better understands of bioelectric computation.
Yeah, one of those is much less inpressive than the other. We landed a probe on mars before we landed people on the moon
In the first period Engineers and Industrialists were in charge of companies, and then we succumbed to financialisation and bean counters, and progress has stalled.
The modern world is only an eyeblink old in the grand scheme of history.
The first antibiotic known to modern medicine was an anti-syphilis drug called Salvarsan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsphenamine
Here's an example of E. coli developing resistance to a _strong_ antibiotic within 12 days [0].
Unfortunately, I know more than a few people who take antibiotics even when they get common cold/flu, which doesn't make sense since viruses are not bacteria and they should get vaccinated instead.
Allegedly almost all chickens have it.
It's not controversial that the two big drivers of this problem are the countries where antibiotics are available over-the-counter, and the widespread use of antibiotics in livestock.
These practices must end if we want to be able to keep using antibiotics to save lives in the future, and it is a question of policy alone.
On home medicines in general, though, I'd like to add a PSA. Put an annual event on your calendar to check your inventory to make sure you have an adequate supply and nothing is expiring soon.
It really sucks to say fall off your bike and somehow sprain your entire left side, making most movement agony, and then find that you need to go to the store because you are out of ibuprofen and acetaminophen.
The cream it would seem wouldn't be able to get to bacteria deepest into the cut.
We're living in an era where things like the Great Wall of China or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are created on a regular basis.
I just hope this progress isn't sigmoid shaped, or that we've more than passed the half-way mark.
- As a kid I thought the moon landing was in the distant past, being 11 years before me. Now I have friends who watched it.
- The war seemed even more distant, but I know concentration camp victims who lived through that.
- Pop music seems to fly past, but there's a familiarity to the old hits that I recognize from older people now.
- The wall being built and coming down was about a quarter century, felt like forever at the time. I remember things that happened a quarter century ago now.
And from all men being able to vote to all women being able to vote was a span of 10 years, so 0.2 of GP's lifetime.
What you are probably referring to is a large urban middle class consisting of landless skilled workers, which requires modernity, as all previous middle classes were built around rural land ownership, or going back to pre-agricultural periods, ownership of cattle. The key ingredient of the French revolution is the battle between rural and urban, between the farmer and the craftsmen, with the craftsmen gaining ascendancy over and eventually slaughtering the farmers.
(Or from a country which abolished slavery later, like Brazil?)
The opening 30s of the interview with a former slave Fountain Hughes always sends shivers down my spine: