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Comment by anonymousiam | Hacker News Reader

My father put together a (vacuum tube) Heathkit tape recorder in the late 1950s and made recordings of my great grandparents (on both sides) in 1959 and 1960. They talked about their lives growing up, how they met, and some of the hardships they endured. They were probably 35-40 years younger than the gentleman in the video, but they also described a time before automobiles, electricity, radio, and telephones were commonplace.

I converted those recordings to MP3 about 15 years ago.

It's amazing how far we've come in such a short time.

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I think being born around 1880 and living to 80+ would probably be the most change any human has ever seen over a lifetime in history. Many would have gone from pre-industrial revolution level tech in their personal lives growing up to seeing man go to the moon. Crazy to think about

Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House on the Prairie) very nearly lived to see Sputnik launched.

We are living in more revolutionary times. The thing is, when you are inside the "evolution", you don't really notice it. If you are 30-50, just try to remember the old days (taxi-phone, early days of the Internet, no digital paperwork, libraries, etc...) and you'll notice a world of change.

I don't think anyone 80 years ago could have imagined that the computer games we have today would ever exist. Other things we did was science fiction long before we did it, like flying, self moving wagons, going to the moon, curing diseases, eliminating famine etc, but modern computer games wasn't even imaginable.

From muskets to nukes.

I'd rather carry a musket than a nuke!8-))

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Austria and lived until 1942 and wrote a book about the experience in "The World of Yesterday"

Different areas develop at different speeds. I figure lots of people more technologically devoid areas have been accelerated even faster more recently than the folks you talk about. My mother would be one. Vast numbers of Chinese I imagine.

Would you mind uploading them to the internet archive if they aren't too personal? I'm sure lots of people would get some insight from them.

I will give them a listen before doing so to be sure, but yeah, I'll do that. Both of my parents are dead now so I doubt there are any privacy issues remaining.

This would be really insightful if possible, thank you!

Exciting! I remember being captivated by an old man at a retirement home recollecting farm work with horses. I don’t remember what he said or how I came to be listening, but it might have been a primary school project or something.

There is a project to collect old diaries https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X0hi2Q3TAK8

Perhaps they take audio too? Or perhaps there is some similar archive for non-diary recollections and things?

And perhaps you’d like to share online?

My father, born in '35 in South Dakota, talked about as a child they plowed their farm with horses.

I mean, depends where on earth you are, but my parents born in yugoslavia in the late 50s remember plowing with oxen, the first bw TV sets appeared in their village in the 60s or early 70s, there was no indoor plumbing or electricity when they were very little, they were transporting water in buckets on donkeys etc.

I do hope people are documenting this while there are still chances!

Imagine finding a diary or account of some mundane life a few hundred years ago. This stuff is important to preserve for the future.

I visited Turkey in the early 2000s. It was not uncommon to be driving on a major, modern highway, crest a hill, and have to slam on the brakes because a donkey was pulling a farmer's cart in the middle of the road at 5 mph.

This was out in a rural area, but still. Major highway like an American interstate.

What will be the future I wonder.

Thunderdome.

Technocracy. We'll all live in small flats, every move monitored, resources 'correctly' allocated, quarterly 'health' shots, no cars, we'll see very little nature.

My, how far we've come...

Hey man it's that or Thunderdome.

Since we are dystopia larping:

The future will be miserable, unless you live in China. In China, the future will arrive as planned as China will once again become the middle kingdom and be bestowed with the mandate of heaven. In the west, the 200 years of western industrial society will be regarded as a mistake that must be payed for dearly with carbon credits.

;)

Sounds about right.

Also.

Sudden death for worn-out workers. We'll invent a rationale for that eventually. 20 years of retirement is just an unnecessary drain on the economy.

Like in Logan's Run except more plausible.

Also cellphones implanted at birth. With stress induction.

Also, radical amputation for information workers. All that extra flesh is just an unnecessary drain on the economy.

>20 years of retirement is just an unnecessary drain on the economy.

Or you might go the way my country did, with a 60-something retirement age and 65 (or slightly better) life expectancy.

> We'll invent a rationale for that eventually. 20 years of retirement is just an unnecessary drain on the economy. I n the UK there's already some disdain for 'boomers' because they're getting state pensions and are quite likely to own several mortgage-free houses. Tax rises only affect those currently working so young people people get irked at having to pay more into a system where they're unlikely to get much out. It's not entirely unjustified but the assumption that 'boomer's got stuff for free isn't necessarily true.

It's a interesting development and worth watching.

Jeez. You people catch nuance like a chainlink fence catches mosquitoes. I'm not saying that I buy into the "kill the old" thing. I'm just saying it's the natural evolution of our society. Aristocrats get gilded, serfs get grinded.

I think the future will be more diverse, and what you describe is probably one direction it will go. But there are also many other directions, like people living off grid aided by varying amounts of cheap technology, etc.

There is actually a lot of land left in the world (even in the US and Canada) if you want to take on the hardships of not interacting with society. Judging by what I see say on YouTube, a lot of people want this!

Random channel, I only watched a little of it: https://www.youtube.com/user/explorealternatives (it felt like a lot of off grid living was in Canada, which is interesting given the weather)

Similar to paleo and other alternative diets as a reaction against industrial farming and food production, there's already a lot of reaction against big tech and technocracy. I think / I hope this time it won't take 50+ years to "properly react". Both industries brought us some good things but we have to be critical about what to adopt.

"A lot of land"? Where exactly? The private timberland? The Federal wilderness? Or the desert? https://i.imgur.com/Us5Wyt0.jpg

I'm not an expert in this area, but I watched a video by a guy who built a cabin in Michigan, talking about how to buy land for like $5K an acre.

I just googled and this seems like a real thing, i.e. hundreds of properties for very cheap:

https://www.landandfarm.com/search/michigan-land-between-500...

Also I had a friend who did this near the California/Nevada border. Super cheap land if you don't care about electricity and plumbing!

Michigan and California are both extremely populated states -- but MOST of them by land area is very sparsely populated.

I'm sure someone here knows more, but I think it's obvious if you just drive 30, 60, or 120 minutes outside any city in the US. There is a lot of land. All of it is probably owned, but the owners are probably not doing anything with it, and would sell it for a fair price, which is low.

Hell there is even land in San Francisco if you've ever biked between San Francisco and South San Francisco. Again, it's owned, but it's not doing very much.

Humans like to crowd together in very few places, particularly near water. Here's a more relevant picture: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/3d-mapping-the-worlds-large...

Judging by this picture, the US, Europe, and Russia are barely populated at all :)

There are huge swathes of unpopulated land across the world. However in many areas the local zoning rules prevent you building on them.

In Australia for instance, thousands of acres of Rural land have been rezoned as "Farming", which means that you can't build a house on less than 100 acres. And of course the only ones who benefit are the corrupt real-estate developers.

There's an entire state's worth of "idle / fallow" on that map. Michigan and then some.

That's a lot of land.

The future will be sparsely distributed. The wealthy elite are modifying society such that only they will have the gilded science fiction future, and everyone else will be left to their own, probably ruled by Libertarian Warlords.

How could a libertarian be a war lord? As far as I can imagine, war lords are authoritarian, which is complete opposite from libertarian.

They'll find justification somehow. Like needing a security force to respond to various "concerns", or the "increasingly unstable situation" (at that point in time).

Ageing and declining population everywhere - already most developing countries from 90s have net negative population change, and it spreads to more and more countries.

Huge cities disappearing as remote working, automation, rising sea levels and mass migrations make most of them pointless.

Lots of civil unrest, mass migrations, new plagues and wars as the globalized economy collapses and disappointed voters choose new kinds of populism to save them.

Rich people moving to the few lucky countries that won on the global warming and now try to isolate. Everybody else fight for scraps.

Eventually population adjusts and stabilizes on much lower level and reproduction rates grow again as repopulation starts.

I can relate to that comment, as I feel the same way. So much that it causes me pain.

I have to constantly remind myself:

In chaos, all predictions are possible, solarpunk is just as likely as cyberpunk.

Everywhere you look, you see what you are looking for. If you are looking for death all you see is death, if you are looking for god, all you see is god.

> Rich people moving to the few lucky countries that won on the global warming and now try to isolate. Everybody else fight for scraps.

Which, if you follow the projections, will include entire Europe and North America. Seriously, read the IPCC report: impact of global warming in western world will be rather superficial, if not positive. It’s not them who is most negatively affected.

> Which, if you follow the projections, will include entire Europe and North America

So, about 1 billion people out of about 8 billion worldwide. Half of that if you were speaking of "western world" only.

Now imagine what the rest will do. And how that will impact globalized economy on which welfare of western world is built.

Oh, I know that. My point is that, contrary to what the comment I was responding to said, rich people in western world will not be moving anywhere. Rich Africans will indeed try to move to Europe/North America, but they already do, and would do so even without global warming happening.

At first this vision seems like a bleak contrast to the world of the film, until one remembers that the 25 years immediately following the making of this film were arguably the bloodiest in world history, containing the great depression, WWII, the holocaust, and huge famines in communist Russia and China.

Probably mostly like the present, and the past. Things don't really change much, especially people. We build new toys, that's about it.

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