It’s why a lot of sci-fi written in the 1900’s takes place in like the 90’s and 2000’s. Writers thought that we would keep on exponentially advancing and have Mars colonies and flying cars by now. They could have never predicted that interest in space exploration would have waned, like people stopped caring about the space shuttle, and that the actual technological revolution took place in the computing space.

There is no individual. There is only network. System. Systems create. They output. They produce. They produce well and tremendously when the system is healthy. Make the system healthy for once. I mean again.

My great-grandfather grew up with horses and carriages and saw man set foot on the moon and the early days of the internet. He saw the rise and fall of the USSR. What will I see?

My Great Grandfather lived that change. He went from walking, horses and buggies, steam engines, with no telephones or electricity, to sitting on a couch next to me and watching the first Apollo moon landing. He saw more insane changes to this world than we will ever probably see. But.....

It took 2 world wars and millions of dead to drive all that change in that time period of one life. War is the great driver of technological leaps. I'm not sure I feel the need to drive tech advances that fast at the cost of all those lives. Slow and steady might be a better path to travel.

Still, within my lifetime, which much like my Great Grandfather I'm nearing the end of, there have been great changes that everyone just takes for granted. The internet has caused a great disruption in the world. You have access to nearly all the information this world has in an instant. No matter where you are. No more going to a library to look up outdated information in a card catalogue. You can talk to nearly anyone on this planet at any time. When I grew up, we had a party line we shared with 5 other families. And using that phone was expensive. You got billed for each phone call for the duration of that call. You can do business with almost every business on this planet directly. Or Amazon/Walmart/Temu yourself to death if you want. All we had as the Sears or Wards catalogue to mail order from. And then you waited a month to get your order.

You can affordably travel to London, Paris, Tokyo, and nearly everywhere else in a matter of hours. There are re-usable space rockets now. And while the stars might still be just out of reach, there is nowhere in the solar system we can't go if we really want to. The planets are ours for the taking as soon as we want them. Even true self driving cars are a solid possibility now.

Those are just a few of the things I've seen change. And there are many more. But we seldom notice and just take them for granted.

I'm certainly not.

But what if...

The Babylonians knew a * b = 1/4 * ( (a+b)^2 - (a-b)^2 ), and used tables of 1/4 * x^2 to do multiplication by addition. It took three thousand years for Napier to discover modern logarithms. The slide rule was invented eight years later.

Don't forget the weird rocks that, when refined and enriched, it gets a bit of... well you know...

We also created nukes and religion. So there's that too.

A man named Peter, who had escaped slavery, reveals his scarred back at a medical examination in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, while joining the Union Army in 1863.

Yup, that's far alright:

My grandmother was an adult through that 66-year period. Lived to be 99. She rode to town on a horse as a kid and took trips on jets before she died.