One of the Wright brothers managed to live to see the end of WWII. Imagine the weird janky flying machine you and your dead brother designed in a bicycle shop in Dayton is being used to decimate Europe while boats full of the things are redefining naval warfare across the whole of the pacific before one drops a weapon so powerful that it becomes the basis of mutually assured destruction

I've thought from time to time about how being able to see significant societal change in a person's lifetime is a very recent phenomenon. For many thousands of years, things stayed pretty much the same from birth to death unless you happened to live though a significant event. It's neat that I've gotten to witness change in a way that one would have to time travel to experience in the past, but monkey's paw, the change isn't always good...

And only 30 years after that, we're surfing the interwebz, sailing down the data highway at the speed of light. I'm running out of metaphors to chain together...

The Brooklyn Bridge and the battle of Little Bighorn happened the same year. And there were Native Americans who fought in the battle that were still alive to see man walk on the moon. So in the span of one lifetime we went from Custard’s last stand, to one giant leap for all mankind.

It’s easy to see why people thought we would be a lot more futuristic by now.

Just a nitpick, the fastest transportation for thousands of years were boats.

Forget the moon. We're all within a few generations of the first people who had access to indoor toilets on a mass scale.

And fifty years later we still mope around in low earth orbit. Progress has slowed down a lot since the billionaires took over.

And destroyers.

Just a few months into its reign, the US regime intends to ruin decades of progress in science and space exploration:

On May 30, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced a plan to cancel no less than 41 space missions — including spacecraft already paid for, launched, and making discoveries — as part of a devastating 47% cut to the agency’s science program. If enacted, this plan would decimate NASA. It would fire a third of the agency’s staff, waste billions of taxpayer dollars, and turn off spacecraft that have been journeying through the Solar System for decades.

Shutting down a working, completely functional mission like New Horizons, in particular, that may just be on the cusp of a huge discovery - it has seen signs of a new, second "ring" to the Kuiper Belt - is the ultimate repudiation of the American self-image as explorers of the frontier. And all of this at a time when the Chinese are just about catching up to "the West" in space science prowess.

As a kid, I never understood what the Romans were trying to say with their Janus myth. Turns out that Orange Janus is simply the god of endings.

And now we have self-driving cars that are able to kill people without human intervention 👍

Now picture it without fossil fuels giving us a 100:1 EROEI

And since then - We have found ways to make all travel worse for comfort, more expensive, and more necessary.

In 1861 Russia abolished serfdom.

In 1961 Gagarin reached space.

It's just barely implausible a person born a serf could have seen their descendant explore space.

I feel like the pictures over-exaggerate the difference a bit. The wright flyer was literally made by two people in their spare time while the space program was around 4% of all federal spending and had almost half a million people working on it in some capacity.

Feels like we're going backwards now with like anti-vax stuff. A lot of tech seems to be getting worse for users, too, like IoT gadgets that stop working for remote reasons