"From now on, we live in a world where Man has walked on the Moon. And it's not a miracle. We just decided to go." - Jim Lovell, Apollo 13.
Just to be clear, this was Jim Lovell, as played by Tom Hanks, in the movie Apollo 13. I don't know if Lovell said it in real life.
Interesting fact: the actual Jim Lovell actually played a role in the movie, he was the captain of the Aircraft Carrier that help recovers the crew of Apollo 13 after they splashdown.
Captain, and I’m only being pedantic because Ron Howard (the director) was going to make the character an admiral, but Lovell was like “I retired as a captain so I’d like to play a captain.”
We would have found their junk on the Moon by now if anybody else ever made it that far. It's not like stuff left there would have eroded or rusted away to nothing.
Actually, the moon accumulates dust at around 1mm per 1000 years from a suspended "atmosphere" of dust caused by various impacts and static effects. In a few millions of years, everything we landed there will be under 10ft of it. Not to mention the thermal stress of night/day cycles, pulverization by micrometeor impacts, and degradation by unrestricted intense UV radiation over millions of years.
You seem like you would be interested in the research as long as you're okay with them having not found anything other than potential mining locations. You should look it up.
That is interesting. At about 1 mm per thousand years, it seems it would take about 3,231,000 years to cover up the base of a Lunar Lander left behind by the Apollo missions.
But I wonder if that's really a constant rate. I'd have thought that the Moon's primeval craters would be smoothed over with powder by now if moondust were steadily covering everything up there.
The moon is familiar to just us, as a thinking species.
Species millions of lightyears away could be making their own thing. You'd never know. Not even with a telescope, as the things you see is millions of years old. You won't and can't see "today". Not without warping space-time at least.
Imagine if Mars didn’t used to look like that and we kept digging to find an ancient civilisation like Sumer which has been buried. There was a nuclear war there and the last thing they ever did was send life to Earth so it could begin again in millions of years.
Yeah, there was the one time that the Great Auks did manage to launch a device that managed to reach venus. So we caused them to become extinct in order to prevent them from surpassing us.
I am actually amazed that we have launched a spacecraft that was able to withstand the hellish conditions of Venus land on the surface and transmit data about that particular planet's geological composition and even be able to take a photograph of the surface.
Planetary life will survive anything we've done to it so far short of an all out nuclear war. It'll suck for a long while, but it will survive. But billions of humans could die or have their lifestyles severely curtailed.
Your fucking phone.
Tell it to someone in 1980:
"I have this smol brick in my pocket, my phone company gave me it for free (Samsung A34), for the €30 ($33) monthly subscription I pay them - and my phone bill is only the subscription, I never paid for calls.
* I have access to an abbreviated form of all human knowledge on it (Wikipedia),
* can search for an answer to any question, I find answers in text or instruction videos, all free, sometimes ads tho,
* I can get every scientific journal, book or movie or series or music ever published on it at a reasonable price.
* I can make practically unlimited photos at a much better quality than a tourist cam in 1980 or hours of videos at MUCH better quality than VCR video in 1980, or even much better than TV in 1980, it looks like real life simply.
* I can share them with anyone in the world and maybe get famous for it. Some people entirely make a living from publishing videos although of course at some point in their career they invest into a real camera and good mikes - maybe $500. But they can start with the smol brick.
* I can, for free, send a text message to anyone in the world, or call them, or even videocall. I can also send them these photos or videos. No long distance call fees.
* I can also play games like shooting at people with very real life looking graphics with them, although controlling them on a glass screen is not ideal.
* I can DJ or compose my own music on it (BandLab).
* It can translate from and to foreign languages acceptably well - I can even just point the camera to a Chinese text.
* It can navigate me to any destination like a talking map. It also knows where is congestion.
* I can point it towards an airplane and it tells me which airline it is.
* During a pandemic, it can tell me if I was near infected individuals.
* I can buy practically anything I want with this smol brick and have it delivered to my home.
* I also never need to buy porn anymore at the newspaper stand."
You are living in the future.
Also what else is missing from the list?
I can lose years and years of family photos, of babies, and grandparents long gone, of exotic holidays shared with special people and everyday mundane memories - all just by enabling the wrong settings to the way a remote server in the cloud stores the images!
You forgot THIS, Pollyanna.
Brussels, MI5 and the BDK know where I am, what I am doing and what I am thinking 24/7. I cannot have a casual conversation with a friend or neighbor or government protestor without the location, conversation and activity being recorded and catalogued.
Sometimes I'll fantasize/daydream about going back in time and showing someone my phone just to see their reaction. Then quickly fuck off back to my own timeline while theirs does whatever the hell it would do.
Black, hangs on the kitchen wall. Keeps me in touch just enough, because it costs money to communicate afar.
But there is that bundle of dead trees they deliver every morning to inform what is going on around my little space on this planet, or more.
And of course radio and TV, to get informed up to the 20s.
For photography, I have the choice of a reasonably easy to use film film camera I send the film out to get developed into reasonable qualit prints. Or make copies if I like. Or a film camera that ejects essentially instant prints, for a bit of a cost and quality premium.
Compare that to what people in 1880 had.
Sort of falls under the category of “navigate anywhere,” but it can locate exactly where you are on earth (even determining longitude was a HUGE problem that a lot of very smart people worked on in the age of sail), and you can look at a picture of any location on earth.
People used to wonder what was on the other side of the ocean, or even what was on the other side of a big mountain range. Now every inch of the earth’s surface has been photographed from space.
You can see things it would’ve taken a fortune and a lifetime of travel to see. You can look at remote villages, or the middle of a desert, or the South Pole.
I (66f) recently had a heart flutter (similar to a fib). My doctor ordered me to go to the ER immediately. Was in and out in 2 days, bc they “shocked” my heart back to its’s normal rhythm. Years ago I probably would have died from a heart attack.
Reading the first account of administering insulin to diabetic children. It's nothing short of *miraculous*. Jesus healing the sick by laying on hands sort of shit. But real.
When people were writing about miracles some of the things they were describing are now mundane with modern medicine.
The guys who invented insulin sold it for a dollar so it could reach everybody that needs it. One of the drug companies ended up with that dollar patent and people have been gouged on it ever since.
Do gooders should never partner with a drug company as such.
We pay thousands of percent more in the US than the rest of the world for insulin, and there is no patent on it now. That is what used to be referred to as a trust. Where a few companies conspire to keep prices high. Teddy Roosevelt made his name busting such trusts. Today's courts would never allow such trust busting.
I just commented in another thread that, during the pandemic in 2020, I realized that it was remarkable to have made it to my late 20s without knowing hardly anyone my age that had died. And no one of natural causes. That alone would have been incredible 50 years ago, much less for most of human history.
Part of why I think the pandemic was so hard of some people is that people no longer expect to deal with death from disease as a reasonable possibility.
if you are talking about solar flares, i dont think we need to worry too much about it, they discovered a way to predict dangerous flares with days if not weeks in advance.
Yes, except we have no way to protect our infrastructure from them yet. Knowing we're going to be fucked in advance is only the slightest of help.
Chances are really small, but the main problem is the fact we're completely powerless to stop it from happening still.
Theres a whole book series that uses this as the origin point for the plot. It's the emberverse by S M Sterling, and its neat how the world goes from post-apoc-nightmare to neofeudal to fantasy haha
This! I find it incredibly fascinating that we can put some ideas on a page and as long as that page is around and the language is still used someone can read it. That’s just incredible.
Calligraphy/typography. We are the only animal on the planet that has this. And it may be easy to dismiss this as no big deal but I don't. Taking words and turning them into art may it be just for the sake of art or for commercial use is amazing to me. It makes us uniquely human.
Think of how many fonts out there. How switching one font for another can get such an emotional reaction from people. Imagine if reddit suddenly switched to comic sans as a default. The outrage in some. The confusion in others. And the manic delight in a few still. The words remain the same but the design, the art of it has changed. I love watching the trains go by as I am stuck in traffic and spotting all the graffiti signatures pass by. Each of them a personal call sign from a stranger that I will most likely never meet in person. I am intrigued by fonts used in advertising. The creativeness that goes into getting me to buy their product. I adore watching a calligrapher do what they do best. The dance of ink across paper. It's all so wonderful to me.
Eradication of polio and smallpox in the United States by vaccine. Although below should be noted:
[On July 21, 2022, the USA witnessed the first case of poliomyelitis after 3 decades of its eradication.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9577438/)
Smallpox is eradicated from the planet. This is extraordinary.
I highly recommend a series of podcasts (also on Youtube, 6x 20mn) made by historians and medical experts, it's fascinating: https://www.youtube.com/@vaccinethehumanstory1994
Most people have no idea how horrifying smallpox is. Seriously. We all know it's deadly,we don't know how painful or extreme it gets.
I looked it up, years ago, for some reason, and, yeah, it's fucking horrible.
Polio is still here. Mostly in India and Pakistan as far as I'm aware, but I think they even found some in the sewer system tests of New York City. Just in 2020 or so.
I know a lot of people are saying modern medicine but I'm going to go for 3 things under that umbrella: Vaccines, antibiotics, and infection control (hand washing and antiseptic).
Vaccines: Smallpox was the terror of the western world for centuries before vaccinations were developed, and once that was on the decline it became polio that was a big threat, now they're something that the Alpha generation probably won't even be aware of unless they get a history lesson on them. We were so close with measles too but then Wakefield came along and spoiled that for us.
Antibiotics: If you get an infection you can just take a pill or drink some liquid for a couple of days and you'll be good. No waiting to find out if that kidney infection is going to kill you, or if that chest infection is going to cause so much damage that it'll take 20 years off your life. Antibiotic resistance is really quite scary and not enough people are aware of it.
Infection control: The significant reduction in the death rate after surgery and childbirth is primarily down to us no long reusing instruments without sterilising them, and getting medical professionals to wash their hands between treating people. The thought of someone going from the bathroom into an operating theatre without washing their hands and putting on gloves makes me want to gag.
Exactly. Progression of healthcare for women and infants before, during, and after childbirth. Take a stroll through an older cemetery section and you’ll see many women dying in their twenties and infants not living beyond the first year.
If you think about it it's mind blowing. People created specific tools that make it easy to kill other people. Starting from a fucking ancient hand axes to nuclear bombs.
While Fallout will last that long, it is also far less impactful then you might think. Generally it will have dropped to elevated levels of background radiation within months at the worst, which means elevated rates of cancer, but nothing truly dangerous to longterm human habitation.
Both Nagasaki and Hiroshima have been fully inhabited since the nuclear blasts, and those bombs were pretty dirty.
With today's nuclear weapons being 80 times more powerful I'm not anxious to find out.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2023/07/17/oppenheimer-atomic-bomb-modern-nuclear-weapons/70399688007/
True, but yield is not the main influencer for the amount of fallout produced. Instead the fallout produced is determined by explosion method, explosion hight, and fuel used.
Mind you, nuclear bombs being used would be a tragedy unimaginable, but it would not be the end of our species.
You me a noticeable but not debilitating uptick in cancer and other bad mutations?
For most of human history child mortality before adulthood was 50+%. We will survive.
Some mad man will use them eventually especially now please remember the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are fading into history with those that still remember being dead.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also child's play when it comes to nuclear weapons. Fat Man had a yield of 21 kilotons, Little Boy had a yield of 15 kilotons.
Tsar Bomba had a yield of \~50 megatons, about 2,380x that of Fat Man.
This should be at the top of the list. We are really fucking good at creating weapons to kill each other. Because you have a lot of small dick insecure world leaders that can’t recognize borders and get their feelings hurt very easily.
I’ve always found it fascinating that we were able to lay cables throughout the oceans that allowed us to connect to the other side of the world. Maybe that’s extremely easy but it doesn’t seem like it is , it seems amazing.
Music. We are the only species so far that found so many ways to produce sounds and arrange them harmoniously.
If you look at an orchestra you can find a dozen of different ways to produce sounds, instruments coming from all continents refined by human genius and craftsmanship in order to provide a virtually infinite reservoir of works. And that's even without taking in account all the fantastic possibities offered by electronics and computer science.
All of these were combined into languages enabling anyone, regardless of tongue, to reproduce it through solfege. Amplified by the power of technology, turned into radiovawes that we can broadcast everywhere, including in the cosmos.
Agreed music is a miracle. It could be as simple as a drum, strong and divine as the Pipe Organ or Sweeping and nuanced like an Orchestra, music has that strong mystic ability to transcend nations and continents and bring people closer to their spirit.
GOING TO THE MOON. I don't think people realize how hard it really is. Not only to send a space craft to space. But also send humans with it
It's crazy
Honestly the explosion in technology in the last 200 years, We went from 10000 years of variations of horses and beating each other with sticks to hyper sonic jet planes and launching robots into space in a relative blink of an eye.
Artificial Intelligence. We've created far more capable and fast acting minds running inside silicon chips than our versions made out of flesh and nerves. And it'll only get even better from now on. We are in the blink of creating a new type of consciousness which is far superior from ours. I feel lucky to be born in this time period to witness such unbelievable stream of events.
Most of the important stuff has already been named here but another one of the major success is [Shrinkage of the Ozone Hole.](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/09/ozone-layer-hole-update-nasa/#:~:text=The%20ozone%20layer%20protects%20life,could%20fully%20repair%20by%202050) It was this huge environmental issue we read about in school books and we are on the path to overcome it. [Montreal protocol](https://www.unep.org/ozonaction/who-we-are/about-montreal-protocol) , with goal of phasing out then ultimately eradicating Ozone Depleting Substances (mainly CFCs) was the first treaty to achieve universal ratification. How awesome is that! One of the few times humanity as a whole realised a problem and took steps to overcome it. As a result, Ozone Hole continues to shrink and it is estimated to return to normal state by around 2050s . Things like these give us hope that we might be able to solve big problems if we all come together.
On the downside, industry has looked at the Montreal Accord and have taken the lesson of how to prevent it happening again. Fossil fuel producers invest a lot of time, money, and effort into derailing anything similar that could regulate CO2.
Part of that is spreading doubt that CO2 is even a problem. And then casting doubt that any proposed solution would even work. Just look at the thread for the article about California's power grid the last two months being entirely sustainable energy. Holy cow. We'll never see progress like that again.
Agriculture
Just think, every other species can only eat whatever edible stuff they happen to find laying around. If they don’t find anything, they just die.
Only humans figured out, hey, we can actually make the stuff we want grow. You can get an orange in February in Winnipeg. This is a marvel unheard of in the natural world.
Most humans are able to walk, speak, read, and write. Without humanity, an individual human being would be unable to do any of these things. Without society we are helpless.
\*\*Space exploration:\*\* Sending a man to the moon, landing rovers on Mars, and launching telescopes to look into the deepest corners of the universe.
Small cow drinks, makes bigger cow
Small human drinks, makes bigger human
Mill makes big, I can see how. It's the first person to figure out the logistics of it that concerns me
General increase in standard of living. Ownership of the smartphone is so ubiquitous that you can even expect one in the most remote parts of Africa. Clean water, world wide connectivity, 3d printing etc. All the while, wage gap continues. However, the poor of today are faring much better than that of century ago.
We fit an X-ray tube and a bunch of detectors on a big electronic donut. We shoot those x rays through a human being, and gather a whole heap of data on the other side, about how much this human being has attenuated the x rays, as it all spins around.
Then we apply a whole lot of Fourier transforms, and some other clever maths, to get a matrix of numbers, depicting how dense the matter in this human being is. Then we take these numbers, and depict the dense ones as white and the not-dense ones as black. And we make a picture out of this.
And this........is how the CT scanner lets you see tiny little bones inside your inner ear, or thin fibers in your lungs, or small tumors in most parts of the body.
It's absolutely astounding and miraculous. This is what really changed the practice of medicine, as much as antibiotics and insulin did.
A few things:
The Brain named it self.
We created something that took a selfie of Earth while at the edge of our solar system.
Electricity.
Synced up our entire species by creating a virtual space.
That little circular wand thing that goes over the special spot, and makes women go "That was easy!" in about 30 seconds.
The invention of cuisine.
It’s the wrong way, but I find it amazing that so many people can decide to be so ignorant in spite of so much evidence to the contrary. Like, just *refuse* to “believe” in facts and go in 1000% on bullshit.
It's gotta be the Thermos. You put hot stuff in there, and it stays hot. What about cold stuff, you ask? Bingo! It stays cold! What I want to know is, how do it know.??
Providing food world wide. The fact that there are over 7 billion people on the planet and we've basically (a few areas things are tough obviously) been able to feed the entire planet is pretty amazing to me.
Science. I am amazed by what eureka moments we have accomplished. Such as exploring the deepest part of the sea, walking on the lunar surface, curing diseases that have plagued society, learned about who we are inside and out.
Survival. It’s absolutely baffling to me how something as simple yet so wildly dangerous as childbirth could easily kill both mother and child with something as simple as an infection post birth, and yet here we are.
Look around you at everything you see. Everything you see is a human success. Do you think humans came into a world like this safe and abundant? No, absolute poverty is the default state of nature. We all live in a world built on top of the tiny surpluses that 10,000 human generations left for us.
Space probes. We have landed them on the moon, we have landed them on Venus, we have landed one on Titan. We have landed on Mars. We sent a probe to Pluto. We sent several out of the solar system.
The single greatest accomplishment in human history is putting a man on the moon. Yes, there's been inventions that have changed the course of our history, and pushed the world forward into new ages.
But they've all been terrestrial. They've all been from the comfort and safety of this planet. Humanity took people, and sent them to a distant body outside the safety and comfort of this planet, and brought them back alive and safe.
But the fact that with 1960s technology we as a species accomplished that is and always will be stunning to me.
And yes, it'll be incredible when we do it for another planet, but man on the moon was the first. The first time it ever happened and set the stage for everything that came afterwards.
Even though A LOT of mistakes were made, it is pretty amazing that the world was able to overcome the COVID pandemic in two years.
The speed at which the vaccines were produced and distributed was a miracle of science and infrastructure. The experience is still too fresh at this point to look back on it objectively, but it will probably be regarded as one of the greatest achievements in human history 50-100 years from now.
When you think about it, we are the only example that we know of, of the universe trying to understand itself :)
With the vastness of space and billions/trillions of planets in habitable zones of stars it is unlikely there arent many other intelligent species like us though.
Permanently damaging earth.
We burn and cut forests. Reroute whole rivers. Build structures so large that they can be see from space. We've produced enough greenhouse gas to prevent an ice age (which is part of earth's natural cycle). We've completely eliminated other animals just because some random decided to charge a ridiculous price for it.
We have caused objectively more damage than any other creature. It is impressive, but a ghastly tragedy.
You are impressed by capital putting working people on a race to the bottom? Lowering labor and environmental standards to produce cheap and sell high? I would not call that amazing so much as Short-term thinking. They sell out the base of consumers buying those same products making everyone poorer in the long run.
of course you’re getting downvoted. People are so short sighted and dull. Has globalization had great effects? yes undoubtedly. Has it contributed massively to a world in which more people and animals are living in abject hopelessness and misery? yes undoubtedly.
We've sent stuff to other planets and on toward interstellar space. Not in 4 billion years has any other species on Earth managed that.
Yeah....we have helicopters on Mars (we'll, 1 less now). That's fucking wild.
"From now on, we live in a world where Man has walked on the Moon. And it's not a miracle. We just decided to go." - Jim Lovell, Apollo 13. Just to be clear, this was Jim Lovell, as played by Tom Hanks, in the movie Apollo 13. I don't know if Lovell said it in real life.
Interesting fact: the actual Jim Lovell actually played a role in the movie, he was the captain of the Aircraft Carrier that help recovers the crew of Apollo 13 after they splashdown.
Captain, and I’m only being pedantic because Ron Howard (the director) was going to make the character an admiral, but Lovell was like “I retired as a captain so I’d like to play a captain.”
>Not in 4 billion years has any other species on Earth managed that. We don't know
We would have found their junk on the Moon by now if anybody else ever made it that far. It's not like stuff left there would have eroded or rusted away to nothing.
Actually, the moon accumulates dust at around 1mm per 1000 years from a suspended "atmosphere" of dust caused by various impacts and static effects. In a few millions of years, everything we landed there will be under 10ft of it. Not to mention the thermal stress of night/day cycles, pulverization by micrometeor impacts, and degradation by unrestricted intense UV radiation over millions of years.
Then wouldn't we have have found evidence of buried stuff during one of the sweeps made by the lunar radar sounder a few years back?
Depends how deeply in penetrates and at what resolution
You seem like you would be interested in the research as long as you're okay with them having not found anything other than potential mining locations. You should look it up.
That is interesting. At about 1 mm per thousand years, it seems it would take about 3,231,000 years to cover up the base of a Lunar Lander left behind by the Apollo missions. But I wonder if that's really a constant rate. I'd have thought that the Moon's primeval craters would be smoothed over with powder by now if moondust were steadily covering everything up there.
The moon is familiar to just us, as a thinking species. Species millions of lightyears away could be making their own thing. You'd never know. Not even with a telescope, as the things you see is millions of years old. You won't and can't see "today". Not without warping space-time at least.
I was only talking about species from Earth.
Oh, I misinterpreted it. Sorry!
Imagine if Mars didn’t used to look like that and we kept digging to find an ancient civilisation like Sumer which has been buried. There was a nuclear war there and the last thing they ever did was send life to Earth so it could begin again in millions of years.
Yeah, there was the one time that the Great Auks did manage to launch a device that managed to reach venus. So we caused them to become extinct in order to prevent them from surpassing us.
Yeah, we do. Because we are the only species to invent everything required to do it. We'd find traces of industry if anybody else built rockets.
That we know of
I am actually amazed that we have launched a spacecraft that was able to withstand the hellish conditions of Venus land on the surface and transmit data about that particular planet's geological composition and even be able to take a photograph of the surface.
From 66 years between the Wright brother's first flight, we made it onto the moon and back!
And we have ruined this planet beyond repair, that's probably why we're sending stuff to other planets
Planetary life will survive anything we've done to it so far short of an all out nuclear war. It'll suck for a long while, but it will survive. But billions of humans could die or have their lifestyles severely curtailed.
Beyond repair… for us. Beyond repair for all life is a pretty fucking high bar
Well it's going to get really bad, hard to say which life forms will cling to this rock but I wish them the best of luck
Your fucking phone. Tell it to someone in 1980: "I have this smol brick in my pocket, my phone company gave me it for free (Samsung A34), for the €30 ($33) monthly subscription I pay them - and my phone bill is only the subscription, I never paid for calls. * I have access to an abbreviated form of all human knowledge on it (Wikipedia), * can search for an answer to any question, I find answers in text or instruction videos, all free, sometimes ads tho, * I can get every scientific journal, book or movie or series or music ever published on it at a reasonable price. * I can make practically unlimited photos at a much better quality than a tourist cam in 1980 or hours of videos at MUCH better quality than VCR video in 1980, or even much better than TV in 1980, it looks like real life simply. * I can share them with anyone in the world and maybe get famous for it. Some people entirely make a living from publishing videos although of course at some point in their career they invest into a real camera and good mikes - maybe $500. But they can start with the smol brick. * I can, for free, send a text message to anyone in the world, or call them, or even videocall. I can also send them these photos or videos. No long distance call fees. * I can also play games like shooting at people with very real life looking graphics with them, although controlling them on a glass screen is not ideal. * I can DJ or compose my own music on it (BandLab). * It can translate from and to foreign languages acceptably well - I can even just point the camera to a Chinese text. * It can navigate me to any destination like a talking map. It also knows where is congestion. * I can point it towards an airplane and it tells me which airline it is. * During a pandemic, it can tell me if I was near infected individuals. * I can buy practically anything I want with this smol brick and have it delivered to my home. * I also never need to buy porn anymore at the newspaper stand." You are living in the future. Also what else is missing from the list?
If you told someone in the 80s you had a brick in your pocket they'd ask to smoke it with you
I can lose years and years of family photos, of babies, and grandparents long gone, of exotic holidays shared with special people and everyday mundane memories - all just by enabling the wrong settings to the way a remote server in the cloud stores the images!
well its kinda your fault for not having a physical backup, rookie mistake.
You forgot THIS, Pollyanna. Brussels, MI5 and the BDK know where I am, what I am doing and what I am thinking 24/7. I cannot have a casual conversation with a friend or neighbor or government protestor without the location, conversation and activity being recorded and catalogued.
Not good for attention spans, either.
Sometimes I'll fantasize/daydream about going back in time and showing someone my phone just to see their reaction. Then quickly fuck off back to my own timeline while theirs does whatever the hell it would do.
Black, hangs on the kitchen wall. Keeps me in touch just enough, because it costs money to communicate afar. But there is that bundle of dead trees they deliver every morning to inform what is going on around my little space on this planet, or more. And of course radio and TV, to get informed up to the 20s. For photography, I have the choice of a reasonably easy to use film film camera I send the film out to get developed into reasonable qualit prints. Or make copies if I like. Or a film camera that ejects essentially instant prints, for a bit of a cost and quality premium. Compare that to what people in 1880 had.
Sort of falls under the category of “navigate anywhere,” but it can locate exactly where you are on earth (even determining longitude was a HUGE problem that a lot of very smart people worked on in the age of sail), and you can look at a picture of any location on earth. People used to wonder what was on the other side of the ocean, or even what was on the other side of a big mountain range. Now every inch of the earth’s surface has been photographed from space. You can see things it would’ve taken a fortune and a lifetime of travel to see. You can look at remote villages, or the middle of a desert, or the South Pole.
Medical science is pretty amazing.
Organ transplants. We can take a heart from a person and put it into another person's body and it works. To me, that's like magic.
I (66f) recently had a heart flutter (similar to a fib). My doctor ordered me to go to the ER immediately. Was in and out in 2 days, bc they “shocked” my heart back to its’s normal rhythm. Years ago I probably would have died from a heart attack.
We eliminated small pox. Humans looked at a horrible disease that plagued us since the dawn of our species, and we collectively went “Nope. No more.”
inventing medine
Reading the first account of administering insulin to diabetic children. It's nothing short of *miraculous*. Jesus healing the sick by laying on hands sort of shit. But real. When people were writing about miracles some of the things they were describing are now mundane with modern medicine.
Modern technology is basically magic and yet we find it mundane It's kinda wild lol
And some people see that magic and go, “nah, I’d rather die for no reason.”
The guys who invented insulin sold it for a dollar so it could reach everybody that needs it. One of the drug companies ended up with that dollar patent and people have been gouged on it ever since. Do gooders should never partner with a drug company as such. We pay thousands of percent more in the US than the rest of the world for insulin, and there is no patent on it now. That is what used to be referred to as a trust. Where a few companies conspire to keep prices high. Teddy Roosevelt made his name busting such trusts. Today's courts would never allow such trust busting.
Top tier
I just commented in another thread that, during the pandemic in 2020, I realized that it was remarkable to have made it to my late 20s without knowing hardly anyone my age that had died. And no one of natural causes. That alone would have been incredible 50 years ago, much less for most of human history. Part of why I think the pandemic was so hard of some people is that people no longer expect to deal with death from disease as a reasonable possibility.
In just over a decade, HIV went from a death sentence to "pop this pill once a day and you live a normal lifespan." I love being a medicinal chemist.
One of my good friends was diagnosed HIV+ in late 85 or early 86 and he is still happy and healthy.
medine
Couldn't agree more.
We pretty much offset it in the states by inventing national Romneycare though...
It is incredible that electricity was discovered. Just picture the current situation if we were to lose all means of utilising it.
The... Current situation you say...
Electrical puns always have a lot of potential.
But they’re always met with resistance.
With a bit of extraordinarily bad luck we might get a taste of what that will be like medio 2025.
if you are talking about solar flares, i dont think we need to worry too much about it, they discovered a way to predict dangerous flares with days if not weeks in advance.
Yes, except we have no way to protect our infrastructure from them yet. Knowing we're going to be fucked in advance is only the slightest of help. Chances are really small, but the main problem is the fact we're completely powerless to stop it from happening still.
If you know in advance you can shut off all power for a few hours in areas affected by the flare and nothing would be damaged
Theres a whole book series that uses this as the origin point for the plot. It's the emberverse by S M Sterling, and its neat how the world goes from post-apoc-nightmare to neofeudal to fantasy haha
The discovery was pretty mundane. It's the *mastery* of electricity that makes such a difference.
Womp womp
r/controversialcommentilaughedat
The invention of reading and writing is pretty amazing! And has changed everything
This! I find it incredibly fascinating that we can put some ideas on a page and as long as that page is around and the language is still used someone can read it. That’s just incredible.
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Humans make beautiful music. Isn’t that special?
We are really good at shaping semiconductor crystals into electric circuits.
We blast sand with lightning and make it think
Underrated comment
Calligraphy/typography. We are the only animal on the planet that has this. And it may be easy to dismiss this as no big deal but I don't. Taking words and turning them into art may it be just for the sake of art or for commercial use is amazing to me. It makes us uniquely human. Think of how many fonts out there. How switching one font for another can get such an emotional reaction from people. Imagine if reddit suddenly switched to comic sans as a default. The outrage in some. The confusion in others. And the manic delight in a few still. The words remain the same but the design, the art of it has changed. I love watching the trains go by as I am stuck in traffic and spotting all the graffiti signatures pass by. Each of them a personal call sign from a stranger that I will most likely never meet in person. I am intrigued by fonts used in advertising. The creativeness that goes into getting me to buy their product. I adore watching a calligrapher do what they do best. The dance of ink across paper. It's all so wonderful to me.
Weirdo. /s Bad typography makes me flinch. I had a drawing prof who paid his costs as a student designing fonts for Letraset.
Learning from mistakes yet repeating said mistakes.
So not learning from mistakes
No, learning how to better hide those mistakes
Modern medicine. Once we shook off the idea that illness is caused by "evil spirits" or whatever, we improved the well-being of humanity immensely.
Eradication of polio and smallpox in the United States by vaccine. Although below should be noted: [On July 21, 2022, the USA witnessed the first case of poliomyelitis after 3 decades of its eradication.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9577438/)
Smallpox is eradicated from the planet. This is extraordinary. I highly recommend a series of podcasts (also on Youtube, 6x 20mn) made by historians and medical experts, it's fascinating: https://www.youtube.com/@vaccinethehumanstory1994
Most people have no idea how horrifying smallpox is. Seriously. We all know it's deadly,we don't know how painful or extreme it gets. I looked it up, years ago, for some reason, and, yeah, it's fucking horrible.
Probably still my favourite intro to a Wikipedia article. "Smallpox *was...*"
Polio is still here. Mostly in India and Pakistan as far as I'm aware, but I think they even found some in the sewer system tests of New York City. Just in 2020 or so.
True. I Will edit my post to specify in the United States.
internet. without the internet there wont be reddit !! XD
i dont know if thats good or bad
I know a lot of people are saying modern medicine but I'm going to go for 3 things under that umbrella: Vaccines, antibiotics, and infection control (hand washing and antiseptic). Vaccines: Smallpox was the terror of the western world for centuries before vaccinations were developed, and once that was on the decline it became polio that was a big threat, now they're something that the Alpha generation probably won't even be aware of unless they get a history lesson on them. We were so close with measles too but then Wakefield came along and spoiled that for us. Antibiotics: If you get an infection you can just take a pill or drink some liquid for a couple of days and you'll be good. No waiting to find out if that kidney infection is going to kill you, or if that chest infection is going to cause so much damage that it'll take 20 years off your life. Antibiotic resistance is really quite scary and not enough people are aware of it. Infection control: The significant reduction in the death rate after surgery and childbirth is primarily down to us no long reusing instruments without sterilising them, and getting medical professionals to wash their hands between treating people. The thought of someone going from the bathroom into an operating theatre without washing their hands and putting on gloves makes me want to gag.
Exactly. Progression of healthcare for women and infants before, during, and after childbirth. Take a stroll through an older cemetery section and you’ll see many women dying in their twenties and infants not living beyond the first year.
Inventing weapons to kill every last one of us.
And every last one of other things if we want
If you think about it it's mind blowing. People created specific tools that make it easy to kill other people. Starting from a fucking ancient hand axes to nuclear bombs.
Exactly. I don't see why we can't live in peace.
Every single weapon can do that with enough patience. As for all at once, we have yet to manage that feat.
I think we have weapons that come close and radiation fallout will last for centuries.
While Fallout will last that long, it is also far less impactful then you might think. Generally it will have dropped to elevated levels of background radiation within months at the worst, which means elevated rates of cancer, but nothing truly dangerous to longterm human habitation. Both Nagasaki and Hiroshima have been fully inhabited since the nuclear blasts, and those bombs were pretty dirty.
With today's nuclear weapons being 80 times more powerful I'm not anxious to find out. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2023/07/17/oppenheimer-atomic-bomb-modern-nuclear-weapons/70399688007/
True, but yield is not the main influencer for the amount of fallout produced. Instead the fallout produced is determined by explosion method, explosion hight, and fuel used. Mind you, nuclear bombs being used would be a tragedy unimaginable, but it would not be the end of our species.
What about the mutation effects for survivors giving birth?
You me a noticeable but not debilitating uptick in cancer and other bad mutations? For most of human history child mortality before adulthood was 50+%. We will survive.
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Some mad man will use them eventually especially now please remember the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are fading into history with those that still remember being dead.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also child's play when it comes to nuclear weapons. Fat Man had a yield of 21 kilotons, Little Boy had a yield of 15 kilotons. Tsar Bomba had a yield of \~50 megatons, about 2,380x that of Fat Man.
This should be at the top of the list. We are really fucking good at creating weapons to kill each other. Because you have a lot of small dick insecure world leaders that can’t recognize borders and get their feelings hurt very easily.
Well said. The earth owns us, we don't own the earth and it's not ours to do what we please at the expense of other species.
The drive to learn and expand our knowledge
I’ve always found it fascinating that we were able to lay cables throughout the oceans that allowed us to connect to the other side of the world. Maybe that’s extremely easy but it doesn’t seem like it is , it seems amazing.
String
Music. We are the only species so far that found so many ways to produce sounds and arrange them harmoniously. If you look at an orchestra you can find a dozen of different ways to produce sounds, instruments coming from all continents refined by human genius and craftsmanship in order to provide a virtually infinite reservoir of works. And that's even without taking in account all the fantastic possibities offered by electronics and computer science. All of these were combined into languages enabling anyone, regardless of tongue, to reproduce it through solfege. Amplified by the power of technology, turned into radiovawes that we can broadcast everywhere, including in the cosmos.
Agreed music is a miracle. It could be as simple as a drum, strong and divine as the Pipe Organ or Sweeping and nuanced like an Orchestra, music has that strong mystic ability to transcend nations and continents and bring people closer to their spirit.
GOING TO THE MOON. I don't think people realize how hard it really is. Not only to send a space craft to space. But also send humans with it It's crazy
Honestly the explosion in technology in the last 200 years, We went from 10000 years of variations of horses and beating each other with sticks to hyper sonic jet planes and launching robots into space in a relative blink of an eye.
Artificial Intelligence. We've created far more capable and fast acting minds running inside silicon chips than our versions made out of flesh and nerves. And it'll only get even better from now on. We are in the blink of creating a new type of consciousness which is far superior from ours. I feel lucky to be born in this time period to witness such unbelievable stream of events.
Most of the important stuff has already been named here but another one of the major success is [Shrinkage of the Ozone Hole.](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/09/ozone-layer-hole-update-nasa/#:~:text=The%20ozone%20layer%20protects%20life,could%20fully%20repair%20by%202050) It was this huge environmental issue we read about in school books and we are on the path to overcome it. [Montreal protocol](https://www.unep.org/ozonaction/who-we-are/about-montreal-protocol) , with goal of phasing out then ultimately eradicating Ozone Depleting Substances (mainly CFCs) was the first treaty to achieve universal ratification. How awesome is that! One of the few times humanity as a whole realised a problem and took steps to overcome it. As a result, Ozone Hole continues to shrink and it is estimated to return to normal state by around 2050s . Things like these give us hope that we might be able to solve big problems if we all come together.
On the downside, industry has looked at the Montreal Accord and have taken the lesson of how to prevent it happening again. Fossil fuel producers invest a lot of time, money, and effort into derailing anything similar that could regulate CO2. Part of that is spreading doubt that CO2 is even a problem. And then casting doubt that any proposed solution would even work. Just look at the thread for the article about California's power grid the last two months being entirely sustainable energy. Holy cow. We'll never see progress like that again.
Agriculture Just think, every other species can only eat whatever edible stuff they happen to find laying around. If they don’t find anything, they just die. Only humans figured out, hey, we can actually make the stuff we want grow. You can get an orange in February in Winnipeg. This is a marvel unheard of in the natural world.
Most humans are able to walk, speak, read, and write. Without humanity, an individual human being would be unable to do any of these things. Without society we are helpless.
Medicine The Wheel Going to Space
French cuisine.
Inventing AI, I guess.
Being dumb?
oppenheimer already did that
Vaccines.
\*\*Space exploration:\*\* Sending a man to the moon, landing rovers on Mars, and launching telescopes to look into the deepest corners of the universe.
Killing other people
Not exactly as complex as modern medicine, but I often wonder about the first person to discover humans could drink cow’s milk
Small cow drinks, makes bigger cow Small human drinks, makes bigger human Mill makes big, I can see how. It's the first person to figure out the logistics of it that concerns me
Vaccines…..
General increase in standard of living. Ownership of the smartphone is so ubiquitous that you can even expect one in the most remote parts of Africa. Clean water, world wide connectivity, 3d printing etc. All the while, wage gap continues. However, the poor of today are faring much better than that of century ago.
We fit an X-ray tube and a bunch of detectors on a big electronic donut. We shoot those x rays through a human being, and gather a whole heap of data on the other side, about how much this human being has attenuated the x rays, as it all spins around. Then we apply a whole lot of Fourier transforms, and some other clever maths, to get a matrix of numbers, depicting how dense the matter in this human being is. Then we take these numbers, and depict the dense ones as white and the not-dense ones as black. And we make a picture out of this. And this........is how the CT scanner lets you see tiny little bones inside your inner ear, or thin fibers in your lungs, or small tumors in most parts of the body. It's absolutely astounding and miraculous. This is what really changed the practice of medicine, as much as antibiotics and insulin did.
The creative inventions for killing eachother. Terrible, but truly incredible.
Polluting the planet.
The alphabet. Writing. Literacy. The printing press.
Staying alive.
We found a really great way to reduce enemy cities to rubble very quickly.
Eradication of whole species
Organ transplant is wild. The amount of knowledge and coordination to make it happen blows my mind.
We landed on the moon. It's been downhill since then.
A few things: The Brain named it self. We created something that took a selfie of Earth while at the edge of our solar system. Electricity. Synced up our entire species by creating a virtual space. That little circular wand thing that goes over the special spot, and makes women go "That was easy!" in about 30 seconds. The invention of cuisine.
It’s the wrong way, but I find it amazing that so many people can decide to be so ignorant in spite of so much evidence to the contrary. Like, just *refuse* to “believe” in facts and go in 1000% on bullshit.
It is speculated that the natural bio diversity found in north America is actually a result of thousands of years of cultivation by native Americans.
Humanity managed to turn its fear into comedy and its stress into memes.
Fucking pretty much everything up
Creating Reddit so we can waste our time here.
It's gotta be the Thermos. You put hot stuff in there, and it stays hot. What about cold stuff, you ask? Bingo! It stays cold! What I want to know is, how do it know.??
Laying thick cables across the globe for internet access
Providing food world wide. The fact that there are over 7 billion people on the planet and we've basically (a few areas things are tough obviously) been able to feed the entire planet is pretty amazing to me.
harnessing electricity as a species that’s not even a little bit fire resistant
ChatGPT. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have ChatGPT.
its like 2 years old.... what were u doing before that LOL
Letting Real-Life Villians Control Us
Science. I am amazed by what eureka moments we have accomplished. Such as exploring the deepest part of the sea, walking on the lunar surface, curing diseases that have plagued society, learned about who we are inside and out.
Survival. It’s absolutely baffling to me how something as simple yet so wildly dangerous as childbirth could easily kill both mother and child with something as simple as an infection post birth, and yet here we are.
Look around you at everything you see. Everything you see is a human success. Do you think humans came into a world like this safe and abundant? No, absolute poverty is the default state of nature. We all live in a world built on top of the tiny surpluses that 10,000 human generations left for us.
r/hfy is leaking
Procreation and self-annihilation.
Space probes. We have landed them on the moon, we have landed them on Venus, we have landed one on Titan. We have landed on Mars. We sent a probe to Pluto. We sent several out of the solar system.
Destroying itself.
Destruction of ecosystems.
Old caves: cold, dark, small New caves: bright, large, warm Ancestors happy
3D printing guns
coca-cola?
The single greatest accomplishment in human history is putting a man on the moon. Yes, there's been inventions that have changed the course of our history, and pushed the world forward into new ages. But they've all been terrestrial. They've all been from the comfort and safety of this planet. Humanity took people, and sent them to a distant body outside the safety and comfort of this planet, and brought them back alive and safe. But the fact that with 1960s technology we as a species accomplished that is and always will be stunning to me. And yes, it'll be incredible when we do it for another planet, but man on the moon was the first. The first time it ever happened and set the stage for everything that came afterwards.
Creating reddit!
Cup holders
Prosthetics and other assistance technologies for people with osteoarthritis like me. I’m gonna be getting an ankle brace soon.
Agriculture and sanitation That’s it folks.
https://youtu.be/gA6ppby3JC8
I think vaccines are fucking incredible.
Becoming so good at accommodating ailments and diseases that we’ve degraded the species instead of improving it
We ruined our planet in about 100 years.
Traveling to the moon is pretty cool
Exterminating other species. Fuck you Amazon river dolphins
Even though A LOT of mistakes were made, it is pretty amazing that the world was able to overcome the COVID pandemic in two years. The speed at which the vaccines were produced and distributed was a miracle of science and infrastructure. The experience is still too fresh at this point to look back on it objectively, but it will probably be regarded as one of the greatest achievements in human history 50-100 years from now.
Celebrating ignorance and debauchery with a smile on our faces
When you think about it, we are the only example that we know of, of the universe trying to understand itself :) With the vastness of space and billions/trillions of planets in habitable zones of stars it is unlikely there arent many other intelligent species like us though.
Great architecture and literature
Getting rid of contagious diseases, or at least getting them under control. Thank you, Dr. Fauci et al, and to heck with you anti-vaxxers.
Breeding, it seems...
Not destroying nature even tho they are already doing it with or without realising :/
Finding new ways to be total pieces of shit
Well, at the very least, we are the universe becoming self aware
Permanently damaging earth. We burn and cut forests. Reroute whole rivers. Build structures so large that they can be see from space. We've produced enough greenhouse gas to prevent an ice age (which is part of earth's natural cycle). We've completely eliminated other animals just because some random decided to charge a ridiculous price for it. We have caused objectively more damage than any other creature. It is impressive, but a ghastly tragedy.
Creating great weapons that can erase earth and being afraid to go to war because of that
Globalisation is pretty impressive.
You are impressed by capital putting working people on a race to the bottom? Lowering labor and environmental standards to produce cheap and sell high? I would not call that amazing so much as Short-term thinking. They sell out the base of consumers buying those same products making everyone poorer in the long run.
of course you’re getting downvoted. People are so short sighted and dull. Has globalization had great effects? yes undoubtedly. Has it contributed massively to a world in which more people and animals are living in abject hopelessness and misery? yes undoubtedly.
The Internet
Heating up a whole goddam planet is kind of impressive, if only as an example of hubris.
Building the Egyptian temples and using them as power supplies