What I meant, which I suppose was lost, was that powdered milk can be kept far longer than liquid, and doesn’t spoil. In the past (and in some countries today,) the only way to get milk is to own a cow. #2 also refers to the fact that sugar used to be expensive and hard to get, and that water can be boiled in less than a minute.
Actually, it’s proof that 3 or 4 humans are living in the future. Until I can get there myself, the top 1%-ish of humanity isn’t living in the future. And as an upper-middle+ class Westerner that still leaves 99% of humanity not yet living in the future.
My take …
So much of the commentary above has been about consumer electronics & the internet. Not surprising, considering how we’re conversing. But that’s the tip of the iceberg.
What we’ve done with medical care is as amazing, if not as familiar to us rank & file schmoes. Likewise physics & applied chemistry.
Heck, try telling a 1910 farmer from Kansas that you grow however many bushels of wheat per acre using how many people. He’ll insist that’s impossible. Try telling the same thing to an 1810 farmer from Kansas and he’ll say you’re crazy to even imagine such numbers.
My bottom line is pretty well where Shagnasty’s is. Setting aside the internet, much of tech today was foreshadowed by 1890’s America. You need to go back to more like 1880 or 1870 to have today really be full of un*imagined *tech.
And the social & piolitical changes have been at least as significant as the technological ones.
I can’t believe no-one has mentioned the Large Hadron Collider - we might be close to discovering the god particle, surely that’s the future right there?
Oh man. :: want to be there ::
I wonder what those windows are made of?
Only if[ul][]We actually discover it,[]It does what we think it does, and[*]We can control it[/ul]What does it do, again?
Not a lot, except confirm that the physicists’ current best guess at how physics ultimately works is largely correct.
Another one voting for 1870-1880. Electronics didn’t really exist, internal combustion engines were just being thought of, powered flight was more or less impossible and little of the basics of modern physics and biology was understood. Social behavior would certainly be different enough between now and then to be seriously disorienting. Not only would someone from that era likely have their mind blown, they’d have to have the concept of a blown mind explained to them.
One thing to do would be to try to find old examples of futurism and see how well they fit. Someone from 1980 would probably have a few “wow” moments: “Where are all the travel agents gone? And since when has the entirety of human knowledge been beamed through the air into my pocket?” But would mostly be able to walk around and function the same – there’s lots of people who lived in 1980, and never DID get onto the internet in the next 30 years.
Someone from 1900 would probably see some things the same if they stuck to certain sorts of places, but would be shocked by the prevalence of completely different fashions cars, planes, direct deposit to banks, etc etc.
I think someone from 1800 would be completely at sea. They would probably fit in fast if they had a good native guide – culture has changed notably, but probably in ways people can explain when asked – but in general suffer from complete future shock.
Flip the question around: At what point do you think our modern world began? I think the 3 fundamental inventions which make up our modern world are: the internal combustion engine, the skyscraper, and the telephone. As I read history, I don’t feel that I can relate at all with how people lived, worked, or socialized before these were in widespread use. Granted, I’d be significantly culture shocked if I was suddenly transported to New York City circa 1935 - but I think our cultures are still related enough that I’d quickly adapt and get by. I could not say the same if I was transported to New York City circa 1890.
The computer is a revolutionary invention but before the internet it was just another business machine. It made jobs quicker and more efficient but it wasn’t really “the future” until the World Wide Web was established. I believe in 100 years this same question will recognize the Internet as the the foundation of their culture, but I don’t think it’s still too new to count yet.
My answer will be 1910 (a nice round number) - I think anybody after that time would be able to see how their social values and technological know how could progress to the technolgies we have today.
I disagree. It was the personal computer in the 80s and the video gaming it provided that made it “the future” (and then the web came along and sent it into the stratosphere).
In 1996, on Star Trek, they imagined in the 23rd century people would carry communicators that were only slightly larger than cell phones, and they didn’t seem to have any apps. So 2011 would seem pretty futuristic by that standard. No evidence that they had Facebook, and they didn’t seem to have Wikipedia either, Spock just had to remember stuff.
Quoted from Frazzled:
The internal combustion engine and telephone are true but I don’t know if I would vote for skyscrapers. The vast majority of people, even in cities don’t live or work around skyscrapers. They are mainly a highly localized fad that aren’t that practical in most places. They LOOK futuristic but that is the point to steer away from when it comes to long-term impact. Low-rise urban and suburban office parks have a much bigger impact on the world overall. The rush to build to the sky or even live in the city proper is vastly diminished by other technology. As 1st world populations stabilize, you see less and less of new skyscrapers in most areas other than the ones where land is at an absolute premium and that isn’t true for most of the U.S.
Large scale computer impact took affect way before the WWW even from a consumer standpoint. You have to go back to the early 1980’s with the advent of the IBM Personal Computer, the Commodore 64, the Apple IIE and Macintosh let alone the arcades. It was a huge deal back then. I was there. Millions of people had them in their homes and it was a popular media topic. The web is its own thing that steamrolled over everything later but you have to go back 15 years or more to see the true start.
That isn’t a bad guess. I am young enough to understand modern technology natively yet old enough to have known family members born in the late 1800’s. They never made a big deal of seeing so much change over time and they adapted but it was there. 1910 is the time when airplanes and personal automobiles were proven to be practical, telephones existed in sufficient numbers, and electricity was enough widespread in many places to consider it a proto-modern era. Frank Lloyd Wright was building Brady Bunch looking houses that some people would still have to travel by horseback to visit however so it was a weird mix.
I think you have to go all the way to the early 1950’s to hit the same level of potential change although the reality was that it took the intervening decades to roll out the change from the turn of the 20th century so that it was commonplace.
My 15 yr old step son had some friends over and we were talking about what we learned in school. I talked about memorizing log tables , trig tables, and using slide rules. They went “huh?”
…I graduated in 1979. The very concept of memorizing dates and names is unfamiliar to them.
I told them that in the 1970’s we could see the future coming, and had some rough idea what it would be like, (I was thrilled with the idea of using a computer to play chess with a guy in hong kong).
To really shock someone, I think though that the late fifties would do. They had the beginings of the sense of technology, and what it would become… The real things that would shock them silly wouldn’t be the gizmos, it would be the social chainges, as earlier mentioned, racial equality, sexual liberation, acceptance of homosexuality, the doubting of “traditional christian values”, rock music (from what it was in the 1950’s), the explosion of media driven culture and the loss of “small town america”, coupled with the decline of global american influence and respect would be pretty shockling to most americans.
To the average Inuit or Imalihut… they would use the snow mobiles and rifles, and then when the civilization that supplied them collapsed… experience an epic die off and go back to the old ways of 400 yrs ago…
Note that the Mechanical Turk a hoax mechanical chess-player, and the Barrel Organ, a precursor to the player piano, were both around in the mid-18th century. Now, the Turk wasn’t real, but the fact that lots of people believed it was possible meant that the idea of a machine that could “think” or play music was present even then.
I’m remided of the line from the TV seriew Eureka, where a person from the fourties is brought back to modern times. Modern character (the Sheriff I think) asks 40’s guy what he thinks of our modern world. His reply, “I was expecting more flying cars.” Kinda what I’ve always thought the future would hold but probably won’t.
Awesome topic.
Hmmmm … i would say if you’re talking like, totally inconceivable - about 1870 nobody could imagine the 2010s at all. If you’re talking about a more recent but still significant difference - I would say about 1995.