There are cures for certain types of cancer.
And back in the 50s famines occured all over Africa, all over India, and all over China. Millions of people starved to death in China.
Hunger is now a localized emergency problem rather than a world-wide insoluble problem. For example, no one in South Korea goes hungry, yet right across the border in North Korea starvation is widespread. But the only way to solve the problem is to get rid of the North Korean government which would require war, or wait for the North Korean government to implode, which could take decades.
As for flying cars, you’re never going to have a flying car unless you invent antigravity. A flying car that uses regular old jets and props and turbines and such is not a flying car, it is a roadable airplane. It might be possible to have an airplane you can land on a street and drive to your garage, but it’s not a car, it’s an airplane. And the design compromises necessary for roadability mean that your roadable airplane will be a crappy yet expensive airplane.
There’s no getting around the problem that in order to have a flying car you have to fly. As in, leave the ground. And once you leave the ground, you have to return to the ground. Unless you can change the laws of physics, this is always going to be a problem.
I’ve never really understood this flying car obsession. “You want the average yahoo to be piloting a plane up-into-the-air over people? Many of these people have trouble in two dimensions, with lanes painted on the street.”
Show them the internet. I’m impressed just looking at it from 1991 (when I graduated college).
“So that black fella talkin’ bout gay marriage is th’ president?”
I guess, until you got to the end of a 60 mph sidwalk.
Someone in this thread suggested that people in 1959 would be surprised by the prices in 2009. Well, no. It was pretty well understood how inflation worked. Anyone in 1959 who could do a little simple math could predict that prices would be much higher in 2009 than in 1959. There were, of course, people at that time who were baffled by inflation, just as there are now, and who would be annoyed every time anything went up in price, but most people understood what was going on.
People in this thread wonder why flying cars were thought of as so special in 1959, given how impractical the idea is. Yes, you’re right, flying cars really don’t make much sense, but that didn’t stop people from dreaming of them. I can even remember cartoons for kids made in about 1959 about our wonderful world of the future in which flying cars were predicted. My excuse for believing the cartoon was that I was seven at the time. I don’t know what excuse the makers of the cartoon had.
How about the general lack of formality, politeness and decline in customer service? Alot of people who’ve actually experienced it over the past 50 years complain about it. It would be a huge shock for someone who didn’t. Sure merchandise selection and availability have increased dramatically, but the all professional salespeople who’d bend over backwards to get the customer to buy something have been repleaced by largely indifferent employees with minimal knowledge of their inventory, no real incentive to make a sale. Even the behavior of their fellow customers would shock them. Especially a woman from the 50s. Of course a black person (or anybody not white) would have a much different opinion.
I had a flying motorcycle, for a second, in 1984. The flight went sideways and ended with a compound fracture, brain trauma and road rash. Unfortunately I don’t remember that flight.
Ah, a 1984-style death flying motorcycle.
Just imagine the look on the face of a person from the 1950s if you could bring them to the present and show them internet porn.
I imagine the typical response would be to gasp, and say “w…why does the future need SO much porn?”
And then you could walk them through Rule 34.
I think your typical 50s ham radio enthusiast would be bowled over by VOIP & MSN chat, but perhaps a little sad as well.
Let’s see. I started HS in 1950 and I remember the 50s very well. I am a combination of appalled and delighted. Yes, I did believe in flying cars, but not terribly disappointed. Much more so about nuclear energy that I indeed believed would be too cheap to ration.
Sometimes I imagine a 1950s person coming into my house and wonder what they would make of it. Well, in the living room they would find a flat panel color TV and a computer or two. Well, flat panels wouldn’t blow their minds and the first color TVs were already out. The computer would blow his mind. I remember the Univac I, a large roomful of whirring tape decks consolles and thousands of vacuum tubes with MTBF of maybe five minutes. So a complete memory dump to tape was done every minute or so to allow restart. The notebook I am typing this on would be incomprehensible. Hell the $300 Altair of 1974 was incomprehensible to me.
Let’s move into the kitchen. The microwave would be brand new, but nothing else in the ktchen would be especially different. Maybe the auto-defrost fridge, but the concept is almost trivial. Leaving the house, cars are really very different, but nothing incomprehensible about them. Save the ubiquity of foreign, especially Japanese (in those days considered the equivalent of shoddy).
But what would be truly appalling would be that the world’s fundamental problems seemed to have gotten a lot worse and no country is prepared to do much of anything about them. We are in denial about global warming (not even mentioned 50 years ago) and the population bomb is still exploding led by the intransigence of the “morality” of the Church of Pedophilia.
I think he would be astounded that the idea that the Church of Pedophilia holds any sway whatsoever over India and China and most of the other fastest-growing countries. (And does anyone even talk about “the population bomb” any more? I thought it was more or less settled that the world population would be reaching some sort of equilibrium and even possibly mark a decline some time in the next century.)
As for global warming, I could understand his confusion. Weren’t scientists predicting a new Ice Age not so long ago?
The rate of growth in population has been dropping since about 1963:
The rate of growth is now about half of what it was in 1963. It appears that it will continue to drop so that about 2050 the world population will reach a peak and then start to decline. Perhaps it would have been better if the rate of growth had dropped faster so that world population would begin to drop sooner (or even already had begun to drop), but it’s clear that the rate of growth is dropping.
I disagree.
I grew up in the 60’s - 70’s. As I tried to explain to my son:
We were losing the cold war. Our armed forces were a joke and getting kicked around (at least that was the perception). The Soviet Union was a looming presence and growing in power. Countries were going communist around the world. It was only a matter of time until we lost.
The econmy was complete shit and had been for quite some time.
Corruption seemed rampant in government - A president was impeached for being a crook.
Pollution and shit was everywhere. The country looked dirty and grimey. When you traveled down the roads trash lined the sides. Say what you want about gloabal warming and pollution but the country seems much cleaner to me today.
Crime seemed everywhere.
Inflation was running at a billion % - unelmployment also at a billion %. It really sucked.
Gas prices (after adjusting for inflation) were probably 3 times higher. There were shortages and lines.
Nuclear war was pretty much assumed to going to happen. You lived under the cloud of possible mushrooms all the time.
It was a depressing, scary time with not much hope. Today seems much better by comparison.
Then tell them we have a black President…
Good Lord, where did you grow up? That’s not as I recalled it.
Losing the Cold War? It was a stalemate. Most young people didn’t put much stock in the Domino Theory. Czechoslovakia obviously wasn’t happy being Communist. Solidarity started making waves in Poland by 1979.
Gas prices higher? No way. Relative to inflation, gas was pretty comparable, or lower.
Unemployment high in the 1960s? No way.
Inflation high? depends on exactrly what period i n there you mean.
I never felt crime was high in the 1960s. It seemed higher later.
I’ll agree that pollution had gotten pretty bad, and trash on roadsides (which was a separate issue entirely), but both problems drew a lot of attention and were getting fixed up by the early 1970s.
I really do think the feeling of imminent doom abated as you moved away from 1962. There were air raid drills in the schools when I was a kid in the early 1960s, but that disappeared by the later 1960s. I think between the 1962 crisis freaking the Powers That Be out and the improvement in ballistic missile technology making nuclear strikes more likely to be effective persuaded folks on both sides that an adventurism would have a high probability of disaster for both sides kept their fingers away from the buttons. I don’t recall fear of nuclear annhilation being anywhere near as big a deal in the 1970s as it had been in the early 1960s.
I think that the disagreement between CalMeacham and BlinkingDuck shows just how difficult it is even to decide whether things are in good shape or bad shape at any particular point in time. There are many statistical measures of what’s going on and one can choose to pick any one of them to concentrate on. And, of course, most people don’t really care about statistics when they complain about the present at all. They just concentrate on anecdotes. Sometimes they don’t even need anecdotes about how bad things are. They just project their personalities onto the world. Even if you focused on statistics about the present, most people don’t know or care about how the present statistics compared with ones from the past.
“No, gol-swarn-it! The President is a ni-[BONG!!!]”
“He says the President is near!”
And if they’re still standing, tell them he’s a black Democrat from someplace that isn’t even a state yet (depending exactly what time in the '50s our victim is plucked from).