[ygjb-dupe]

> Why, because we have almost completely fucked up our home planet and will have to abandon it in few years.

Yes, we did. I don't know that we will have to abandon it, but we do know that human civilization is on the precipice of change, largely in part due to our relentless pace of technological process and reduction in global inequality. Setting aside income and wealth distribution on an individual level, most technology available to humans is more broadly available to humans across the globe than at any time in history. We failed to improve away from fossil fuels for largely economic reasons, and have caused irreparable damage to our ecosystem as result. That doesn't mean we haven't done incredible things along the way, and it doesn't mean that human civilization is going to come to an end, it simply means that it will change.

> Imagine that you were living in a time period when electricity was invented.

There is the rub. Electricity wasn't invented, it was discovered. From the conventionally excepted discovery of electricity to the invention of devices which can be used to generate and distribute electricity, development of modern infrastructure and advances, and the most recent experimental batteries (and if you don't think batteries are experimental, take a good look at Samsung's recent failures), we have been on a 2500 year journey (the first documented history of electrical phenomen was the triboelectric effect, and documented in amber by ancient greeks) to get where we are.

We have vastly improved our understanding of how electricity works, but we haven't yet mastered it. We probably will never stop finding new and interesting ways to capture new forms of energy with the express goal of generating electricity, and it is almost certain that we haven't begun to imagine the different ways it can be used.

Along the way, we have used electricity to improve virtually every aspect of human life.

> Can you imagine how people felt when they saw the first cinema?

Yes, approximately. It suspect it felt as amazing and futuristic as the first time I connected to a BBS. It probably felt approximately the same way it did when I got my first internet connection, and decoupled my ability to learn from my (at the time) poor financial circumstances.

> When they heard voices that came across the town?

Yes, because I remember the first time I had a video call with my girlfriend when I was on a business trip.

> When they saw the first locomotive?

Yes, because I watched with glee as the Challenger shuttle took off, and then confusion and sadness when the Challenger accident unfolded in videos played on the news (I was 8 at the time).

> Imagine that you were living in a time when all the great people that we learned about in the history classes were alive.

Education in the sciences and the arts is more accessible than at any time in human history, in large part due to the advent of the internet. Think of all of the great people who will emerge over the next few generations!

> How many great people, how many great writers, how many great singers and poets of the current times do you imagine students after fifty years will be learning?

Has it occurred to you that the reason that we don't know all of the great minds and great artists that have emerged in the last century largely because the glut of invention, ingenuity and art has drowned our ability to single out greatness?

The great contemporary achievement is not that we have somehow failed to live up to our potential and there are no longer great people, it is that we have reduced the barrier to achievement so dramatically that almost anyone simply needs to try to have the opportunity to succeed in the way that only a select few were able to in the past.

In what era could the child of a refugee grown to build one of the greatest technology empires we have seen? Steve Jobs is and will be one of our contemporary greats; his story of building Apple, being pushed out, building a new empire, and triumphantly returning to control of Apple and leading it into a golden age is quite literally legendary (seriously, it's an amazing story, even overlooking Jobs behaviour, personality, and all the dramatic license that my summary takes! Do you really believe that it was 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae or is it just a beter story when you leave out the Thespians and Thebans?). In what era could the child of an upper middle class family build an means of connecting more than one billion people each day? Mark Zuckerberg is and will be one of our contemporary greats.

If Elon Musk achieves even a fraction of his dreams, he will be renowned in history as one of the most important contemporary great people. Whoever gets the credit for colonizing Mars may go down in history as the reason there still is a human species, depending on how the next century plays out :)

If you think we live in boring times, you would do yourself a service by taking some time out to explore what happened to your sense of wonder, and maybe try living without the modern conveniences invented in the last 30-100 years, even for a week.

[babyrainbow]

> largely in part due to our relentless pace of technological process and reduction in global inequality...

Reduction in global inequality? I don't know what you mean.

>Electricity wasn't invented, it was discovered.

Agreed. My mistake. I don't know what the point is with the rest of that section. I was suggesting that the invention of ways to convert electricity to other forms of energy should have looked like magic at that time. With steam engines, at least you can see what is driving the wheel. But when a motor gets driven by just a wire connected to it or a bulb lighting up should have felt like magic at the time....

>I suspect it felt as amazing and futuristic as the first time I connected to a BBS.

I doubt. Once you have electricity carrying signals, it does not seem much more exciting that signals can be used transfer different kinds of data. So all the wonder of Internet does not feel so wonderful that way. It is just a scaled up telephone exchange...nothing more.

> Yes, because I remember the first time I had a video call with my girlfriend when I was on a business trip.

Same thing...

>Yes, because I watched with glee as the Challenger shuttle took off...

People freaked out when they first saw an automobile. No one freaked off when they saw a rocket lifted off. If you want to evoke the same kind of wonder today, I am afraid nothing short of antigravity will do.

> Education in the sciences and the arts is more accessible than at any time in human history, in large part due to the advent of the internet.

Accessible, yes. But the true workhorses of Internet are Porn and Advertising. You say that we have more access to science and arts more than ever. But we also have access to any kind of sick porn, and guess what our new generation of kids are hooked up on? Internet have opened multitudes of new channels to feed never ending Ads that inject insecurities into their minds and make them feel inadequate and make them buy buy and buy more and more stuff that they don't really need.

>Think of all of the great people who will emerge over the next few generations!

Ha ha. From where? From bowels of your smartphone, where their heads are buried? I would be surprised if the future generations will be able to hold a proper conversation face to face without the help of their smartphones to cue them in the right time to start speaking...

> ingenuity and art has drowned our ability to single out greatness?

You mean, there is greatness everywhere? I don't get you. Single out greatness?

> Steve Jobs is and will be one of our contemporary greats; > Mark Zuckerberg is and will be one of our contemporary greats.

Oh my. No comments for this one.

>Whoever gets the credit for colonizing Mars may go down in history as the reason there still is a human species...

No. Going and colonizing Mars or any other world is a short term solution. It is like paying one credit card bill with another credit card. The real solution is to stop/reduce spending when you are short on cash. In this case, that would be to learn to co-exist peacefully without waging the never ending fights/wars for resources, and learn to limit our extravagance so that our home does not go up in flames. And do that without turning the whole lot of human population to complete imbecils.

>do yourself a service by taking some time out to explore what happened to your sense of wonder..

My sense of wonder is just fine. It is just that my imagination hasn't been so dried up that I cannot imagine something more wonderful than a rocket taking off.....

[ygjb-dupe]

> Reduction in global inequality? I don't know what you mean.

Contrast the distribution of available technology across the globe throughout history. While there are still pockets of people stuck between the neolithic and bronze age, for the most part, more people have access to more technology than ever before.

Economic disparity is enormous, but the general quality of life for those not living in societies in active war zones, or for societies that don't have despots or leaders that are deliberately withholding technology and resources ('lost tribes' that are not lost, simply xenophobic, or nations like North Korea where state inflicted poverty and restricted access to technology is a means of control).

> comments dismissive of my sense of wonder (several comments)

I disagree, but then again, my experiences are subjective ;)

> Accessible, yes. But the true workhorses of Internet are Porn and Advertising.

Yes, you are correct. I don't agree with your assertion that there is a new generation of kids hooked on porn, but I could be convinced if you shared links to peer reviewed studies.

I agree with you on advertising, but then again, we only had two decades of experience with a connected culture, and we haven't even achieved 'hyper-connectivity' in the sense that everyone is connected, all the time. Time will tell if the advertisers win, but there is no way to put the genie back in the bottle. Humans are addicted to connection (in the human sense), and the first generation of connected adults are proving to be more discerning and aware of privacy than people expected when it comes to using technology to connect to other people.

> Dismissive comments about examples of greatness

If you don't think Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are examples of greatness, how about:

Physicists

  - Stephen Hawking

  - J. Robert Oppenheimer

  - Richard Feynman

Artists

  - Banksy

  - Photographers Steve McCurry (Afghan Girl, an iconic photo), Nick Ut (photo from Vietnam war)
  - Richard Serra
  - Vik Muniz

Mathematicians, Cryptographers, Computer Scientists

Each notable for their contributions on the front of research and practical application as opposed to specific technologies

  - Benoit Mandelbrot

  - Ron Rivest

  - Adi Shamir

  - Len Adelman

  - Alan Turing

  - Edsger Dijkstra

The list goes on, and on, and on. We aren't just living on the shoulders of giants, we are living amongst them. And by the way, Justin Beibers music may not meet your taste, but Van Gogh, Kafka, and Bach were artists whose contributions weren't appreciated until after their deaths and in some case for generations.

> Going and colonizing Mars or any other world is a short term solution.

No, it's not. A short term solution would be doubling down and investing in building facilities that meet modern atmospheric expectations and attempting to survive as we burn the rest of the world down around us. A short term solution would be attempting to stifle the economic progress of undeveloped countries as they ride the fossil fuel train to something like economic equivalency instead of investing in and being the early adopters that drive down the cost of environmentally alternatives such that other countries can modernize themselves.

Another short term solution would be to trigger a set of EMPs in orbit that would knock out the last 100 years of technological development and force us to build technologies that don't rely on the ready availability of fossil fuels while we reacquire our current level of sophistication.

Going to another planet, and learning how to survive there, including how to properly manage and keep an environment pristine and survivable in a sustainable fashion (a core requirement to survive in a hostile environment) is most certainly not a short term solution.

> It is just that my imagination hasn't been so dried up that I cannot imagine something more wonderful than a rocket taking off.....

“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.” ― Terry Pratchett (oh, also, another contemporary great person!)

[babyrainbow]

Will respond to just one of your points. Don't think we will be going anywhere with the rest of them..

>Going to another planet, and learning how to survive there, including how to properly manage and keep an environment pristine and survivable in a sustainable fashion...

We are not able to keep ourselves from completely ruining the environment here on earth. That we would be able to "learn to keep the environment on mars or what ever world pristine and survivable in a sustainable fashion" is just wishful thinking.

What I think is that the short sightedness we have, as a species will be our doom. And worse, our core system of existence, require people to be more and more short sighted.

So, as much as we might not like it, unless we, as a species, learn to cultivate sustainable habits, we are going to be selected against in this race to become a space faring species. We just might end up going to Mars or a couple of other worlds. But that would buy us some time, but that is about it be it.