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The keyword here is “visible”; for most of these things, though the change is real, it is also easily missed, with the exception of, as you say, thousands of satellites that orbit the earth constantly (space missions are not however already flying past the limits of our galaxy, they’re just about reaching the heliopause; even just leaving the plane of the Galaxy is 200,000 times further than that, while leaving the rim of the Galaxy is about 12 million times further). Video conferencing worldwide? If you draw attention to it, I suspect it would’ve surprised 1922 people that anyone richer than a literal subsistence farmer would also have a device of their own for the other end of the call, but the existence of the technology itself would not be surprising. For visible changes between 1922 and 2022? New materials, new lighting, new fashion, drones, the public acceptability of same-sex relationships, race relations (in particular attitudes to those of pre-Colombian, African, and Chinese descent), and possibly also visible might be the absence of disfiguring illnesses that we have now vaccinated against. But those are likely less than the changes from 1822 to 1922. (The Blue Marble, or the photos of astronauts walking on the moon… I don’t know if those would’ve been shocking or not. Jules Verne died in 1905). |