When he mentions the lack of cables, he's pretty close with most of them being underground. But also he's incredible close if you consider the mess of cables that was the Stockholm telephone tower, functioning until 1913 https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/09/the-stockholm-telephon...
What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
21–30 of 659 posts
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#22The "less cleaning due to less coal" part is not something we really think much about these days, but the older limestone buildings can really show the difference. Here's a view with the old and either pressure-washed or redone wall: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wso9gae4JPsN6NaG6 and that's on a residential side street... Imagine getting your clothes slowly covered with it every time you go out.
Before clicking on this link I was thinking "oh yeah, I know of one such example near where I used to live in Bath". And then I clicked the link... and now I'm terrified of you.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#23I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago. A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. Hubris... hubris never changes.
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Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#24I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago. A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. Hubris... hubris never changes.
From a technological perspective, I'm not sure they're wrong? 1922 had railways and cars and mass transit which had already started increasing urbanisation vs 1822, skyscrapers were already being built, passenger air travel was a go, telephones and electricity existed in cities. The internet and computing is certainly a big shift, but from a visible changes to the world perspective I think 2022 is more alike 1922 tha…
> The internet and computing is certainly a big shift, but from a visible changes to the world perspective I think 2022 is more alike 1922 than 1922 was alike 1822.
Lolwat? Handheld devices that have the power to process millions of calculations a sec, to record Ultra HD videos, to establish a video conference instantaniously with anyone in the whole world.
Thousands of satellites that orbit the earth constantly. Space missions that are already flying past the limits of our galaxy.
Bio-mechanical organs, giving the crippled back the ability to walk, the blind the ability to see, the deaf to hear.
Welp, I do think that technological progress has been growing at a logarithmic rate, and it's probably keep growing at that pace...
I think the one point in which the author was super correct is, when he says that the progress will be made on technology, rather than the "emotion that arises between a man and a maid" - as I understand it, emotional intelligence - , which will remain stagnant.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#25I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago. A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. Hubris... hubris never changes.
Yep. Penicilin, Heart transplants, Supersonic travel. Nuclear power, Nuclear weapons, Nuclear naval propulsion. Space exploration. Artificial Satellites, GPS, Succesful cancer treatments, NMR and other imaging diagnostic tools. Wireless bi-directional personal television (the 20's name for making a zoom call from your phone). And the list goes on.
Do any of those even come close to 1822-1922 changes of aviation, global telecommumications, ubiquitous electricity, cars, Quantum Mechanics, and so on? Space exploration, nuclear propulsion and satellites are great, but their impact on people’s daily lives is far smaller than the above, imo.
I think the author was largely correct.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#26The "less cleaning due to less coal" part is not something we really think much about these days, but the older limestone buildings can really show the difference. Here's a view with the old and either pressure-washed or redone wall: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wso9gae4JPsN6NaG6 and that's on a residential side street... Imagine getting your clothes slowly covered with it every time you go out.
Before clicking on this link I was thinking "oh yeah, I know of one such example near where I used to live in Bath". And then I clicked the link... and now I'm terrified of you.
We may have met :-) It was actually hard to find a good example on street view today - the whole centre is washed now and Cheap/Westgate aren't black for over a decade.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#27I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago. A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. Hubris... hubris never changes.
Yep. Penicilin, Heart transplants, Supersonic travel. Nuclear power, Nuclear weapons, Nuclear naval propulsion. Space exploration. Artificial Satellites, GPS, Succesful cancer treatments, NMR and other imaging diagnostic tools. Wireless bi-directional personal television (the 20's name for making a zoom call from your phone). And the list goes on.
In my earlier reply to GP, I had forgotten about space exploration, and I think that is a major technological advancement that would amaze someone from 1922. However, I still think that someone from 1922 would expect such things of 2022 in a way that someone from 1822 would not expect of 1922. 1822 - 1922 is the difference between being a barely-technological world to being a fully-blown one, in many, many fields.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#28The "less cleaning due to less coal" part is not something we really think much about these days, but the older limestone buildings can really show the difference. Here's a view with the old and either pressure-washed or redone wall: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wso9gae4JPsN6NaG6 and that's on a residential side street... Imagine getting your clothes slowly covered with it every time you go out.
I live in a suburb with a power station that was converted from coal to gas in the 70s. My older neighbours have told me that they had to careful when hanging clothes out to try, lest they got so dirty that they'd have to wash them again.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#29I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago. A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. Hubris... hubris never changes.
Hubris? I think he was right, and that the world of 1822 was more different from 1922 than 1922 is to now. Computers seem to be the primary novel invention in the last hundred years, but long-distance data transfer was normal - and the fax machine sending pictures was overseas was just two years away (1924). 1822 was a horse-drawn, gas-lit world that was in many ways the same as it had been for millennia. 1922 was a…
> but long-distance data transfer was normal - and the fax machine sending pictures was overseas was just two years away (1924).
"Quantity has a quality all its own"
-Joseph Stalin
Saying the fax let us move information long distance is like saying global trade was around in the middle ages because Macro Polo. The quantity difference is so big it becomes a qualitative difference.
I can arrange to have an arbitrary industrial doodad show up on my doorstep from literally the other side of the world while taking a shit. I can stream 1080p to/from damn near anywhere on the planet. In 30sec I can get answers to specific technical questions that would have taken hours for the president of the US to get an answer to in 1990. The list goes on. Communication and information are just so much more abundant than they were even 75yr ago.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#30And in almost one hundred years, we still haven’t made much progress on the fundamental questions in quantum mechanics, other than perhaps Bell’s theorem in the 60s.
I wonder if Einstein, Dirac, et al. would have thought in the early 1930s that the measurement problem would remain unresolved and that there would still not be a consistent theory for QM and GR almost a century later.