Why haven't we really advanced much as a species lately?

[JUST BLEED GOD]

It wasn't the expectations being too lofty, it's that they didn't even know where to look for the change to begin with. Also you're basing this off of movies. Movies are designed to sell to the masses, and the masses aren't going to be experts in future technology, a studio isn't going to pour money in to making an accurate representation. Most of the time, flying cars and neon lights are shorthand to denote to an audience that it's the future. If you look in to the literature of Sci-fi, you'll see plenty of examples of modern technology being talked about before it's existence.

It's not that we aren't making steps forward in technology, it's that they're happening so fast and so often, you can't even keep up with the changes.

Regarding movies, I think I would add a few hundred years to any prediction. I think everyone just kind of assumed we'd have made more progress.

Allow me to phrase it this way, if, in 1970, you'd told people " hey, we went to the moon last year, in 47 years time we won't have ever gone back or done a whole lot except send a probe tO mars" they would probably laugh at you.

A robot on mars a while ago was an achievement, but not on the kind of scale I believe people expected.

 

[Slick_36]

Regarding movies, I think I would add a few hundred years to any prediction. I think everyone just kind of assumed we'd have made more progress.

Allow me to phrase it this way, if, in 1970, you'd told people " hey, we went to the moon last year, in 47 years time we won't have ever gone back" they would probably laugh at you.

A robot on mars a while ago was an achievement, but not on the kind of scale I believe people expected.

Space exploration is certainly something that we've neglected. But, we've made many many observations that we couldn't have even explained to a person in the 70's. Our understanding of space and physics is continuing to grow at a rapid rate. Telling someone that we landed a craft on the moon sounds a lot more impressive than the fact that we took a picture of the universe in it's infancy, or that we've observed two galaxies colliding in spectacular fashion.

 

[RawHawg]

Yes, because now people put ranch dressing on pizza

 

[fightingrabbit]

As long as people keep putting ketchup on steaks, nothing's changed really.

 

[Pwent]

the fuck are you talking about

i have the access to the summation of mankinds knowledge that fits in my pocket

i can instantly facetime with someone in africa

do you realize how unbelievable that wouldve been even 100 years ago? or 50 years ago?

we are advancing faster and faster

 

[Metal_Daze]

Space exploration is certainly something that we've neglected. But, we've made many many observations that we couldn't have even explained to a person in the 70's. Our understanding of space and physics is continuing to grow at a rapid rate. Telling someone that we landed a craft on the moon sounds a lot more impressive than the fact that we took a picture of the universe in it's infancy, or that we've observed two galaxies colliding in spectacular fashion.

Goid point. Just the search for exoplanet. Ain't nobody got time for that but since the 70's, the progress are stunning. From a handful to a thousand, all observed by deductions. It's not mathematics that solved that equation: it's the evolution of observation technology and the experience gathered in the discovery of previous exoplanets.

It's because our new culture is garbage.

Short term profits and long term control are the new goalposts, not innovation or advancement.

And if you say anything about it, people just give you this lazy dirty look because they don't want to deal with the "stress" of acknowledging the obvious.

I hope you're aware that every generation since Moses has thought the next generation was dooming the Earth. Every generation thought that kids were stupid and taking their "hard work" to the garbage. Every generation hates their offsprings' tastes, music and clothing. They think their sexual preferences are abominable. Also, every old geezer gets out to shout to kids: "get off my precious lawn"!

You are that geezer, right now.

 

[kuromusha]

You're comparing real-life progress to movie-progress.

 

[Goonerview]

Was watching a 1997 film Event Horizon and it starts setting the scene by saying we colonise the moon in 2015 and start mining on Mars in 2032. I noticed a lot of films that have graphics that are almost as good as today's imagining we are capable of deep space travel on massive ships and stuff not far in the future but then 20 years later we watch the film and think wow we really haven't done much.

Cars from the late 90s imo are not far behind today's, fuel consumption isn't much better as they've all gotten heavier. Hell, some poor countries are only just starting to use efi, developed in the 50s!

Movies like The Lord of the Rings imo from the late 90s are still great looking, better than the Hobbit's cgi arguably. We have some OK 3d stuff but it's 2017 and I can't help feeling disappointed that we haven't done much. The dreams of tv shows like Beyond 2000 in the 80s were big, we don't even have hover boards! Unless you count the water jet and magnetic ones that are...expensive and not really that great.

Sure we have phones and porn in our hands but these are just small evolutions from laptops, things like the psp Playstation Portable or gameboy. Personally the only really big jump for me since 2000 has been flat screen tv affordability.

We went to the moon in the 60s, what went wrong since?

I am disappointed.

Social welfare keeps weak people alive. Survival of the fittest is no longer a thing.

 

[Codger]

Social welfare keeps weak people alive. Survival of the fittest is no longer a thing.

None of the technological advances mentioned have anything to do with evolution. The TS is using the wrong term.

We have moved on technologically a lot but most of it is hidden from the average man. The technology of a smartphone is insane compared to the 70s. We've done most of the big, physical technologies that poeple can see and understand and now we're doing stuff in the nano-scale, genetics, pharms, software and so on. These things are super complex and invisible to the consumer other than as black-box wonders.

Plus the moon programme is a bit of a red herring. Space tech sounds and appear super advanced but it's actually pretty basic at its core. It's just a big rocket and a thin shelled capsule and air tanks etc. It's an engineering feat really. It's also insanely expensive. Without the cold-war chest-puffing to motivated the spending, it's no surprise that interest in manned spaceflight dropped drastically after the first couple of Apollos. Also we're not getting a new star anytime soon, probably never. So all you're left with is shitty planets in our own system, none of which will support life. Sure we can get people to mars to live in a bubble but really - so what? We already got feet on the moon - it's not much more of an advance really other than the time it takes to get there. So space tech isn't a good thermometer of our tech progress.

 

[Pugilistic]

This is kind of a good point. Maybe expectations from the 80s were just unrealistic?

I still feel like with what we have, not much has been done. Maybe being in my 30s has made me realise I'll be 6 feet under before we get into space properly. It feels like we've slowed and stagnated.

I don't really read tech news or the news in general, but I am quite often amazed at some of the developments that have been made. I remember a few years back I heard about a US Navy project to use water as antennas which is pretty cool. I bet there's a bunch of military tech being developed we don't know about. More space stuff would be cool but there's probably less of an incentive nowadays with the Cold War being over.

Plus the earth is flat and we can't break the firmament anyway.

 

[steve38]

Yes, because now people put ranch dressing on pizza

I've probably advanced us all as a species, as I prefer to dip my pizza in ranch dressing. Putting the dressing on the pizza...that's just silly, and quite primitive, TBH

 

[JUST BLEED GOD]

None of the technological advances mentioned have anything to do with evolution. The TS is using the wrong term.

We have moved on technologically a lot but most of it is hidden from the average man. The technology of a smartphone is insane compared to the 70s. We've done most of the big, physical technologies that poeple can see and understand and now we're doing stuff in the nano-scale, genetics, pharms, software and so on. These things are super complex and invisible to the consumer other than as black-box wonders.

Plus the moon programme is a bit of a red herring. Space tech sounds and appear super advanced but it's actually pretty basic at its core. It's just a big rocket and a thin shelled capsule and air tanks etc. It's an engineering feat really. It's also insanely expensive. Without the cold-war chest-puffing to motivated the spending, it's no surprise that interest in manned spaceflight dropped drastically after the first couple of Apollos. Also we're not getting a new star anytime soon, probably never. So all you're left with is shitty planets in our own system, none of which will support life. Sure we can get people to mars to live in a bubble but really - so what? We already got feet on the moon - it's not much more of an advance really other than the time it takes to get there. So space tech isn't a good thermometer of our tech progress.

I think we should be trying to improve space travel so we're not just kicking our own puddles.

 

[Reyesnuthugr]

I hope you're aware that every generation since Moses has thought the next generation was dooming the Earth. Every generation thought that kids were stupid and taking their "hard work" to the garbage. Every generation hates their offsprings' tastes, music and clothing. They think their sexual preferences are abominable. Also, every old geezer gets out to shout to kids: "get off my precious lawn"!

That's not what I was saying at all. You're responding in broad generalities about cyclical history but I was talking in specifics regarding the actual problem.

Yours is the standard cookie-cutter nonsense that is predictably spewed by default via every semi-pro transparent bluffer today, and it's clear you don't have any actual thoughts on the matter when you regurgitate this exact embarrassing form letter "response". This is the non-thinker's anthem and it is more bland and less original than the 'cyclical history' it is supposedly referring to.

You could literally recite what you said word for word to each and every problem or criticism to escape from having to think or have any kind of real conversation and it would be BS every time. It's more tired and less interesting than any geezer ever was and you should be embarrassed for having resorted to it so automatically.

Speaking of geezers-- geezers, nerds/geeks and oldschool are the cool thing today so using the "ur an outdated square" makes you the absolute farthest out of step with current zeitgeist than anyone else you could possibly point at.

Cliffs: Ranting about cyclical history doesn't disprove anything I said or add anything to the conversation, it's completely useless. I've seen you post better than that and I expect higher quality in the future.

 

[GSP_37]

I suspect the guys who studied and reverse engineered the alien tech died or lost their marbles due to old age and the new employees found the research papers, didn't know what they were and threw them in the trash.

 

[MusclesMarinara]

I think we should be trying to improve space travel so we're not just kicking our own puddles.

Have you ever driven around the deserts of Arizona? There is a reason people don't live there. The same reason there is no rush to put people on Mars. The reward just isn't there for the risk. The Rover was like Trip Advisor.

For areas of advancement, I would look at solar power. The efficency of the modern panel has more than doubled what its predacesors were doing.

 

[INTERL0PER]

This thread is mind blowingly ignorant/stupid/short sighted.

Our species is advancing, technologically speaking, faster than any time in history, and it's not even close.

 

[JUST BLEED GOD]

This thread is mind blowingly ignorant/stupid/short sighted.

Our species is advancing, technologically speaking, faster than any time in history, and it's not even close.

OK Hoss

 

[Codger]

I think we should be trying to improve space travel so we're not just kicking our own puddles.

I personally don't see the point other than scientific interest, making ourselves feel cool etc. The chances of us ever having a useful colony on another planet is insanely low. All the talk of terraforming etc is just pie in the sky. We've millions of years of good use out of this planet unless we fuck it up. Not fucking it up is completely in our power to do so and we can't even get everyone to agree on that. So quite why we need to go to another planet which, by defintion, will be a lot worse than the one we evolved for, and then somehow transform it and then not fuck it up anyway, is beyond me.

 

[Organic Damage]

It wasn't the expectations being too lofty, it's that they didn't even know where to look for the change to begin with. Also you're basing this off of movies. Movies are designed to sell to the masses, and the masses aren't going to be experts in future technology, a studio isn't going to pour money in to making an accurate representation. Most of the time, flying cars and neon lights are shorthand to denote to an audience that it's the future. If you look in to the literature of Sci-fi, you'll see plenty of examples of modern technology being talked about before it's existence.

It's not that we aren't making steps forward in technology, it's that they're happening so fast and so often, you can't even keep up with the changes.

He'd have a better argument if he complained about futurists making predictions that never come to pass. Movies are more "I wish this could happen" than "this could actually happen".

IMO we've advanced a lot as a species but most of the tractable problems of civilization have been tackled. Inequality, poverty, climate change, strong AI, the cure fore cancer... those are going to take a while.

 

[Deleted member 409801]

Id say youre a little spoiled for choice and maybe have unrealistic ideas TS. Compare the rate of change from the last 20 years the rate of change from say 1890 to 1910 or 1790 to 1810 ect ect and I think things are progressing pretty quickly.

I worked for Bell Atlantic/ Verizon from 2000-2010 , and when I started it was all cooper phone lines , a few cooper T1s and DSL stuff. We all carried pagers and dial up modem computers in the field. If you had told me in 2000 , that in less than 10 years most people would have a fiber optic line to their homes , cooper lines would be obsolete, and ANYONE could take a video on their phone and have it broadcast worldwide in 30 seconds , I would've had a hard time believing it.

boiling frog phenomenon , dude .