What about today would most impress a person from 150 years ago?

[CoolB]

the smell

 

[bosox32]

I'd be pissed there were no flying cars.

 

[lowsingle]

id take them on the freeway

 

[5H3RD0G]

It depends on their intelligence level. If they aren't too deep they might be impressed by technology. If they are deep in thought they would see how many different people have come together in society, maybe in awe in fact. :icon_chee

 

[Cool Hand Luke]

You seem to have it reversed. Smart phones and the internet would be far more "inconceivable." Nobody from 150 years ago could even imagine their existence (the definition of inconceivable).

Air and space travel have been the "stuff of the future" for hundreds of years. They'd be impressed, but not surprise.

The concept of traveling really fast through air/space is ancient:

looks more like a fancy toilet.

 

[Patof]

Me.

 

[Mohawk Mauler]

Idk if its been mentioned yet,maybe Solar Panels?

 

[El Chimpo]

id play them this song and note their reaction

 

[SammyPops]

Black president.

both accurate and funny

 

[NRFC]

Thermos - they keep cold things cold as well as keeping hot things hot... Amazing!

 

[Senzo Tanaka]

Anyone who doesn't say smartphones is being a contrarian. Near instantaneous communication and access to the sum total of the world's information would have been inconceivable.

Almost everything was just iterative or had already been imagined. It's almost exactly 150 years since Jules Verne wrote about traveling to the moon, so space flight was a conceivable thing in that age.

Other than access to information, my guess is that the one thing that a person from the past would have trouble adjusting to in our world is speed. Speed of travel, communications, business, etc.

Third would be population and health.

I absolutely love the example given in the movie The Shawshank Redemption. Brooks lived his entire life in a prison cell and got out as an old man. He got a job bagging groceries and everyone is bossy, in a hurry and everything is moving fast paced. He almost gets hit by a car while crossing the street. He mentions how the world got itself in a hurry and he just couldn't keep up and eventually

Spoiler

kills himself because he didn't want to live in that world. It was completely alien to him.

I don't think someone in the past could adjust to the speed of things and it would drive them mad.

There was also a good Twilight Zone episode where an old west criminal time traveled to modern times (the late 50s back then) and he couldn't handle the noise of the city, the lights and the sheer speed of everything moving around him. He was freaking out. I think it was a pretty realistic depiction of what would happen if you dropped someone into our time.

 

[Spoken]

space, flight, electricity (wasn't common until late 1800s.). The very concept of a computer would make their heads explode.

 

[Spoken]

You seem to have it reversed. Smart phones and the internet would be far more "inconceivable." Nobody from 150 years ago could even imagine their existence (the definition of inconceivable).

Air and space travel have been the "stuff of the future" for hundreds of years. They'd be impressed, but not surprise.

The concept of traveling really fast through air/space is ancient:

How about Icarus.

 

[D Train]

You seem to have it reversed. Smart phones and the internet would be far more "inconceivable." Nobody from 150 years ago could even imagine their existence (the definition of inconceivable).

Air and space travel have been the "stuff of the future" for hundreds of years. They'd be impressed, but not surprise.

The concept of traveling really fast through air/space is ancient:

That's kinda my point. Smartphone technology is far beyond their technology that they couldn't even appreciate it.

 

[BRF]

Exactly.


It'll be "low-tech" that blows their fucking minds.

Indoor plumbing?

 

[Northern]

I think the posters that are prioritizing cultural/low tech are spot on.

I remember reading about a Russian defector during the cold war, who was brought to a run of mill 1960s American grocery store. He couldn't believe the amount and variety of fresh produce available. It blow his mind and his mind rationalized that it was solely a trick to impress him, instead of normal. Now imagine a person who lived a 150 years ago in a grocery store, the variety, freshness and quantity would dwarf anything they had ever experience but it would be easy to comprehend the difference.


Just like today, space travel, ocean exploration, medical advancement etc is so far removed from the normal day to day experience of 99% of people, it'd be hard to understand the significance to daily life, due to abstractness of technological change.

 

[Ippowned]

If someone was told they were going to travel 150 years into the future, and they were brought to 2014, I think they would be quite disappointed. It depends on where they would be brought. Tokyo looks a lot more futuristic, than Budapest. We still have railways, and at the time, they would be on the brink of inventing cars, which we still use. The biggest difference is probably that women shave their clamburgers.