• AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
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    1 hour ago

    I feel like the pictures over-exaggerate the difference a bit. The wright flyer was literally made by two people in their spare time while the space program was around 4% of all federal spending and had almost half a million people working on it in some capacity.

  • altphoto@lemmy.today
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    3 hours ago

    A man named Peter, who had escaped slavery, reveals his scarred back at a medical examination in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, while joining the Union Army in 1863.

    Yup, that’s far alright:

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    My grandmother was an adult through that 66-year period. Lived to be 99. She rode to town on a horse as a kid and took trips on jets before she died.

  • WanderWisley@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    The Brooklyn Bridge and the battle of Little Bighorn happened the same year. And there were Native Americans who fought in the battle that were still alive to see man walk on the moon. So in the span of one lifetime we went from Custard’s last stand, to one giant leap for all mankind.

  • samus12345@sh.itjust.works
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    3 hours ago

    I’ve thought from time to time about how being able to see significant societal change in a person’s lifetime is a very recent phenomenon. For many thousands of years, things stayed pretty much the same from birth to death unless you happened to live though a significant event. It’s neat that I’ve gotten to witness change in a way that one would have to time travel to experience in the past, but monkey’s paw, the change isn’t always good…

  • rustydrd@sh.itjust.works
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    4 hours ago

    And only 30 years after that, we’re surfing the interwebz, sailing down the data highway at the speed of light. I’m running out of metaphors to chain together…

    • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 hours ago

      And just 20 years later we have destroyed the concept of truth. What a time to be alive.

      • girsaysdoom@sh.itjust.works
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        40 minutes ago

        Do you mean the actual philosophy of truth or do you just mean that we currently have a cult of personality spewing lies and people en masse accept it as truth?

        Because I’ve heard arguments for both.

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    One of the Wright brothers managed to live to see the end of WWII. Imagine the weird janky flying machine you and your dead brother designed in a bicycle shop in Dayton is being used to decimate Europe while boats full of the things are redefining naval warfare across the whole of the pacific before one drops a weapon so powerful that it becomes the basis of mutually assured destruction

  • frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    7 hours ago

    Forget the moon. We’re all within a few generations of the first people who had access to indoor toilets on a mass scale.

    • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 hours ago

      India basically introduced toilets in a single generation.

      According to this article, in 1993, 70.3% of the Indian population did not have access to toilets. By 2021, the number dropped to 17.8%. So literally more than half the population of India got access to toilets within 30 years.

      • MeThisGuy@feddit.nl
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        7 hours ago

        the flushing kind or the hole in he ground kind?
        the there’s a sink kind. or there’s a communal soap bar to wash your asshole with and the other hand to eat with kind?
        wonder how many Indians are left-handed, or if that’s even culturally accepted

  • ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works
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    7 hours ago

    In 1861 Russia abolished serfdom.

    In 1961 Gagarin reached space.

    It’s just barely implausible a person born a serf could have seen their descendant explore space.

  • SpecialSetOfSieves@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    And destroyers.

    Just a few months into its reign, the US regime intends to ruin decades of progress in science and space exploration:

    On May 30, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced a plan to cancel no less than 41 space missions — including spacecraft already paid for, launched, and making discoveries — as part of a devastating 47% cut to the agency’s science program. If enacted, this plan would decimate NASA. It would fire a third of the agency’s staff, waste billions of taxpayer dollars, and turn off spacecraft that have been journeying through the Solar System for decades.

    Shutting down a working, completely functional mission like New Horizons, in particular, that may just be on the cusp of a huge discovery - it has seen signs of a new, second “ring” to the Kuiper Belt - is the ultimate repudiation of the American self-image as explorers of the frontier. And all of this at a time when the Chinese are just about catching up to “the West” in space science prowess.

    As a kid, I never understood what the Romans were trying to say with their Janus myth. Turns out that Orange Janus is simply the god of endings.

  • w3dd1e@lemmy.zip
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    8 hours ago

    It’s easy to see why people thought we would be a lot more futuristic by now.

    • PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@feddit.uk
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      7 hours ago

      i have a little tablet in my pocket that gives me access to the sum total of all human knowledge and can contact anyone else more or less anywhere on/around the planet for instant voice communication.

      We can take organs out of dead people and put them in living people and have them survive.

      I can be anywhere on the planet within 48 hours

      We have cars that can drive themselves

      We have robots being controlled live(ish) on mars

      We have planes that can stay airbourne indefinately

      And there’s many more examples

      • ZoopZeZoop@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        Phones can also video call, lead you to just about anywhere you want to go on the planet, and store millions of pictures/videos/writings of a person’s personal history. Unprecedented.

        • PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@feddit.uk
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          7 hours ago

          Yup, i was in three completely unfamiliar cities in the last month that speak languages i do not speak.

          I was never lost once, i was able to learn how to take public transport, and i was able to effectively communicate with people who do not speak english

        • Pringles@sopuli.xyz
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          7 hours ago

          I always thought those scifi stories where companies basically rule everything were overblown, but you just see it changing to that in real time.

          • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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            6 hours ago

            It happened before, it could and is happening again. The East India Trading Company was the most profitable company in the world after looting and conquering India for a while before the British government formally took over.

      • Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 hours ago

        Unfortunately, we’re cyberpunk futuristic instead of whatever futuristic flavor the Jetsons were doing.

      • RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz
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        6 hours ago

        Families taking vacations to Venus and swimming in the seas of Europa futuristic?

        We still have ways to go