This is pretty amazing when you think about it. When I was a child, 200 years seemed like an eternity (I was born near the US bicentennial, and the founding of the US was like ancient history to me). Now, nearing 50, 200 years ago is just about 4 of my lifespans. In just 4 of my lifespans (and I don't even feel that old), we went from rudimentary electric motors to all the amazing technology we have at our fingertips today. Truly astounding.
In under 1.5 of them, humans went from first heavier than air flight to walking on the moon. In around another 1 of them, we flew a helicopter on Mars. It’s utterly bananas to think of the pace of progress in our lifetime and immediately prior.
I currently work on embedded software for medical delivery UAVs, and I often choose to use 30-40 year old technologies because it's the most "boring" solution. We're already making sci-fi drones, we don't need to make the software flashy.
I've previously worked on self driving cars, and spaceships. Over my career, it doesn't feel like anything's changed more than incrementally. A lot of the expensive technologies I worked with professionally are now starting to appear in consumer electronics, though, and that's really cool. It seems like modern breakthroughs come from "Elon Musking" existing technology into being cheaper and better, and then "Apple-ing" it into a mainstream commodity.
> […] and I often choose to use 30-40 year old technologies because it's the most "boring" solution.
There's a good chance that it will also be around for a while in regards to spare parts and such:
> The Lindy effect (also known as Lindy's Law[1]) is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, it is also likely to have a longer remaining life expectancy.
I've mentioned variations on this regarding music.
How much garbage is on the radio today? From the last decade? From the last generation?
Music hasn't gotten worse, but we're still listening only to the good stuff. Pantera will be around another generation at least, my grandchildren's grandchildren will likely still listen to The Beatles. And starship captians will undoubtedly invite the wives of dignitaries to onboard Mozart recitations en route to the boring interstellar negotiations of their husbands.
> And starship captians will undoubtedly invite the wives of dignitaries to onboard Mozart recitations en route to the boring interstellar negotiations of their husbands.
I hope gender roles will have progressed more by then, though technological progress is often more rapid than social change.
I was referring to a specific episode of Star Trek The Next Generation. There is no need to interject social wokeness into every conversation. You are causing attrition, not compassion.
> There is no need to interject social wokeness into every conversation
Your parent comment "interjected" gender roles into the discussion in a jarring and frankly outdated way. Not sure why an obscure TNG reference makes you immune from all criticism?
It's a good observation, but IMO this has been the lifecycle of many, many technologies. Take the jet engine. It was invented in the 30s, applied to exotic military applications in the 40s and 50s, available as transportation for the rich in the 60s and 70s, and finally became the dominant long distance transport mode for everyone by the 80s and 90s.
I totally agree. However, I do think there is and will continue to be massive breakthroughs in _biological_ technology.
Things like synthetic biological manufacturing. The decoding and understanding of the basic biologic software that runs our cells and bodies.
I'm convinced a huge breakthrough is on the horizon, that will nudge us down the correct path of building AGI, based on better understands of bioelectric computation.
"In under 1.5 of them, humans went from first heavier than air flight to walking on the moon. In around another 1 of them, we flew a helicopter on Mars"
Yeah, one of those is much less inpressive than the other. We landed a probe on mars before we landed people on the moon
In the first period Engineers and Industrialists were in charge of companies, and then we succumbed to financialisation and bean counters, and progress has stalled.
That's like the meme that when Harriet Tubman was born, Thomas Jefferson was still alive, and when Harriet Tubman died, Ronald Reagan was alive. The electrical engineering equivalent might be that Thomas Edison was born before Faraday died, and Gordon Moore was born before Thomas Edison died, and Gordon Moore is still alive.
The modern world is only an eyeblink old in the grand scheme of history.
The most shocking one to me is always going to be penicillin. There are still people alive who were born before it was discovered. 90 years ago you could die from an infected scratch and now we have the whole arsenal of modern medicine available.
For those interested in antibiotic history it's worth noting that sulfa drugs predate penicillin by a few years. Prontosil was the first practical antibiotic, developed in 1932; it's mentioned a few times in the All Creatures Great and Small books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prontosil
Last week my mom suddenly got very sick. She got pneumonia, one of her lungs collapsed. We expected the worst, she’s not that old but she has diabetes and other health issues. Thankfully the doctors got everything under control with the help of antibiotics. It was amazing to witness how she recovered very quickly. Today she’s back home, the whole family got reunited and we enjoyed a nice meal like nothing happened last week.
This might be a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think that using antibiotics unless you [absolutely] have to - like when you get one prescribed - is a problem if you think long-term because of a higher chance of antibiotics resistance. Using antibiotics "just in case" should be avoided.
Here's an example of E. coli developing resistance to a _strong_ antibiotic within 12 days [0].
Unfortunately, I know more than a few people who take antibiotics even when they get common cold/flu, which doesn't make sense since viruses are not bacteria and they should get vaccinated instead.
I really hope that’s not an unpopular opinion on a site like Hacker News. Misuse (could even call it abuse, especially in the case of livestock) of antibiotics is a direct cause of antibiotics rapidly becoming less useful.
Unpopular? Antibiotic resistance is one of our more severe public health problems globally, and it's only getting worse.
It's not controversial that the two big drivers of this problem are the countries where antibiotics are available over-the-counter, and the widespread use of antibiotics in livestock.
These practices must end if we want to be able to keep using antibiotics to save lives in the future, and it is a question of policy alone.
Antibiotics must be used rationally. Bacteria evolve surprisingly quickly. They can and will develop resistance to the medication. Depending on which antibiotic it is, the bacteria might already be resistant. Staphylococcus aureus is ubiquitous and resistant to common penicillins. In this case, all it will do is kill off all the non-pathological bacteria that actively compete with the resistant bacteria for resources, allowing it to spread over a wider area.
I'm not going to weigh in on antibiotic cream--a lot of commentators are making good points about overuse of antibiotics leading to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but on the other hand most medical sites do recommend applying an antibiotic cream for a couple days after receiving a puncture wound so in fact it probably is a good idea to have some around in your first aid kit.
On home medicines in general, though, I'd like to add a PSA. Put an annual event on your calendar to check your inventory to make sure you have an adequate supply and nothing is expiring soon.
It really sucks to say fall off your bike and somehow sprain your entire left side, making most movement agony, and then find that you need to go to the store because you are out of ibuprofen and acetaminophen.
if you have a wound you can't clean and bandage yourself, you should probably seek medical attention. antibiotic cream is for anything that doesn't reach that level.
If you have a wound, even one that you can clean an bandage yourself, why would you put cream in it? You clean it and you put a sterile dressing on it.
Or, you could just keep some silver leaf around. Place it on the wound, and your chances of infection are greatly reduced. Apparently, many of the bacteria that cause us problems can’t tolerate being in contact with silver.
I think it's often taken for granted just how much humanity has kicked ass over the past 200 years, technologically speaking. Motors, antibiotics, airplanes, skyscrapers, computers, the moon landing.... It's just crazy compared with any other era of human existence.
We just take for granted the “moon landings” of previous eras. Things like cities with 100,000 people, running water, sewers, having a functioning economy over hundreds or thousands of miles… there are many accomplishments growing past complicated animals with pointy sticks to civilization.
Sewers and paved roads are what really boggles my mind, most in the last half-century. Or that China used more cement in 3 years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th century.
We're living in an era where things like the Great Wall of China or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are created on a regular basis.
I just hope this progress isn't sigmoid shaped, or that we've more than passed the half-way mark.
Even prehistoric humans were trading metals and pottery (and other things that decomposed and left no evidence, surely) over thousands of miles. It's easy to forget that they were as intelligent as we are but did not have Isaac Newton's shoulders to stand on.
Most of this is due to progress, but part is due to the way Western European nations dominated the globe and destroyed some pretty advanced civilisations. Some pretty impressive progress was essentially wiped out by colonialism.
I often wonder if we’ve hit a plateau and are just waiting for some major breakthrough, or, if we’ve got about as good of a command of physics and chemistry as we can that it’s much slower progress from here on out.
This is what I come to HN for - inspiration and optimism (hasn’t been delivering lately :-)). The rate of progress is unbelievable and we are already getting serious about going to Mars.
It's been said that as you age, you appreciate history going back proportional to your age as being near your own time. As a rule of thumb it kinda makes sense:
- As a kid I thought the moon landing was in the distant past, being 11 years before me. Now I have friends who watched it.
- The war seemed even more distant, but I know concentration camp victims who lived through that.
- Pop music seems to fly past, but there's a familiarity to the old hits that I recognize from older people now.
- The wall being built and coming down was about a quarter century, felt like forever at the time. I remember things that happened a quarter century ago now.
Although we should also note that most men also didn't have the right to vote for a couple of those lifetimes [1]. If I understand correctly, only a minority percentage of property owning men could vote before 1918.
And from all men being able to vote to all women being able to vote was a span of 10 years, so 0.2 of GP's lifetime.
The French Revolution and end of feudalism happened in the lifetime just before the electric motor. It's easy to forget that the middle class is a very recent invention.
The Roman Empire had a middle class. The middle ages had a middle class. In early civilization, during cattle culture, there was a middle class. But historically middle classes consisted of small landowners in the countryside.
What you are probably referring to is a large urban middle class consisting of landless skilled workers, which requires modernity, as all previous middle classes were built around rural land ownership, or going back to pre-agricultural periods, ownership of cattle. The key ingredient of the French revolution is the battle between rural and urban, between the farmer and the craftsmen, with the craftsmen gaining ascendancy over and eventually slaughtering the farmers.
Not OP but there are some interviews on YouTube called Voices from the Days of Slavery, where former slaves from the US talk about their lives as slaves.
The opening 30s of the interview with a former slave Fountain Hughes always sends shivers down my spine:
