I think both outside cultures would look at 1960s car culture and see it as bizarre, but no more bizarre than a lot of other things in other periods of history. We tend to be most aware of the stuff that's recognizable in a bygone era, and less aware of the peculiar stuff. We recognize the medieval inn as precursor to hotels, but there were doubtless numerous totally bizarre customs associated with inns that we would find utterly strange. But we don't know about those. We know about the 60s enough to know how strange it was. I was a child, but had cousins who were all deeply into the Ford vs Chevy rivalry and cruising and removing mufflers to sound loud. I found it utterly bizarre even then. I think it was the fumes from leaded gasoline.
]]>"Cars, personal transport vehicles, were really popular for a while."
Was it all that strange? Yes and no. Few people orient their lives around transportation machinery but there's never going to be a culture that can't understand fads coming into fashion, being everywhere for a few years, and then fading either into obscurity or just one part of daily life.
And as RDSouth pointed out, we're in a transitional period; such eras are fertile ground for brief flourishes of idiosyncrasy. It seems quite natural that about the time self-propelled vehicles became common they also became a focus of attention. If you think it's bizarre to build a life around a vehicle, don't get boat owners wound up about their hobby. grin
In a thousand years nobody will remember or care. The 1960s was the decade humans landed on the moon for the first time and school kids won't be able to remember if that was before or after the Civil War. Before or after the Facebook AI Massacres? There are recordings so spaceships were invented after telephones, right?
]]>Yeah, we're really weird. Even in Damascus and Aleppo they built better than we have, and look where it got them.
People have had horses and donkeys for about 4,000 years, and boats for at least 40,000 years if not 400,000. What we've done with cars is unique and uniquely self-destructive. Try explaining how our cities, homes, farms, and jobs are laid out without reference to cars if this doesn't make sense.
]]>Our generation forgets that one thing cars did was cut to a fraction the amount of pollution within cities. The previous transportation solution was just as dirty out in the country but there are good uses for manure in rural areas; in cities it just piled up and stank. Gasoline fumes smelled funny but they didn't form odious piles and you didn't ruin your shoes walking in them. It was a great advance!
Yes, we planned for cars when we built things in the 20th century. I've read essays about how best to design entire towns around the railroad, which was a question of the 19th century. We've been designing neighborhoods around ships and boats for thousands of years. The 26th century may be designing habitats around antigravity belts (and then be called inexcusable by the 27th).
Not planning for resource depletion is depressing and all too common; you don't need me to point you at examples or Jared Diamond. The same goes for climate change, be it the Greenland Norse or the Anasazi or the example of your choice.
Here's a new thought, and those are thin on the ground after 1500 posts. What are we doing now that our descendants in a thousand years will be surprised at and impressed by? I'm sure we've got our own Canal of the Pharaohs, something that gets duplicated centuries from now and then appears in popular 'marvels of the ancients' presentations. I kind of hope the Ancient Lost Technology wonder isn't going to be space travel.
]]>Here I'll assume we don't combat climate change and do collapse civilization. Useful things we'll have done:
Built buildings out of iron, copper, and other useful stuff (even drywall can be recycled to help ameliorate saline soils). People will be mining accessible city ruins and dumps for a long time, even if they're unlivable. There's a lot more refined metal lying around than there will be left in the ground, so I think it's safe to assume our history will get ground up and recycled, whether we collapse or not.
Domesticated scads of new species, from fungi to insects, all of which are useful in a climate-changed world. In the US, a lot of myco-technology is hobbled by some amazingly stupid and vague patents that were issued in the 1970s. We might well have a lot of industrial pollution under better control if those patents did not exist. Check out Paul Stamets' Mycelium Running. The point is that there are some low tech solutions to difficult problems that we have the rudiments of, but haven't properly developed because the first adopters can't make any money due to a large corporation that is (I believe) squatting on the patents. Similarly, we're working hard on domesticating insects for food consumption, and that probably will turn up some really small livestock that will be very useful in future conditions.
Rocket stoves. We've kind of revolutionized burning wood over the last 20-odd years, and made it much more efficient. So long as we can continue to make rocket stoves, it will be a lot easier to cook.
Solar thermal heating. I'm not sure our descendants will have photovoltaics, but a lot of solar thermal is low tech, and those designs last.
Matches (if we can continue to make them). They're properly a 19th Century invention.
Germ theory, sanitation, and whatever comes out of our current revolution in dealing with micro-organisms. Doctors are still well behind the plant pathologists in understanding host-pathogen interactions (which must be why plant pathology funding is getting cut back), but we're getting more sophisticated about how humans deal with the microbes that run the world. A lot of health solutions come from understanding how microbes spread, rather than using antibiotics against them, and I suspect this knowledge will survive.
US patents issued in the 1970s expired in the 1990s at latest. Or are you referring to knock-on effects from efforts to avoid key patents in the past?
]]>The information source is Stamets' Mycelium Running, and what I got wrong was the timing: 1990s, not 1970s. The major patents run from ca. 1995 to 2004, with most in the 1990s. Here's the key Stamets' quote on the legal problem: "Another problem with mycoremediation is a testimony to its effectiveness. Oftentimes, while trying to break down diesel contamination for instance, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) will be destroyed. In doing so, one mycoremediation method has succeeded in treating several targets, whether intended or not. Inadvertently, the bioremediator may be in violation of one of the several issued patents specifically granted for matching fungus against a toxin...Unintentional patent violation does not protect you from patent infringement and lawsuits. This legal mess is a major stumbling block preventing wide-scale fungal cleanup of chemical toxins."
In other words, fungi aren't as selective as the patents presume they'd be, and since they don't read, they don't know they're supposed to only break down some contaminants and not others. Depending on the issue, we've got until 2021 for all the original patents to expire.
]]>I'd like to point out why putting humans into space doesn't fit that description...but reasons escape me at the moment.
Fission power might well turn out to be a lost technology abandoned for social reasons that the 31st century finds opaque or baffling. Trans-oceanic communication cables could easily be forgotten in a collapse or move to satellite relays; rediscovery of those could be an eight day wonder in the future. Nuclear submarines, to combine the subjects of oceans and fission? (Sadly, we've left more than one on the sea floor for our descendants to find.) It would be nice to say airships, since they're so big and impressive looking, but it's not clear now why they'd be revived.
If we assume a collapse-of-civilization in the 21st or 22nd century and no Grand Reboot until the 23rd or 24th, then in the 31st century plastics could be one of those Ancient Technologies that took a long time to be recreated, the same way we view hydraulic cement which the Romans had and we didn't regain until the 18th century.
]]>The one I always see, as an engineer, is the "optical transistor" or equivalent. It appears about every 5 years and has done so since the 1970s. The article usually ends with the statement that optical computers will "one day" be 1000x as powerful as what we have now.
]]>In any case, without a lot of fixed nitrogen, that local warlord isn't going to be able to keep his machine gun fed.
What he might have is a machined rifle (e.g. built in a machine shop) that is far more accurate and has a greater range than the village-built muzzleloaders his militia fields (a muzzleloader can be built with about the same blacksmith's forge as a sword, albeit they need a few special tools to bore the barrel and build the lock). If there are any machine guns around in such an environment, they'll probably be more like the machine guns of the 19th Century, company-level weapons of the great powers, rather than individual weapons of high-level fighters.
]]>(It was not only the longest thread ever, it was almost 60% longer than the previously longest.)
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