It’s 2020 and you’re in the future

I had a very similar shocking thought when a year ago I realized that GTA: Vice City that had been released in 2002 and depicted the 1980s was much closer to the eighties that it is to our times…

My kid was born in 2014. If she does live to be the same age as her great grandfather when he died in 2015, at age 92, that’ll be the year 2106.

I was born in ’94 and desperately want to live until 2100’s . Its crazy how time lies.

The person I always think about when time and people are concerned is Jeanne Louise Calment. She died in 1997 at the age of 122. I was 16 when she passed away. Although I have never met her. Those who did meet her met someone who most likely spoke with people born before the French revolution! She knew people who fought in the Napoleonic wars! She was born only a few years after the Franco-Prussian war ended! If someone who met her at age 5 lived to be the same age. They would pass away in 2114! Two people who lived at the same time could span 1875 to 2114. Even though odds are this 5 year old who will live to 122 never met her. They probably are out there somewhere.

Also, 2020 most certainly did NOT go the way any of us expected unfortunately.

Here’s one that tickles me:

‘That 70s Show’ is about a time that was as far back in the past as ‘That 70s Show’ is now – about 20 years.

Also, I was talking about the original Zelda games to an 11 year old the other day. I realized that it was the same as someone talking about something from the 1950s to me when I was his age. Yikes!

looking aheading telling kids you were born in in the 90s…how are you still alive? they ask

Lost me at the mention of Super Bowls and Wonder Years. I’m not from the US, you see 🙁

Funny how you mentioned that part at the end about how younger people perceive the 80s like older people perceive the 60s. Funny because, being 19 years old, that is how perceive the 80s-90s. The 60s already seems pretty darn distant to us now and before that seems pretty far away.

Some decades back I ran across the fact that Bertrand Russell was raised by his grandfather, Lord John Russell, who led the fight for the great Reform Bill (parliamentary reform) which took effect in 1832. Bertrand died in in 1970. And I was an adult in 1970. It astonished me that I could have met someone who knew Lord John.

The Sick Giant series was absolutely amazing (as is most of your work).

After reading this series, as well as reading your article about artificial general intelligence, and watching the Kurzgesagt video about UBI (and reading about UBI), I am convinced that nations worldwide should allocate atleast 15% of their GDP towards UBI both to decrease political divisions between people and as a first step to prepare for AGI (artificial general intelligence). Otherwise, AGI when it arrives is going to hit the global economy like a tidal wave.

Tim, what are your thoughts about Andrew Yang? Do you feel a more unifying leader like Yang is the kind of leader the country needs right now?

I ask because as someone with a spouse actively working in AI development, the next two decades, humanity has one simple decision to make that will decide if most of the US live as economic slaves to the wealthy or if all citizens share in the fruits of economic prosperity.

You should absolutely read this short story if you have not already done so, about the choice that humanity will have to make soon. The short story touches on many of the same themes that you write about…

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

The Enlightened Mind = The Self Actualized Mind that sits on top of Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs pyramid.

This is the one element missing from your otherwise excellent and spot on analysis of the primitive mind vs the enlightened mind… Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs. The primative mind dominates when even the bottom pillars of Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs are not met. When a person’s basic needs are met, the Enlightened Mind taking on a greater role. This is why nations that do a good job of meeting the basic needs of all of it’s people tend to have more enlightened individuals. This is why people like Bill Gates whose Maslowian needs are all met tend to a take a more global view of the world.

It’s why I am supporting Human-Centered Captialism and Universal Basic Income, because those policies are catered towards meeting the basic Maslowian Needs of as many people as possible, so that all people can make more enlightened decisions.

But I do think this entire series of yours should be taught in schools. It is an excellent primer on the nature of humanity.

The British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore knew the Wright brothers and Neil Armstrong.

My stepdad was born in 1921, and his dad was born in 1867, nearly 100 years before me. I didn’t have my first biological kid until i was in my 40s. My daughter will likely live to see the 2100s. That’s a huge span of time.

This really hits home. I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing a lot recently. My parents were born in the 1920s (Dad in 1922, Mom in 1924). I’m a Gulf War veteran (DESERT STORM, not the 2003 version). When it was fought, I was 30 years old. I’ll be 60 when it’s 30-year anniversary rolls around.

My father was a World War II vet. Thirty years after the end of World War II, it was 1975 and I was 15 years old. Saigon fell that year, and I’d grown up watching the Vietnam War on TV (along with Kennedy’s funeral — I was three; the Apollo Program — teachers would bring TVs into the classroom so we could watch the most recent launch; and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech).

My Grandfather fought in World War I, and used to tell us little kids “war stories” (no doubt highly sanitized) about fighting the “Boche” in the trenches…

I was born 100 years after the election campaign that saw Abraham Lincoln elected and the Civil War get underway. The year I was born, the Napoleonic Wars had been over for 155 years. This year, our own Civil War has been over for 155 years…

I remember when gas was $0.24 a gallon…at the expensive places. I remember the gas lines in 1973. I lived in El Paso, Texas in 1979, and remember the helicopters roaring low overhead in the middle of the night as they practiced for the Iranian Hostage Rescue mission (that ended in disaster at Desert One). No one in El Paso would talk about those helicopters, and if you mentioned them in public, it was like cussing in church…dead silence, and then everyone talked about something else and tried to pretend you hadn’t said anything. Even the local news kept quiet about it.

Call of Cthulhu was published 39 years ago. At the time, there were people alive (my folks among them) who had been alive during the “classic era” of the 1920s. Cthuhu Now (originally set in the late ’80’s-early 90’s) is almost as long ago as the original “classic era” of the 20’s was from when CoC was published. Reading Cthulhu Now today is like visiting a museum would be for kids today. I was in a movie a couple of years ago that had a scene depicting a phone booth on a street corner. I remember a teenage girl in the audience behind me asking her friends what that thing was…her friends didn’t know either.

I served in Berlin from 1985 to 1989, and remember watching the Wall come down on TV the year after I left. We used to hear the gunfire in the middle of the night as some poor soul from East Berlin tried to escape to the west and was shot down by the Communist Border Guards. Now you can only see about 10 feet of the wall in the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. Some of my people from Berlin later sent me a chunk of barbed wire taken from the Wall (which was included on my retirement flag plaque in2004). I retired 15.5 years ago…after a 20+ year career in the military.

We “won” the Cold War — something I thought would never happen in my lifetime. But it happened so long ago now that children today can’t really imagine what it was like, and have no real understanding of either a bi-polar world (USSR versus USA), or the idea that we could all die in 30 minutes if someone made a mistake in judgement.

I wonder what people will be doing in 2060, when my 100th Birthday rolls around (I’m very sure I won’t be there to see it), and what they’ll believe *really* happened back in the 1960s? It would be very interesting for me to be a fly on the wall THAT year!

https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0aaefae8c871d3c3432e22604092a0e3fd8d282319897e33f7af14c3b1396ae2.png

I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this, but technically we are still in the decade off the teens! Technically, the 20’s begin with the year 2021. The new decades begin with the year 1 of the decade.

hey man comon leave me alone

“if you’re 60 or older, you were born closer to the 1800s than today.”
1900s

Just a remark…
How much an event looks far in the past to you also depends on how much the world changed in the meanwhile. This should be taken into account.

“Chapter 10 of The Story of Us coming next week.”
Press X to doubt.

Sometimes, the passage of time plays tricks on us in unsuspecting ways. The ever accelerating change of advance in the world is not as dramatic as you might think.
Sputnik was launched in 1957. We landed men on the moon in 1969. How incredible that in just a 12 year period (a blink of an eye even by our mortal standards) so many amazing technological feats occurred in space exploration. Yet from 1969 to 2020, 51 years have passed and where are we? What happened? Shouldn’t we already be living on Mars, mining the asteroid belt, or on our way to a neighboring star in a generational ship?
Commercial jet airlines became operational in the late 1950’s, and here we are in 2020, 70 plus years later and we are still flying in basically the same aircraft, albeit with less legroom. Buck Rogers would be embarrassed.

This post reminds me of how mind-bogglingly old the pyramids are. The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2560 BC. That means that the birth of Christ is much closer to us in time than the construction of the Pyramids was to him. We will have to wait another 540 years before the birth of Christ is half way between us and the pyramids!

GP……………………………………………………….JC…………………………………………US

At the time, the 1920s were commonly referred to as “The New Era.” The “Roaring Twenties” was applied a little later, when in contrast to the Great Depression years it looked more obviously as a time of excess.

Here’s another curious example.

The last sighting of Halley’s Comet from earth was in 1986.

We’ve been waiting longer for the next sighting of Halley’s Comet (now reaching 34 years) than the length of time between the last sighting and Bill Haley & His Comets’ achievement of having the first rock-and-roll No 1, Rock Around the Clock, in 1955.

We watched White Christmas over the holidays. Stunned to realize that it was 23 years from that movie until 1977’s Star Wars but it’s been 42 years from A New Hope until The Rise of Skywalker.

When I was born in 1948 the world’s population was roughly 2.5 billion. In my lifetime (so far) it has more than tripled to over 7.7 billion. A person in 1948 contemplating the world with only a third of its then-current population would have been looking back unimaginably far to the mid-1700’s!