I’m more a visual person, so let me show you some graphs: Famine rates are down: https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Famine-death-rate-since-1860s-revised_850.png
We can do so much more with our computing resources - Note, logarithmic scale: https://www.singularity.com/images/charts/MicroprocessorClockSpeed.jpg
Billions of people live in a democracy, before 1850 almost none did: https://bigthink.com/the-present/democratic-rights/
By why did Canada briefly regress to an electoral democracy from a liberal democracy in 2020?
Medical science.
I try to be a “silver lining” type of guy whenever possible, and a recent example that I’ve been using is mRNA vaccines. They were advancing achingly slowly before CoVID-19 basically turned the whole world into an mRNA lab. Now, thanks to that, there are vaccine trials underway for seasonal influenza, Epstein–Barr virus, HIV, RSV and several types of cancer. There’s even talk of a bona fide cure for the common cold.
The RSV vaccine is even being used in the wild! Certain high risk demographics can get it during RSV season. And not rare high risk either, women beyond a certain point in pregnancy and older people.
the common cold
the WHAT?
THE COMMON COLD
(well… just the coronavirus variants that cause it about 50% of the time, no word yet on a norovirus vaccine - https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/moderna-sets-sights-common-cold-triple-attack-against-respiratory-diseases)
Common cold is rhinovirus, not norovirus.
Kids seem more aware of toxic behaviours and seem to clock their mental health better than I ever did. Even 10 years ago, talking about mental health was considered a taboo.
Standard of living has been steadily improving in China since the revolution, and it has managed to develop in an overwhelmingly peaceful fashion. China has achieved astounding feats of engineering with projects like cross country high speed rail, and it’s currently leading the clean energy revolution globally.
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Tell me worst thing, I’ll tell you worser.
Hitler lost WW2, the south lost the American civil war, and we haven’t all nuked each other (yet)
Hitler learned about Eugenics from America. We were forcibly sterilizing people for being “inferior” which you can imagine who that meant. America built their own concentration camps for Japanese citizens and our forced labor in our current prison system is just tge more pletable version of labor camps.
The American civil war was about slavery, but tge north was not full of abolitionist people like you might assume. Tge rich in the North and South were against ending slavery, but their hands were forced by the larger population. The only reason we have not had nukes go off is only because they are old and not maintained well. We’ve dropped a few nukes on accident that just didn’t go off. At least two of those were over America.
Kinda terrible examples tho…
Sure “Hitler lost”. Cause he killed himself and stuff. But the Nazis won. The US saved most officers and gave them jobs in NATO and the nascent west German government. Then used them to hunt and undermine communists all over the world. The Nazis themselves kinda won. The Cold War was basically a Nazi war, which they won.
The south “lost”. But after they lost the US became the most racially segregated country in the world and became the chief inspiration to the Nazis.
Then the US literally bombed Japan TWICE for no fucking reason other than spooking Stalin.
You have 3 wrong examples, that actually show we are living in the timeline where the Empire won.
Ok dude
Pretty sure Japan wouldn’t agree with that last point…
No, it is genuinely a good point. The fact that its use so far has been entirely limited to the two that ended WW2 was certainly not a given. Some US military leaders wanted to use nuclear weapons in Korea.
The Korean War was so soon after WW2 that the strong taboo against the use of nuclear weapons hadn’t yet taken hold, and the USSR had a miniscule stockpile, so the US could genuinely have done it with limited risk to themselves. The fact that they didn’t use them is a really important turning point that helped build in the taboo against their use that has so far held to this day.
the south lost the American civil war,
They’ve been trying to play the long game
The cultural victory, if you will.
The south won the war when they killed Lincoln.
They killed Lincoln but they couldn’t kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman’s Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.
Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”. What he describes is, at it’s heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.
That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.
Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.
Wait, when you say Republicans, do you mean the organisation that Americans currently call the Grand Old Party, the GOP, the modern Republican Party? If so, I find it ironic that the party standing for freedom has evolved into the party that shields and encourages racists and criminals.
the party standing for freedom
That died with the Hayes Administration.
The American parties in the American civil war that share the names with the current parties are largely ideologically inverted at this point.
All the times where we narrowly avoided nuclear war.
Statically speaking, globally, we are living in the freest, most prosperous age in recorded history. It was the most peaceful as well, but I am unsure if recent events have changed that.
But by and large, we have more rights and are more prosperous than any other era of human history. And drspite the fact we could literally end the whole goddamn world right fucking now, it’s very, very clear that the powers that be really like living, and most conflicts are more focused and less destructive than ever before.
It could very easily be way, way fucking worse. We are nowhere near the worst timeline yet.
But by and large, we have more rights and are more prosperous than any other era of human history.
Wall-E Buy-N-Large hehe
The fact that most of the world has decent access to food. And the fact that here in the first world (I’m in Canada), just about everyone has access to some kind of food.
I know it isn’t perfect and there are still a small percentage of people that may have difficulty with access to proper food, plentiful food or enough food … but everyone everywhere here has something to eat.
I’m Indigenous and when I was growing up in the 80s, mom and dad had enough for us to eat but we weren’t starving or anything.
However, my parents were born in the 40s and they said they had to live through famines as children … in modern Canada! They remembered a severe famine that swept through northern Ontario in the 50s where every hunter and trapper just couldn’t find enough wild food anywhere to feed people. It was a normal cycle that happens in our part of the world that takes place at least once a decade - most times it is just small decline in animal populations but other times, everything just disappears for one reason or another (disease, migration, weather, temperature, animal movements, etc)
In my grandparents time … starvation was a normal part of life to the point where lots of our old legends are filled with stories of cannibalism and murder because people were starving to death.
It all just means that in our modern era over the past hundred years … food has become plentiful for the majority of the world and that starvation has become less prevalent than it ever was in human history.
In our modern world of interconnected finances, services, governments and systems … it is all hinging on a very delicate balance … because as Will Durant put it …
“From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day”
Our easy access to food for everyone is only possible if we maintain a functioning world order of cooperation.
The way the moon is perfectly sized to just exactly cover the sun while still showing the corona and stuff like Bailey’s Beads. It’s an extremely rare cosmic coincidence, and a few million years before or after today and total solar eclipses as we know them wouldn’t be possible.
Too big. An alteration of the timeline where that’s not the case would basically be one that didn’t involve humanity at all. Not sure you fully understood the question, it’s not asking what’s great about living in this point in time, but rather, of the different paths humanity could have taken, what makes this one good.
Did you ever stop and consider things could be different in other time zone completely unrelated to humanity. Consider our non is smaller or farther and we never get solar eclipses. Small detail, humanity still here (with smaller waves).
Time LINE. You’re talking about going so far back that humanity wouldn’t exist. And if you go that far back and try to jumpstart evolution to have humans exist sooner; disregarding how that completely ignores how evolution works, any society that would arise would be indecipherable compared to our own. The resulting “humans” could be hairless and have purple skin. Think of the hot-dog fingers timeline from 'Everything, Everywhere, All At Once" except the world they live in wouldn’t look anything close to ours. They would instead communicate entirely by slapping and live in long tunnels made of beeswax or some shit like that. There are too many branching paths and variables to get anything even close to recognizable.
For the purposes of the main question OP asked, it’s pointless to go back that far. We’re no longer talking about “how might modern society be different if we had made different choices, and what choices have we made that turned out to be good?” but instead saying “what if humanity never evolved and something else did instead?”
A better example, let’s look at the Grand Canyon. Carved by the Colorado River over millions of years. But let’s say you went back far enough to deviate the river’s path so that it never ran through modern day Arizona. At that point, it’s pointless to ask how the Grand Canyon might look different because there wouldn’t BE a Grand Canyon!
We haven’t had a nuclear war yet!
Actually we did, 79 years ago.
A nuclear war definitely implies use of nuclear weapons on both sides. That was nuclear conquest, or nuclear terrorism.
Just slaughtering civilians in a country that was already willing to negotiate their surrender.
Japan wasn’t exactly a bunch of saints when it came to slaughtering civilians.
Japanese civilians weren’t exactly the ones doing the slaughtering. It’s not like the nukes targeted a military target.
I was definitely talking about the nation of Japan and their military.
So? The nukes weren’t dropped on he military. They just slaughtered civilians.
Willing to negotiate a surrender favourable to them, sure.
Willing to negotiate a surrender that wouldn’t force them to become a conquest of the US. They just wanted to keep their own government. The US refused, it wanted unconditional surrender and total control of Japan.
👍😎👍
And yet, despite stockpiling weapons for the next eight decades, never again.
Maybe that’ll change in the next decade, but hopefully we can keep 1945 as the last year nuclear weapons were used for a bit longer.
Well. Right now, putin is in an unwinable war. He CAN’T win given his lack of superior quality war machines and materials. His lack of combat experienced military personel, and his lack of air defenses. They’re losing literal thousands of personel (mostly soldiers) every single day.
If putin loses, he dies. He will be forcefully removed from his position and executed. He knows this. The united states knows this. Everybody in the situation knows this. Which is why for a very long time, nobody would allow Ukraine to use their weapons deep into russia in an effort to curb escalation. Because back against the wall, with no other possibility for winning the war, putin is going to eventually use nukes. He’s going to use nukes when it’s a situation of “fuck it, I’m going to die anyways. Nuke em.”
And as each day passes, russia gets further and further into a state of permanent national destability. This war is going to harm them for generations. Even before the war, they hadn’t replenished their population to pre-WWII levels. This is on-par with that. That should give you an idea of how badly this is going to damage their next 40 years. Hundreds of thousands of young men all dead. And eventually, russia will run out of men to send to the war. That’s when putin pushes the button. He’s going to nuke Ukraine. Probably Kiev. And it will happen before this war is over. Unlike hitler just killing himself and his wife, putin is going to try to take everybody down with him. Because that’s how big his ego is.
Only question is…does he ONLY fire at Kiev? Does he just go balls out and nuke everybody instead? Scorched earth kind of thing.
Only time will tell. If we live to tell the tale.
Putin can feasibly last until the West loses interest and stops supporting Ukraine, which with Trump that’s highly likely. Alternatively, Israel starts so much trouble the US is forced to prioritize and can’t afford to support Ukraine anymore.
And of course, Russia simply has more people than Ukraine. The most morbid possibility is the war lasts until Ukraine runs out of bodies.
Everyone replying seems to be confusing “timeline” with “generation” or “era”, discussing how this point in time is better than other times in history. That is not what OP was asking.
We live in a timeline where the niceties of this generation or era were possible and came to be. Seems like a pretty decent timeline to me.
Yeah, that’s how I’m choosing to interpret them.
It demonstrates how things could be worse, but aren’t.
Yeah, it’s basically look at all these improvements that happen in the last n years. This is obviously better than a timeline where those changes didn’t happen.
It also gives context for what way things could be worse. Compared to a completely dissociated suggestion like, “the entire universe didn’t spontaneously turn into farts therefore this isn’t the worst timeline.”
That’s true but I think irrelevant. People are posting examples of things that used to be bad and have improved. If you want your science fiction framing, just consider the timeline where those things didn’t improve, and you have your answer.
Because so many of us didn’t interpret the question properly at first, maybe the question could have been written more clearly, and it wasn’t and that’s okay, but I hope people looking for answers would be willing to do a little bit of logical reasoning.
We live in a timeline where open source exists, where computers arent as locked down as they could have been, where encryption is common
I mean, we’re communicating over the Internet right now, which is pretty cool. Right?
On Lemmy. For now. Things will change. But for now it’s pretty cool. Um.
Hi. :waves:
Do you ever worry that somebody could just forcefully grab you, unzip your pants and forcefully stuff hundreds of angry snakes into your pants? Or that you’re going to pull back your shower curtain one day, and there’s going to be a bear in your shower? Or that one day all the countries will just nuke each other for funsies?
I often worry about things that don’t makes sense. Like the one time my ex girlfriend was eating ice cream, and I wondered if one day she might give birth to a moose.
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I like you. Never change.
Or that you’re going to pull back your shower curtain one day, and there’s going to be a bear in your shower?
Ha! Joke’s on you. I don’t have a shower curtain!
Well then you’re not protected from the bathroom skunks!
Hi! How’s it goin?
Hi!
I’m OK, mostly.
Had some good Chinese takeaway tonight, which was a treat. Ate that while watching my countrymen descend into some kind of froth for dystopic, authoritarian autocracy. That’s kind of a bummer.
I abide. Trying to, anyway
For now.
