People often point to the terrible things in the world as evidence we're living in "the worst timeline". What examples are there of things that suggest our timeline is actually better than it seems?
Hitler lost WW2, the south lost the American civil war, and we haven't all nuked each other (yet)
the south lost the American civil war,
They've been trying to play the long game
The cultural victory, if you will.
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 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.
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
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 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)
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.
Near-infinite access to pretty much any information you can possibly dream of, content, questions, etc, on a little device in your pocket
The problem with that is it has led to ignorant people believing they’re smart — all because they can find any random site that backs up any nonsense they assert. Critical thinking and credible research are endangered concepts now.
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.
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.
The evolution of our living conditions. We tend to forget how much things have changed. My grandmother grew up during WW2, she not only struggled to get food but also couldn’t go to school because she had to work (yes kids had to work, even in first world countries). She was heavily traumatized during the war because she had to take care of the dead bodies the Germans left behind them, she was only 16 at that time. The years after that were tough, she married a man from another country and was seen as an outcast. They worked their ass off all their life for very little money, then my grandfather died in horrible conditions and the company behind the whole thing has never been held responsible. My parents didn’t have much food either when they grew up but ant least they weren’t raised in war times, and they had access to basic education. As for me, I have done things my family couldn’t even dream of: I went to the university, speak 4 languages, married a girl from a different continent and we live freely in another country, there’s food on the table everyday, never had to go to war and even have time to waste watching shows or typing things on the internet. I am not saying the world is perfect today, there’s definitely a lot of things going wrong as well, but it’s definitely better than it used to be and we tend to forget that
In a similar vein, look at a graph of global poverty levels. We've done an astounding job of improving that metric over the last several decades, even if it feels like we're stagnating or moving slightly backwards in many developed nations.
There's also lots of things that would've been a death sentence 50 years ago that we've either completely eliminated or found such effective treatments that they are mere inconveniences now.
There are multiple cases where pure chance and human hesitation prevented all out nuclear bombardment in the Cold War.
So for that alone we are extremely lucky.
It does make me wonder about quantum suicide.
This. People exercised their consciences.
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. 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.
Wall-E Buy-N-Large hehe
Linux was invented and the concept of open web and right to your own hardware, although that could change.
Also, vaccines.
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.
I regularly shop at a supermarket built on a site where people were burned as witches in the 17th century.
A ship's captain was away at sea and died after his ship was wrecked in a storm. Back home, his housemaid was accused of having created the storm and was burned at the stake. And there I am buying lemons and ice cream and toothpaste. It blows my mind.
What are P and N?
The two types of semiconductors. N-types have a slight excess of electrons, allowing them to move freely and P-types have a slight lack of electrons, effectively making freely moving electron “holes”. By sandwiching them next to each other, you can create diodes and bi-polar junction transistors.
And as we all know, bi-trans is an important part of queerdom.
Source: has a degree in electrical engineering. And is bi.
Edit: not cool enough to be trans though.
I heavely assume it means Pan and Non-binary.
Pan and NonBinary is my understanding
In terms of total war and death worldwide, this is the most peaceful time in known human history.
Is that still true? Like, as in, updated in the past year-to-the-last-few-months? War (even though they’re not calling it war) is rising in many places.
I don't believe this is something easily tracked and updated annually. The point is in terms of amount of population as a percentage. People in the 21st century largely have more food, shelter, and general security worldwide than in all of known human history.
Don't let anecdotal news about wars worldwide override the fact that much larger scale (as percent of world population) have occurred and occurred consistently in past history. Wars, famines, plagues, and other things have wiped out far more of the population overall historically. While the wars you see today are horrible, and in specific regions they might be decimating, they still pale in comparison to the level of death in human history and the scope of death of past wars.
The Black Death in the 1300s itself killed 30-50% of all of Europe. Ghengis Khan is estimated to have been responsible for killing 10% of the world population (10% today would be more than the entire population of Europe, for perspective). There's a lot of less than documented Chinese history that also suggests massive deaths from famines and plagues and stuff that seem to have amounted to a large percentage of the world population at the time.
Another thing I have seen a lot of in the last decade, mostly relating the the US, is that while large scale violent crime may be up (like mass killings) overall murder and crime is lower than it has been in past decades. Again, in a macro scope of things. You'll always have pockets of geography and/or time that are bad.
It's no longer true as of about two years ago no, but the measurement was always a bit skewed for Western audiences and glosses over increases in specific types of crimes ( categorically ) such as homicide bombings and domestic terrorism.
We're getting awfully close to another World War given ongoing affairs in Ukraine and the Middle East...
Good people still exist, so does love.
Can't confirm. World is dark. Life is pain.
Its there, you have to find it.
To be fair, i had to dig pretty deep in order to make that comment.
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?
All the times where we narrowly avoided nuclear war.
Cheese
Oranges all year round. A heated house, lit after dark. Spices.
Wars have been fought over spices you can now buy in a grocery store for $5, less than an hours work at minimum wage. It's quite incredible when you think about it.
Cheese is the answer. The worst possible timeline would not have cheese.
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'm sitting in my air conditioned house, watching not one, but 2 HD screens, one of which is playing cheers because I love that show and I can watch it all I want anytime I want. The other is my phone which is a absolute miracle of human achievement allowing me access to the sum of the worlds knowledge which I'm currently using to look at funny shit that amuses me. Also I didn't move a finger to say any of that. I just said it and it typed it for me, correcting most of my mistakes. And you, who are reading this, might be literally anywhere on this planet right now. I also used my phone to order my food which was promptly brought to my home for my enjoyment.
The world certainly has a lot of shit aspects but on the whole, we are living in amazing times right now for those of us fortunate enough to be in a safe country.
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.
Instead of sleeping in a cave and spending all day trying to kill food with a sharp stick, you can use your pocket internet to have food delivered to your door. In your very comfortable living space. Thank you Science and all the smart people in history that brought us here. Life is not as bad as the losers would have us believe.
And there are so many foods that can't be grown in certain parts of the world, but I can get almost anything.
Even something as commonplace as a banana has to be shipped to a large portion of the world where it doesn't grow natively.
We haven't had a nuclear war yet!
Actually we did, 79 years ago.
You, specifically, dear reader, are not dead. Well done for that, keep it up.
There are people who love you, whose lives are better because you're in them, and I'm seriously super proud of you for making it to today.
Me too, me too.
Well, scientifically speaking, we are living in one of the best timelines possible because there is developed life to ask this question to begin with. It's all about perspective.
Nuclear war has been mentioned a couple times but i feel it deserves elaboration: We've been real fucking close a couple times. There was a Soviet "nuclear counterattack station", or whatever, that got the "nuclear strike detected, fire retaliatory missiles" signal and the person responsible simply refused. The signal was due to a glitch, there was no attack. That guy probably saved millions and millions of lives by refusing to carry out his duty.
If you consider (potential) timelines being "close" to ours in terms of only a small number of things needing to change to get us there, the one where everything went to nuclear hell is very close to ours--but we're not in that one.
There are a tonne of realities that are very close to ours are populated by cockroaches and mutants.
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.
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.
David Bowie and Freddie Mercury did a duet.
you can look at old 8mm documentaries from the 1960s
Do they exude a certain positive attitude highlighting the good things from civilization or do you mean that putting them in contrast to the world of today things are good?
i mean things generally sucked back then too
I don't starve if I don't work the fields.
There are books written about this exact topic. The most famous in recent years is Factfulness.
Another one is called "Enlightenment Now" by Steven Pinker. I read it a few years ago and found it very encouraging
Pizza
we have a lot of life saving technology medically that we use to snap people from the jaws of death so that the state can execute them later
WIN WIN WIN
Crime accross the board continues to drop year over year in the US. There is still a ways to go but pharmaceutical costs are down for things like insulin thanks to the generic availability. On top of the policy changes, medical advances are moving at blazing speeds. Clinical trials for stem cell treatments are popping up everywhere. Basically a cure for everything except cancer nowadays. College athletes are no longer legal slaves and are able to be compensated for the work and risk they put themselves up to week in and week out. It's an employees market for finding jobs. There are more companies looking to hire in all industries than there is available tradesman to fill the openings.
I believe we are statistically in the most peaceful time in world history right now. Unless someone triggers a nuke.
You get to exist and understand that you do. That's pretty huge already, as far as I can tell.
That’s an interesting comment. History and science have proven that we have evolved in a way that everything we do becomes easier. Arguably the end goal is that everything is easy (can be debated in many ways, even philosophcally), but there’s no denial that humanity has done everything in its power to make things easier. That’s the whole point of the creation and use of tools
Necessity is the mother of invention. Laziness is the father.
I guess you're referring to the part I edited out where I said that there doesn't seem to be any evidence that life is supposed to be easy. I don't think that contradicts humans trying to make life easy.
But it seems to me that a lot of meaning is derived from being at the limit of what is impossible or at least difficult, and staying at the level of easy makes people depressed and unhappy.
We live in a world of plenty where we still produce enough food that nobody need go hungry.
Humans domesticated wolves in this timeline. Imagine being in one of the dogless hellscapes.
I mostly just think worst and even better is hard to judge. We just exist here. Good and bad are just labels. And I find absurd to be an often more applicable one when it comes to the timeline stuff.
Medical science.
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.
Applebee’s has announced the much-anticipated return of its All You Can Eat Special, which includes Boneless Wings, Riblets, and Double Crunch Shrimp.
I hate... so much about the things that you choose to be.
You could have been born on Mars when it had water. All that's left is dust
The aliens haven't yet consumed our planet in this timeline. Consider yourself lucky.
Indoor plumbing, heating and air!
If you're wealthy, everything is better than ever before
We got the Beetlejuice sequel we have now instead of the original script they had planned.
What was the original script?
::: spoiler For the first time in the known provable history of the universe, it is just becoming possible to have an infinitely persistent entity. The peripheral systems that surround that entity and enable persistence are still getting worked out. In the long term, this is a massively profound step in our evolution. It may not seem like it now. This comment probably seems silly to some, but mark my words in two decades from now the world will be a very different place as a result of such a system.
I don't think AGI is some future leap in technology away from where we are now. I think that present AI is around 80% accurate and that is still better than average for most humans. Present AI is simply like the assembly language of AGI. Eventually we build out the complexity in blocks until it is effectively AGI. The power requirements will be enormous, but so is Solar output.
So much of our organizational norms and assumptions are based on the defacto assumption that we are all mortal and corruptible. Conscious immortality is now possible in a system that can be aligned to meet our needs. This shift is M A S S I V E and will change us forever.
Half or more of us will fight against such a change, but they are irrelevant. Even if AGI is pushed underground, anyone in business or politics that defers their decision making to a real AGI will out compete humans in the long term. It will normalize in either scenario. The only question is how long it will take to achieve. This is a change that will mark our time in history for a millennia or more. It will be the biggest historical event of note up until now, in the long term. I don't think AGI is like nuclear fusion, where it is always 20 years away. I think present AI is like the Intel 4004; the first microprocessor. It needs a ton of peripherals and is still heavily flawed, but the fundamentals required to prove useful are present and that is what really matters.
it is just becoming possible to have an infinitely persistent entity
You're just describing a library. And we've had those for millennia.
That said... we've had libraries for millennia! Imagine all the alternative universes in which Euclid's Elements or Plato's Republic or The Analects of Confucius or Naturalis Historia or On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres were lost before they could become cornerstones of human understanding.
Imagine a world in which we never developed the capacity for language or the faculty for written text.
We’re still here.
Everybody here things it so funny to talk about how we'll all die ans it's all horrible but really?
Lifw is pretty good. Yeah, we're off worse off today than, say, 30 years ago, but compared to the 4 billion or so years before that? We're doing awesome.
We have direct communicationto anyone in the world in the palm of our hands. Even the poor got better and nicer food today than kings had 300 years ago. Life expectancy even over the past 100 years has gone up dramatically...
This "we're living in the worst times ever!" Is kind of like climate change deniers cherry picking a tiny sliver of a huge graph and say "see? Temperatures.are going down!" It's nonsense. Yeah, things got a bit worse.over the past decade, they'll get better again soon and we're still way better off than, say, 1980
In this timeline, princess Leias bun stayed intact. Wholesome.
US centric, violent crime is down. Not the lowest it’s been currently, but better than it was when I was growing up.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191129/reported-violent-crime-in-the-us-since-1990/
Tell me worst thing, I'll tell you worser.
What makes me think this is "worst timeline" is that i fear things will start regressing and we will have to go back to the beforetimes or worse. And in some better world where people are less apathetic it might not go that way.
Well, surely the timeline where those things are already happening is worse?
We will all get what we deserve, whatever that is. I hope its not the worst thing but I havent seen any real effort to resist, nothing to rally behind. If starving to death or being murdered for your things in dying planet isnt the worst timeline i dont know what is. Hopefully this wont start happening in my lifetime or that at least i dont have to make it not happen in my lfietime. I dont understand how people can have kids anymore.
Sorry to say such horrible things but it feels like this shit is just pouring out of me now..
