If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared, what would be the most difficult thing to explain about life today?

This is the 50s, I think it'd be pretty easy to draw a line from casual racism to white supremacists. A key difference this time is that it's not just Germans led by one insane man, it's instead a bunch of redneck prices and conspiracy theorists.

That’s easy, people still wave the Confederate flag and that happened 90 years before the 1950’s.

I presume you're not talking about Russia? You're going to have a hard time showing them those Nazis.

A person from 1950s will just be super confused when you say it because they're going to ask you what country is Nazi. If you say the US they'll just be confused further.

I doubt that someone that actually lived through WW2 would agree on that

I think that wouldn't be too hard. He would just believe that they never left... which would be true

I mean by modern standards, almost everyday in the 1950s was a Nazi.

I've started l to realize that actual information worth reading is not available. Like I cant access in depth medical course or text book in engineering. Lots of beginner tutorials marketed as 7 minute abs.

Information is valuable and nobody gives it away for free. We have access to a worlds worth of crappy, unvetted trash information. But the vast majority of the good stuff is still locked away as it always was.

This does make me think. I remember the days where I would turn up at the library to read books. With my phone, I can read and learn but instead I doom scroll.

"It arguably made us all a lot dumber..."

You don’t use it to get into arguments with strangers.

And porn! So much porn!

Edit: Turns out Gordon is from the '70s, but other pulp sci-fi exist so my statement stands.

Live action Flash Gordon was from the 50s

"Bus? No we bulldozed hundreds of neighborhoods to build highways so now everyone has to have a car"

Depends where they appeared

And we had a pretty great black president.

I knew that would be the obvious joke but it's not like that was unfathomable in the fifties. Desegregation was obviously where the world was headed and I'm sure everyone was expecting (or dreading) modern racial relations.

Person from 2020 magically appearing in 2090 and being told caffeine/excessive sugar is now regulated and ID checked

Grew up in the 50s and 60s. Had a pediatrician who chain-smoked, and had ashtrays all over her office literally overflowing with butts.

I read your response and immediately thought of homosexuality. That would be hard to explain, why now we have a big pride parade celebrating it. (Im gay, dont com at me!)

Seems like this was already know in '47

https://inv.in.projectsegfau.lt/watch?v=65_-vNtWLLs

You just explained a large selection of boomers.

Charlie Chaplin's daughter died recently and I looked him up on wikipedia. Charlie married last wife, and the mother of the recently deceased, when he was 54 and she was 18.

It may not technically be pedophilia, but it damn sounds like it.

Depends where they live, too

Seeing how much overlap they have with the KKK, I don't think it'd be that surprising

They are back In germany too. Although I wouldn't call it they are back, but they are open about it again

"You're telling me there was a black president and he wasn't assassinated? Sure, buddy! Now let me get back to my sharecropping."

Also, the "video telephone" that everyone always so desperately awaited from the future? Yeah, we have that; no, nobody uses it, because we can't be bothered to dress up for a phone call.

That pretty much sums it up.

The phone never leaves my side, but I dread getting an actual phone call.

Also nearly everything else. Computers would be an obvious exception, a couple years ago I paid USD$40 for a smartwatch with specs exceeding a $2000 computer from around year 2000, and millions of times more powerful than computers from the 50s which cost millions of dollars at the time.

“What is a file? Are you working for the FBI?”

Plenty of SF writers lived in that era and they predicted the Internet.

For example: I can name the writer and his novel where he predicted AI writing engines.

they knew about climate change in the 50's- actually, greenhouse gases were first proposed in the 1820s.

You'd think most of them are more fascist than the people you consider fascist now. Remember what England did to Alan Turing. They'd be amazed we let women and minorities work with us and we don't persecute gays. They'd think the commies won.

I'm using this little gadget for all my banking needs, a significant amount of my shopping, to stay instantly connected with friends/family and strangers with common interests all around the world, to almost instantly find information on almost any topic, to watch any of a hundred thousand movies or TV shows instantly on demand, and it's also a telephone.

I think you're severely underestimating how our daily lives have advanced. We've advanced so far that we don't even regularly use the thing that would blow the mind of someone from the 50s, like calling someone on the phone. Calling someone with your phone would already blow their mind, because the first handheld phone didn't happen until the 70s. But we don't really call people anymore. We send instant messages or if we want "a call" we do video calls, which is guaranteed to blow their mind because a) most people in the 50s had a black and white television, so being able to see colored picture in real time is just next level shit, b) you can see someone else in real time on the other side of the planet and c) it's going to feel like you're there because the image quality from the 50s is like a cave painting compared to what we have today. And that's just calling someone. Imagine what else would blow their mind, modern cars probably.

Porn mostly

Nothing as sobering as showing a techno-optimist what the future really looks like

My parents still do. The person who delivers it also delivers butter and eggs.

I'm not sure where the butter and eggs and stuff come from but he owns the dairy the milk comes from and he's part of a cooperative that pay for the equipment. According to him it's just not worth selling to the big stores as he makes more money with fewer customers doing it himself.

There were several places in the media that had stories of landing on the moon as a real possibility. Almost a forgone conclusion.

Brown v. Board of Education was filed in 1951, and decided in 1954. The desegregation movement was well underway. Some folks from that era might not be happy that segregation went away, but I don't imagine too many would be surprised.

What a dumb answer that completely ignores that was a topic of debate at that time. The concept and topic was WELL known. 17 upvotes 🤦‍♂️.

But we also won the cold war

They'd wonder why nobody got their shotgun from their locker and fired back.

"Ronald Reagan, the actor?!"

"The Soviet Union did fall circa 1990, though."

"Oh, so it's different people in charge of Russia now."

"Well..."

"Aside from anyone they respected enough to elect."

"Uh..."

"At least their neighbors are generally safe and separate."

"Hmm..."

Mandarin probably wouldn't help you much, since only about 40% of people in China even understood it, the 7 decades since then have changed that by quite a lot.

The acceptance of them maybe. There were neo-nazis in the 50s. Plenty of Americans had no problem with them before we joined the war.

How after World War 2 we didn’t truly learn and still fight wars over racism, nationalism and other reasons that keep us from uniting.

I mean, we've been doing that for thousands of years. I feel like it would be more unexpected if we stopped.

And families don't sit around the radio or TV to consume their entertainment, we all sit around the dinner table staring at our phones not talking to each other

The actor? Then who was vice-president? Jerry Lewis?

That's heavy doc

Not to mention the Bush imbeciles.

Christine Jorgensen began transitioning in the early twenties and was a pretty major celebrity. When the Nazis took power some of the Authors they attacked were sexologists. Trans issues weren't something completely alien to them, they probably wouldn't take asking them their pronouns well but it wouldn't be hard to explain.

That doesn't have much meaning once you explain inflation as a concept.

They'd already know about the basics since fiat currency existed long before the US.

It seems to me we're actually close in terms of esse, just not cost or risk. Risk will likely stay high, cost may go slightly down, but will never reach cruise ship levels unless you already find yourself in space. Accelerating a massive cruise ship in space is far easier when it doesn't have to leave Earth's gravity well.

In the fifties they were aspiring to that already, engineering seemed unstoppable. May not understand how we could pull it off and then our own kids don't believe us, though.

This thing does math really really fast.

Cause it does math fast, we can use math to have it draw pictures like how you plot a graph.

These picture drawing math machines also talk to each other like a really fast phone call, all the time. So we can transfer pictures and words between them.

Also it makes phone calls but it doesn’t need a cable.

Also the pictures it can send are slowly eroding the foundations of our society like tides against a cliff, and we all feel the ground getting thinner beneath our feet, but if we turn off the water, like 5 people will be marginally less rich. And having 5 slightly less obscenely rich people is deemed unacceptable in our increasingly surreal society.

I think that’s a pretty good explanation for a person from the 50s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_computers