Yeah. That’ll Happen

I’ve been catching up on my Rogan podcasts and caught up to one with Michio Kaku, a real scienceguy. Sort of. You see him everywhere, but mostly on Discovery and that sort of thing.

Lots of pie-in-the-sky futurist stuff that Rogan eats up with a fork and spoon.

The got to talking about alien life and Kaku went through the levels (as he sees it) of civilization advance – Stage 1, 2 3. Stage 1 being cool things like exoskeletons for paraplegics and whatnot. Stage 3 being Star Wars. Says by the turn of the century, we’ll hit stage 1 heading to stage 2.

Uh huh.

Has he noticed the up-and-coming generations? They eat tide pods, think there are dozens of genders, and can’t tell you what a woman is.

Hate to tell him, we can very well go backwards.

I’m sure Romans during their peak were thinking big thoughts of where they’d be in a hundred years, what with a form of central heating and indoor plumbing and whatnot.

They did an excavation and revealed a typical well-to-do Roman house. There was evidence of campfires in the great hall. When they did a dating on it they figured two generations is all it took for the knowledge to evaporate. One generation creates it. The next maintains it. The one after uses it, but doesn’t know how it works but can’t fix it, and the one after can’t make it work and lights a fire in the middle of the floor instead.

Wasn’t too long after that they were living in hovels like barbarians.

In his book “After America” Mark Steyn riffed a lot on H.G. Wells time machine book, using it as a vehicle to explain how civilization was changing. He posited that our pace of change slowed as time went on.

Consider; If you launched someone from 1900 to 1960, they’d be stunned – Nearly everyone has indoor plumbing, many have air conditioning, refrigerators, central heat. The cars are huge and streamlined, there’s Jet travel. Many have radios and TVs. By the end of the decade we went to the moon.

Go forward another sixty years, to 2020. Where’s all the cool stuff? Yeah, we have computers and iPhones. We have the interwebs, where P.J. O’Rourke lamented allows any idiot to connect to any other idiot – at light speed.

BTW I’m typing this sitting in a house that was built in 1962. Sure it was refurbished, but it’s essentially the same. And, I might add, built far better, with better materials than the ones they are building now.

Cars have gotten better. More reliable, but way smaller. Nearly everyone has plumbing, AC/Heat, a fridge. Maybe our rockets are better, but we couldn’t get back to the moon if we tried. We’ve only improved on what was there. Nothing new has been created really.

That said our money is worth what? 4% of what it was worth in 1900?

Look at a picture of a street scene in any city. Notice how people are dressed. We’d look our best in public. Now? yeah.

How about education?

I started Kindergarten in 1969. When I graduated from a parochial school 8th grade, I was two years, at least, ahead of my public school peers and ahead of many college graduates today. Same when I left high school, except that in High School, we had vocational classes – shop, electronics, auto shop, typing, home economics, bookeeping. I left there with enough of a skillset to simply start working. A lot of my friend did. Had a friend that did auto shop. Never went to college. He owns two gas station/service centers now.

So I’m not as sanguine about the future. I think we’re going backwards.

My kids know how to fix plumbing, at least remedially. If I’m still around, so will the grandkids.

After that?

They’re on their own.