Just in time
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You're in the good times right now.
I technically disagree, most periods human history had "good times" and the happiness of those people was relative to their expectations and equilibrium with the social and technical possibilities of their moment. You might be miserable if you were teleported to a relatively comfortable life in the year 1500, but they were probably every bit as content as some financially comfortable credentialed working class individual today.
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At least we have air conditioning
Speak for yourself!
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Still more leisure time then now.
That is mostly a myth. They may have worked less than people at the height of the industrial revolution, but even a laborer who was paid a salary had to spend at least several hours per day on average on "not work" things like food preparation, home maintenance, feeding livestock, gathering firewood, repairing and cleaning clothing. Many tasks that are trivial today were highly arduous.
Then to top it all off it was fairly common for the local lord to force them to do extra labor without pay, like maintaining roads or training in a militia.
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Still think it would be more fulfilling to plant crops rather than "keeping the KPI up", "limiting the exceptions rate" or "moving a button 3px to the left"...
You can become a farmer if that appeals to you. Doubt you want that though
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I hate to break it to you. But if you were born back then, you wouldn't be a knight. You wouldn't be an explorer. You'd be a peasant. Working your farm from birth to grave.
Yeah, this is very much glorifying the past, and probably the future. Medieval peasants would dream of sitting in a warm cubicle, well fed, while scrolling lemmy, if they could imagine it. Space colonization is probably impossible too.
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A pitchfork still could kill a knight in armor. And then you have a horse and armor
No it can't, not unless you get incredibly lucky.
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Yeah, I wanna sit in full plate armor and make-out... sounds fun. No, I wouldn't even want to live in a 17th century castle! Just living in a modern apartment, in a modern neighborhood is vastly more comfortable than a dank, dark, non-AC, poop in a chute 17th century castle.
Oh but we can sit around a campfire. Thats not so bad at least.
Yeah, camping and campfires are nice. They are nice because they are temporary and by choice.
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In the first pictures, the knight would clearly be of the "upper" class. Your chances of being some peon in a field are much, much higher.
Even being a king of that time would be a brutal life in a lot of ways. Death all around and a piss-poor chance of surviving any given year with every bit of your body intact and functional, extremely limited dietary variety, and the smell. Oh god the smell.
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Still think it would be more fulfilling to plant crops rather than "keeping the KPI up", "limiting the exceptions rate" or "moving a button 3px to the left"...
There's no job from those times you couldn't do today while literally living better than they did. Quit your job, give away everything you own and go live in a tent in the woods harvesting mushrooms: Your life would still be better than theirs because you would still have access to some emergency healthcare, foodbanks when you are starving, and be protected from marauding pillagers.
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Do we think that’s actually true, though? Life, all life, has a tendency to spread out when a niche is open in a new environment which it can fill, and there’s nothing shown there that isn’t technically within the bounds of humanity. Before capitalism, before humans were even Homo sapiens, we were already migrating out of Africa and into Eurasia. The drive to explore is, in my opinion, deeply human, and nothing says that the model of that exploration or expansion needs to be capitalistic. We wouldn’t have colonized the world in prehistory if it did.
People expanded to places with resources that they could live in, or bring back home. There are no resources that we know of in space that are not more easily accessed on Earth, and living out there would require a material investment from Earth that would be devastating.
Most of the Earth is currently empty of humans, while space is colder than Antarctica, and less accessible than both the top of Everest and the bottom of the Mariana trench. You could build a city in any of those 3 places easier than even low-earth-orbit and any other celestial body would be thousands of times harder still.
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'The drive to explore' is from Star Trek. To boldly go where no one/man has gone before!
The US retold its origin story (the expansion West) through Westerns in the 50's. Particularly because the US won the space race, tv, and Hollywood, retold a future origin story expanding into space.
Many American people I come into contact with online really seem to have bought it, even though Star Trek portrays a communist society. The cognitive dissonance seemed to be on a national scale.
I categorically disagree with the premise that ‘the drive to explore’ is from Star Trek, and to state that authoritatively and leave it at that is, in my opinion, incredibly reductive. We’ve been exploring, as mentioned, since before we were even Homo sapiens, and I think at this point we can relatively confidently call it part of human nature. Human prehistory and (relatively) modern history has several examples of those who effectively blindly threw themselves out into the ocean, in some cases likely on rafts at most, and discovered new places to live as a result. For example:
Homo Erectus made it all the way to the island of Java and then proceeded to cross the Lombok Strait, crossing the Wallace Line and spreading to the island of Flores ~1.2 million years ago, at which point they stayed there, adapted, and became Homo Floresiensis. This crossing likely wasn’t blind, as Mount Rinjani would be visible, but this a distance of ~35km of deep ocean strait water. Treacherous conditions to brave on the promise of a peak in the distance; nonetheless they did it, and likely only with simple rafts. Along those same lines, the migration of Homo Sapiens from Sunda to Sahul ~65,000 years ago is similarly noteworthy, as some of the relevant crossings required would have been, in all likelihood, blind. (Take this with a grain of salt, though. I had a hard time finding an accurate measure of the distance between various island crossings at this period of history. Under perfectly ideal conditions it is possible each step was visible from the last.)
Another example is the fact that humans settled the remote islands of Oceania. Polynesia is particularly noteworthy here for its remoteness, and we managed that ~3000 years ago. This would have involved anywhere from hundreds to thousands of kilometers of open ocean, navigated with no promise of land, much less any indication that there even might be land. For that matter, given the massive nature of the ocean and the tiny size of these islands, how many people ventured off into the ocean, never to return, before we finally hit on success? I would imagine the number is quite high, and from a raw survival perspective, it seems an incomprehensible journey to embark on, but we did it anyways, and I would argue that is indicative of our drive to explore. Why else would you embark on such a trip except to see what may lie hidden, just beyond the horizon? We’re a naturally curious bunch, it’s one of our primary strengths as a species, and I feel that this is just an extension of that inborn curiosity.
Circling back to Star Trek, though, trust me, I’m well aware of the cognitive dissonance of Americans as it relates to expansionism and manifest destiny. Indeed, I did a long-winded breakdown (I’m prone to bloviating tangents, can you tell?) a few weeks ago in a different comment of the way that the American genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas is presented as a foregone conclusion; inevitable by fate and absolved by destiny. It’s an insidious idea, and one which infects a problematically large pool of our media; I won’t argue with you on that.
I also don’t know if it’s fully accurate to describe the society (at least of earth, not necessarily the whole Federation to my, admittedly limited, understanding of the lore) of Star Trek as communist, though it’s probably not inaccurate either. I think it would be more accurate to say that Star Trek depicts a post-scarcity society, and so the lack of certain economic pressures have led to an economic configuration that is hard to translate into modern terms, though I’ll admit that’s splitting hairs. I think it’s probably close enough, and I think it’s very fair to say that they are absolutely socialist. Funny enough (and to your point) I think the meme of “fully automated luxury gay space communism” is actually a pretty good descriptor of the economic configuration of Star Trek. Regardless, I think a lot of Americans miss that fact simply because words like “Socialism” and “Communism” have connotations and associations in America which are fundamentally inaccurate. Most Americans have, frankly, never moved past the red scare in their understanding of socialism more broadly, likely as a consequence of propaganda, so it’s not surprising that they missed the memo here.
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Yeah, this is very much glorifying the past, and probably the future. Medieval peasants would dream of sitting in a warm cubicle, well fed, while scrolling lemmy, if they could imagine it. Space colonization is probably impossible too.
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That is mostly a myth. They may have worked less than people at the height of the industrial revolution, but even a laborer who was paid a salary had to spend at least several hours per day on average on "not work" things like food preparation, home maintenance, feeding livestock, gathering firewood, repairing and cleaning clothing. Many tasks that are trivial today were highly arduous.
Then to top it all off it was fairly common for the local lord to force them to do extra labor without pay, like maintaining roads or training in a militia.
Remember that one of the biggest contributions to women's liberation was the invention of the washing machine.
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That is mostly a myth. They may have worked less than people at the height of the industrial revolution, but even a laborer who was paid a salary had to spend at least several hours per day on average on "not work" things like food preparation, home maintenance, feeding livestock, gathering firewood, repairing and cleaning clothing. Many tasks that are trivial today were highly arduous.
Then to top it all off it was fairly common for the local lord to force them to do extra labor without pay, like maintaining roads or training in a militia.
I currently and never have made enough money to pay professionals to do those things. A LOT of my time is spent preparing food and repairing/cleaning my clothes and dwelling.
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Yeah, camping and campfires are nice. They are nice because they are temporary and by choice.
Now-a-days you cant even do that if you have to in the states. Youll get scooped up and sent to a prison to be forced to work for free.
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People expanded to places with resources that they could live in, or bring back home. There are no resources that we know of in space that are not more easily accessed on Earth, and living out there would require a material investment from Earth that would be devastating.
Most of the Earth is currently empty of humans, while space is colder than Antarctica, and less accessible than both the top of Everest and the bottom of the Mariana trench. You could build a city in any of those 3 places easier than even low-earth-orbit and any other celestial body would be thousands of times harder still.
wrote last edited by [email protected]The idea that there are no resources we know of in space which are not more easily accessed on earth is just outright untrue, or at least is only true in a narrow sense. My example here would be Helium-3, the ideal fuel for fusion (a difficult choice due to high fusion temperatures, but it has the advantage of not kicking off neutron radiation in the process the way something like Deuterium-Tritium fusion would). Earth contains ~10-50,000 tonnes of feasibly accessible Helium-3, and if we were to move over to fusion power at a large scale at our current rate of power consumption, we would consume that amount of fuel in a matter of years, likely less than a decade. By contrast, the moon contains orders of magnitude more Helium-3 in its regolith, somewhere in the ballpark of 600,000-1,000,000 tonnes, a sufficient quantity to last over a century in the same usage conditions as outlined for Earth. Additionally, both of these sources pale in comparison to the amount available in Sol’s gas giants.
The caveat here is, of course, that it’s unlikely we would switch to fusion entirely in the first place, and that accessing that helium-3 at scale is not easy, no matter where it comes from (though doing so at scale is likely easier on the Moon than it is on Earth). It also ignores ideas like degrowth, energy efficiency improvements, dealing with the drawbacks of alternative fusion fuels, etc. I think, however, that it remains illustrative of the larger point: there are compelling reasons to go to space, even from a raw materials perspective alone.
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I technically disagree, most periods human history had "good times" and the happiness of those people was relative to their expectations and equilibrium with the social and technical possibilities of their moment. You might be miserable if you were teleported to a relatively comfortable life in the year 1500, but they were probably every bit as content as some financially comfortable credentialed working class individual today.
You make an excellent point, my only rebuttal would be that on average people are have become much kinder and more compassionate as they've moved up on the hierarchy of needs. Which I believe demonstrates that an ever increasing amount of people are living in comfort and security in our current world, much more than in the 1500s, though I'm sure you could find them.
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That is mostly a myth. They may have worked less than people at the height of the industrial revolution, but even a laborer who was paid a salary had to spend at least several hours per day on average on "not work" things like food preparation, home maintenance, feeding livestock, gathering firewood, repairing and cleaning clothing. Many tasks that are trivial today were highly arduous.
Then to top it all off it was fairly common for the local lord to force them to do extra labor without pay, like maintaining roads or training in a militia.
Don't forget all the time spent dying from now preventable diseases!
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I feel like everyone saying op is glorifying the past and future seems to be missing the fact that this is a shitpost.
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I hate to break it to you. But if you were born back then, you wouldn't be a knight. You wouldn't be an explorer. You'd be a peasant. Working your farm from birth to grave.
Even if you were a knight. Most knights lived shitty lives and didn't have armor and maidens that glamorous.
