Has everything always been the same?

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Yes even during the height of WW2 I think you actually had more of a chance of dying from violence during the Middle Ages.

During the Middle Ages wars went on for a century. In modern times wars usually are concluded in 5 to 10 years at most.

ruveyn

Who else? (shrug).

It sure as hell won't be the Conservatives. As for the NDP, I am not persuaded that they will maintain the economic conditions necessary for such evolution. But sooner them than the current lot.

Stephen Pinker has made that point most vividly. In spite of the obscene violence of the two world wars, the actual amount of violent death relative to the population had decreased markedly since the industrial revolution. Since the latter part of the 19th century people have been living longer (mostly due to clean water supply and better food, rather than medical science) In the last 170 years, it has become common for youngsters to have the company of their grandparents. Prior to that grandma and grandpa was a rarity.

ruveyn

Well, you're talking to the resident Green here. And the Greens are a lot more moderate than me on fiscal issues. I'm still young enough to support what I believe in rather than what is feasible in the immediate future. In any case, I shouldn't be too harsh on the Liberals. Both them and the NDP are far enough to the right of me that it really doesn't make much difference. And I would have voted for Dion over Layton.

Last edited by AstroGeek on 25 May 2012, 5:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I tend to view humanity as being a cyclical business so to speak, we get shedloads done in short periods of time, then we just tinker with the "shedloads" we got done. If we look at the internet, it started out as a fantastic tool to increase our knowledge and has ended up a cesspool where people waste their lives on facebook, mmorpgs and web forums. I realize the irony of writing this on an internet forum, but I do learn things on WP, unlike most of them.

It disappoints me in a way when most people I meet spend hours reading facebook, then look at me like I'm the a**hole because I happened to have read 2 - 3 books in the time they spent on facebook.

It bugs me that beauty holds a higher value than intelligence and that ancient fairy tales are still viewed as sources of wisdom.

I'm sure we'll advance massively in the next 50 years, due to Moore's law and the exponential increases in human knowledge we will most likely see. That is unless some extremist gets their hands on a nuke or a biological weapon and sets us back a few hundred if not thousands of years in an attempt to bring about a doomsday.

It annoys me that science isn't the focal point of our civilization, given that it has prolonged our lives, increased the quality of our lives, lifted countless people from a level of existence where sustaining themselves from day to day occupied most of their time. It pisses me off that we've had men on the moon, have satellites orbiting earth, have sent messages through space, invented something that lets us share information almost instantaneously from just about anywhere on our globe, yet we haven't done more than we have.

We need more cold wars, the cold war fueled before unmatched resources into research that benefited everyone, and what has come after has demonstrated that humans care little about anything with a long perspective. You know how people say kids can't think more than a few minutes ahead or how teenagers are unsuited for making long term decisions? They're right and just about every human being seems unsuited for making a decision that spans more than a generation or two, and to which the next generations follow through on.