You’d be working the fields.
You’d be working the ice hauler.
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.
A pitchfork still could kill a knight in armor. And then you have a horse and armor
Horse thievery is a hanging offense, hanging offense.
this is extra funny when someone laments like this in Ukraine. Compared with some of our “too late” periods - we’re having it good.
Hah, as if the current fucked up trajectory will ever bring us to a future of high tech space exploration.
The way things are going Mankind is vastly more likely to end up in some Dystopia were society has regressed to outright Feudalism and the most technological advanced stuff are at best mass distraction devices or some kind of ML-based social mass manipulator, possibly just the implanted equivalent of slave shock-collars and the systems to control large number of those.
If even just a tiny fraction of the money spent in stock-buybacks was spent in space exploration we would already have space stations in Mars and be extracting minerals from the Asteroid Belt.
We’re not currently evolving, we’re devolving.
Assuming that space ships like in sci Fi are even physically possible. That’s a tall ask. Momentum and energy are a bitch.
Also money can’t buy “progress”
Fantasy was always fantasy
Nah, the past was filled with peasants dying of infections and dysentery. The future will just be the Pony Express crew from Mouthwashing. Honestly, I don’t even know what member I’d choose to be since they all went out horrifically.
At least we have air conditioning
Now replace the future with how Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 looks like.
Didn’t show ‘mind the size of a planet, but stocking shelves’.
But, I guess I’m happy to be here.
Born too late to be killed in a siege for a castle I work around.
Too early to die in a fire accident aboard my transport ship to my corporate slave workplace.
Just in time to be a corporate slave.
The first and second images are fantasy.
How come everyone wants to imagine the future is great and the past was great (it wasn’t, it’s literally just now but worse), but nobody wants to imagine what they could do to make now better?
Last image from 2nd line is cyberpunk, that’s what a techno-fascist country is becoming. OP might be able to live it, he just have to move to the US (or wait if he already lives there)
Kinda hard to build FTL tech on imagination instead of billions/trillions of dollars of research, insane skills in math, physics, etc.
The first and second images are fantasy.
Even if you concede “Knights exist” and “Astronauts exist”, the idea that you’re going to be a knight much less a fucking astronaut relative to being a subsistence farmer or a digital desk jockey…
How come everyone wants to imagine the future is great and the past was great
That’s the other joke, though. Both these images are of people marching off to war. Presumably, these knights are going to the Holy Land to bake in the hot sun and shit themselves to death from cholera. Meanwhile, the interstellar colony ships are going to be rationing everything from calories to moles of oxygen.
The modern era guy doing a simple 9-5 desk job, getting more wealth in return in a week than an knight errant or an astronaut earns in a month, then going home to fuck his hot wife and play catch with his adorable kids has it pretty great by comparison.
The middle ain’t ever comin’ my guy
And the fist one we’d still be the peasants not knights.
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”…
Give it a try using ancient tech and get back to me after you come back to the city because your back is completely fucked.
Also, add in the drastically higher incidence of parasites and plague!
“Baby, you’ve got a stew goin’!”
Plus, probably still required to do military service, only you get no armor and face knights in full plate who have trained their whole lives to kill you.
You can go do that now, no one’s stopping you.
Something something Enrico fermi
I dunno, middle right looks to me like a cyberpunk dystopia with heavy smog. We can pretty much do that right now!
And the first never existed in the way imagined.
Nothing that is heavier than air could ever fly.
The future represented in this image has little chance of actually happening: it is the mythology of fossil fuel powered capitalist society, which has expanded past the planet’s environmental limits but needs to expand somewhere, or admit it is at the end of its useful life.
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.
Life has a tendency to spread when new environments are available, yes.
But beyond this planet, there are no other environments. You might say the rest of the universe is antivironment. There is a wide range of possible conditions, of radiation and tempurature, gravity and molecular composition. Life requires a very very narrow and specific set of those conditions to continue.
Going from one continent to another, within the same atmosphere, with the same underlying set of conditions, is not all that much of a change. Actually leaving the planet? Permanently? And without just dying in the attempt? That would require a level of organization, long term planning (like, centuries long term), and resource management that we as a species have yet to demonstrate.
I disagree that life requires a narrow set of conditions to continue. What I believe is the case is that life requires specific conditions to begin, but once it exists, it is incredibly resilient. There are extremophiles which could reasonably survive in the vacuum of space, and from a more anthropocentric perspective, humans have proven ourselves to be remarkably resilient in the face of climatic tests. Sure, the most inhospitable of earth conditions is a paradise in comparison to something like Mars as it exists now, but we adapted to those when the height of technology was a flint knapped hand-axe. It’s safe to say that the technological aspect of humanity has come a long way, and our ability to survive in and adapt to the conditions of bodies other than earth improves steadily day by day as the wheel of technology turns ever-faster (to say nothing of outright space habitats, which we could absolutely reasonably build with our current understanding of physics). I don’t mean this as a glorification of human industry; rather, I mean to say that ingenuity, adaptability, and tenacity are fundamental characteristics of our species - it’s why we’re here today.
I will also note that there’s no guarantee that there aren’t habitable worlds in other solar systems, and no reason to assume that they couldn’t be found. Even within our solar system, there are planets which, with sufficient effort, could feasibly be colonized near to our current tech level (looking at you, Venus. I know Mars gets all the attention but you’re my one true love).
And, indeed, I wonder if you’ve proven the fundamental point yourself with your observation on organization and long term planning. After all, is it perhaps possible that the very reason we have never demonstrated that level of resource management in our modern, industrial world is itself capitalism? Such a duplicative, wasteful structure is fundamentally inefficient, and more to the point, is fundamentally at odds with the communalist nature of humanity. We are a species which, historically, shares, and just the mere fact that we have convinced ourselves that selfishness is in our nature does not make it true. Additionally, centuries of planning becomes a lot more reasonable when humans reach the point of living for centuries, which is a prospect that I think a lot of people ignore the (relatively speaking) imminent nature of.
All that is to say: we are a species of firsts, and typically when we are met with a survival challenge on a physiological level, we conquer that with technology. Clothing, fire, tools, and planning allowed us to conquer the arctic despite a body plan which is adapted for equatorial living, why should we assume we won’t also eventually rise to this technical challenge in the long term? I have no idea what that intermediary period will look like (except that it will likely be, at minimum, equally unpleasant for us as it is at present), but if history shows us anything it’s that we eventually pull through. Humanity tried to migrate out of Africa several times before it stuck, populations died out, and we find fossil remains which have genomes entirely unrelated to anyone not from Africa, but the notable thing is that we kept on trying anyways.
We’re just stubborn like that.
Bold of you to assume the guys crewing that spaceship aren’t just doing some job they hate to pay the bills
While being forced to travel literal lightyears away from everyone they ever knew, and potentially outliving everyone they care about due to relativity shenanigans.
I’m glad to live in a time when full plate armor is no longer necessary to approach a woman safely.
