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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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.
Don’t forget all the time spent dying from now preventable diseases!
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.
Remember that one of the biggest contributions to women’s liberation was the invention of the washing machine.
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.
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.
That’s the worst part
That top panel is just Elden Ring?
You won’t be a knight, more like a farmer.
I don’t like farms, no thanks. So much bugs. My grandparents, while working on the farms, got bitten by some worm that sucks your blood, ouch, don’t want that.
(Also if you are conscripted in medieval era, knives and swords and arrows hurt like hell, at least a bullet is a quick clean death)
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.
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.
You’d be working the fields.
You’d be working the ice hauler.
REMEMBER THE CANT
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.
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.
Horse thievery is a hanging offense, hanging offense.
Well I guess that’s something you should consider before you kill a knight
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.
Fantasy was always fantasy
this is extra funny when someone laments like this in Ukraine. Compared with some of our “too late” periods - we’re having it good.
At least we have air conditioning
Speak for yourself!
Now replace the future with how Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 looks like.
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”
Using materials obtained outside the Earth’s gravity well, we can make much larger ships than if we have to launch them from the surface of the Earth. Of course that requires some kind of materials processing facilities in space, which is depending on stuff like Moon bases and the years of development of materials science in low and zero-gravity environments possible in those.
Further, the Apolo Program has most definitelly shown we can buy progress. Not “beyond the known principles of present day science” progress (so, no amount of money is going to get us FTL travel) but certainly Engineering progress (so solar sail towed asteroids, moon mining, moon-based nuclear reactors, mass drivers to push loads from the Moon surface into orbit, alternative ship designs using materials found outside the Earth’s surface and/or low weight designs such as the insuflable space stations that were at one point suggested and even test at a small scale, and so on).
It wasn’t by chance that what I suggested was asteroid mining and Mars stations rather than interstellar travel - the money wasted in the Iraq invasion alone over the decades since could have built the infrastructure needed, to get the engineeringe experience required to be able to do the former, not the latter (as that indeed requires a kind of progress that we cannot buy).
Instead, we have Facebook, over the counter credit derivatives and LLMs.
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”…
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.
You can become a farmer if that appeals to you. Doubt you want that though
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.
