Hindsight is always 20/20

It wasn't terribly long ago that scientists believed maggots spontaneously generated from rotting meat, trepanation and blood letting were cutting edge medicine and mental illness was diagnosed as demon possession.

I can't help but wonder if, in fifty, maybe a hundred years we will be looking back at how ridiculously stupid and naive we were back at the turn of the 21st century.

As my wife put it, when we were discussing this the other day...
Will we be looking back at cancer treatment and saying, "My God, did we really think that filling a body with radiation was somehow going to make someone BETTER?"

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Do you think people did that in the year 1000?

Did they look back at the 900s and think "my god man... how retarded"?

I doubt it really, at least not very many people. But then again. Hmmm.

It probably mostly depends on the pace at which scientific advance impacts everyday life, and of course the pace of science itself. Assuming it's exponential, and in consideration of what i think to be a necessary forthcoming reality "AI", I think it could be even moreso than from now till then. It's hard to say of course, but it could be that we're at a special place in the curve. Maybe we've advanced more in the last 100 years than can be possible in any other forcoming century.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I think so.. maggots can grow anywhere that is rotten...

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Sure they will because they will be shallow and stupid. We use these methods today because they offer the best change of survival that we know off whilst scientist and doctors are studiying other possibilities. What more can they do?

 

Yes, but a fly must lay eggs, if there are no flies then there are no maggots.

 

They will be using different frequencies like infrared and radio frequencies to destroy cancer as they now have started to do.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Are people shallow & stupid for looking back at how ridiculously stupid and naive we were back before the 20th century?
They used those methods then because they offered the best chance of survival that we knew off while scientists were studying other possibilities. What more could they do???

 

...Ah yes I've heard of that far and mystical place called grammer and spelling

 

Anything I put in a post I often correct without thinking about it.
That wasn't the point of my post.

 

The overmedication of today's world will surely be looked upon as one of the worst times in the history of medicine.

 

Yes for sure. They are starting to find prescription medicines in cities water supplies from people dumping their medicines down the toilet.

Just one more reason to keep my Brita filter.

 

Perhaps we should ask, "Who will be looking back and wondering at the stupidity of the past?" as well as, "Who now looks back with disdain at the lack of knowledge of the past?"

Those current people who feel their forebears were all stupid, naive and ignorant are those who are the least equipped to deal with modern life. One learns with age and experience those people who lived in the near or distant past did pretty well with what they had.

Just exactly how does anything think all the knowledge we have today arrived? Just fell out of the sky? Albert Einstein could not have arrived at his conclusions without the preliminary work of Galileo, Copernicus, Newton and others. Modern medicine owes much to the herb gatherers, witch doctors and healers of past time. Even those benighted doctors who didn't know anything about germs or bacteria.

I'm sure scientists of the future will have thanks for current scientists for the work done now. Doctors of the future may have more refined and more effective ways of treating cancer, but I'll wager none of the knowledgeable ones ever say something like, "That radiation thing never worked; what fools they were."

Perspective is a marvelous thing to have and use, folks.

 

I think 20th (and current) century psychiatry, the current banking system, gene modification and a number of other practices will come to be seen as primitive, dangerous and misguided endeavors.

For example.

 

When I read the title I thought: black is always dark...

I love redundancy!!!!

 

One day we will look back at the past (today) and say, "how could we have been so stupid to consume, pollute and basically fuck up the earth." We are sooo wasteful today.

I am optimistic though. Hopefully we will eventually only use renewable energy sources, become more eco-friendly and manage water better.

The USA government were thinking about bailing out the US bankers with $700Billion...So its not like they are broke...If I had a hold of $700billion id say fuck the bankers and invest most of it on solar, hydro, wave (ocean), geothermal and wind power. The rest of the money would go to re-forestation, research in energy storage/ waist management systems. In fact by spending $700Billion in these areas they would be creating wealth and employment in the correct way... not by loaning money to people that can least afford it with higher interest rates.

 

I'm betting that in 100 or more years time, there will be at least two perspectives on how people were in the past:

1. "The human races were pathetic animals despite their belief otherwise and their obsolescence was the greatest of their achievements. Limited populations of fundamentalist humans still exist on the planet earth, but they are no threat to us as long as they remain anti-technological. At present individuals who show aggression towards us are terminated, general population control protocols are to inhibit fertility mildly using bionanobots, birth rates are kept at .98% death rates, controlled extinction projected at 900 years +/- 125."

2. "In the long long ago, people were evil, lazy and worshiped the material, God smite those all with the apocalypse, and blessed us with a cleaned world, god will not stand for the evil anymore, if you go wrong and evil, god will send forth metal demons and they will take your life and your soul to hell! Behold gods glory and his one true prophet David Koresh! Pray to David and he bless you with more children!"

If anyone or anything reads this is the future, you know I was generally right.

 

Probably not. The key difference between then and now is that now we actually do proper scientific experiments to verify our knowledge. For a long time people believed that letting blood out could cure people, sure, but that was only because no one bothered to check. If someone in the year 1500 had bothered to compare the survival rates of 500 people who had their blood drained vs. 500 people who didn't, they could have quickly realized that blood letting was useless. We might be wrong about some things today (in fact we are almost certainly wrong about some things), but since we are doing those sorts of experiments now, we can be pretty confident that none of the stuff that we believe is obvious bullshit. Or to put it another way, if people look back at us in 500 years and are amazed by how wrong we were about things, they will at least say to themselves "I can see why they thought that."

Here's the thing: there is no question that it REALLY DOES make people better. We know that because if you compare the survival rates of people who get radiation treatment with the survival rates of people who don't, the ones who get radiation treatment are a lot more likely to live. So while people in the future certainly might think that our cancer treatments were primitive, there won't be any question about whether or not radiation treatments helped people.

Of course, there's an excellent chance that people in the future will be amazed by how much unproven pseudoscience medical bullshit people buy into today.

 

Placebo's are the ultimate proof that their will always be room for pseudo science in health care. (altough it chould be chaperoned with actual science at al time)

 

If you had ever seen a water treatment plant, what and how it filters the water you drink, you'd never even think about drinking water from anywhere it's processed. I worked in one once and one day there was enough to gag me so bad that I still have nightmares about what I saw there. I've blocked it from my mind so that I can drink things with treated water in them now. I still can't drink it without some sort of flavoring added to bury the taste of plain water. Meds in it? Sure, that's a worry. So is seeing an aborted fetus floating in the filter tank. Not to mention about 20 zillion rubbers. This is what gets treated and put into everything you drink, (almost).

Gag City.

 

In a lot of countries treated sewage water is not allowed to re-enter the cities water system. But if filtered and treated well enough its does not matter if the water was filled with cyanide, its still good to drink.