Phenwhat fact about our current world would freak people out if it were a newspaper headline a century ago?
Vampire [any]humanity generates 16km³ of piss daily.
Call me Lenny/LeniThere are as many people on the autism spectrum as there are neurotypical people.
I believe that is very very far from true. Do you have any source on that?
looks up webpages on Google
No, in fact I’m getting very frustrated with Google’s recent random source sorting which is exactly why I phrased it like I did. Forget I said what I said.
Not that the number of confirmed neurodiverse people today wouldn’t still scare anyone living a century ago.
TY L on X
That moment when you learn everything you know from googling, and then years later they change their search algorithm so that search results are highly irrelevant, and then you have a debate with someone and they ask for sources and you cannot provide any with their new settings.
All sources I could find point to 15% to 20% of the population being neurodiverse with only a small fraction of this being people in the autism spectrum (around 1% of the total population). So even accounting for under diagnosing there’s no way that’s true.
and even if it were true, it isn't accepted as a mundane fact now.
OTOH “spectrum” is such a vague term that you could claim everyone is somewhere on it, even if it’s almost always the bottom end.
Categories only make sense if they are useful, and if you make them so imprecise that they include everyone then they are useless.
By expanding the criteria for the autism spectrum to include everyone that displays even a single trait associated with autism we would be doing a disservice to the people that display a larger amount of those traits (i.e. the ones that are on the spectrum with the current consensus), since they would be invisible in the midst of everyone else.
BloodwoodsrisenNearly anything from the Onion or Florida
Hahaha, I came here to post “anything Florida”. Take my upvote.
OpenAI accepts files/documents now.
ThavronIn 1923 this would be gibberish.
The idea of a thinking machine/mechanical brain would be more than enough to wow them
Yes. Realistic working computers were still a fantasy. So was solid state electronics and continuing miniaturisation.
But they might feel like plausible future space magic like flying cars.
I miss the niche community “sentences that would have made no sense fifteen years ago.”
Like “Homestuck stans dox Twitter influencer @dril.”
I would guess pretty much everything about our current world would freak out people from a century ago
TerminalEncounter [she/her]The suffragettes won 😲 🫨
MudManIn 1923 they'd have won in about half of Europe, but I guess if you happened to be talking to a conservative person you'd bum them out a bit.
The 19th amendment was ratified in 1919.
Ho_Chi_Chungus [she/her]Probably all the climate change shit
Also if you told a guy from 1923 that the world’s most industrialized nation was China they’d probably accuse you of lying
And even nowadays they’d be right to do so…
Least ignorant liberal
What does it say on all your consumer goods again?
Taiwan, Germany, Canada, EU…
I take quality over slave labor and shit falling apart after a year…
I’m sure you don’t own anything made in China then. Canada, famous producer of consumer goods
Whatever little is actually made in Western countries anymore is shit quality designed to fall apart to make more profit just like everything else.
winnie pooh is pleased with your doing
Nothing never happened day:
WINNIE THE POOH TAIANAMMENNMEN 1989 CHINESE CAN ONLY DO BOOTLEGS (totes not racist to show an Asian man with yellow skin btw)
Can you do SOCIAL CREDIT so we can hit all the greatest hits?
tetrabrick [xey/xem, she/her]have you even seen the video of the thing that never happened?
China is such an excellent test for how gullible someone is. So many people will believe any bad thing they read on the internet about it, no matter how absurd, and no matter how easy it is to disprove.
shanghaidisneyresort.com/…/characters-meet-pooh/
So there’s a whole fucking Hundred Acre Wood exhibit, Pooh and all, but I guess if you text someone about it Xi appears from under your bed and black bags you?
Well I do have one, but only this one item from Germany which I would say is pretty good. A Lamy Safari.
But that is seriously my only thing at home from Germany which I would consider high quality, hell all my Thinkpads are from China after all. Lmao
So they excel at trinkets maybe? Lol
Are you really trying to deny reality here? I understand you hate China and am even willing to belive it’s ideological and not entirely racist but pretending they’re not a global manufacturing powerhouse is next level nuts.
You guys sure love your emoticons
So in this scenario you're back in 1923?
I'm pretty sure it'd be anything including the words "World War II".
Bonus point if it includes a date.
SusagaYou might be able to streamline the process by saying “fears of World War III”
rbosI might find that reassuring in 1923, if the world makes it a full 100 years with only one global scale war. It’s a great run by historic standards.
Not really. Global Scale Wars were a unique thing back then. The Great War, the war to end all wars, was thought (hoped!) to be the only one of its kind. They had a lot of conflicts between major powers, but at least for the west, 17 million deaths excluding the spanish flu epidemic was a massive outlier.
Even the Mexican Revolution, listed on Wikipedia with an upper estimate of 3.5 million, wasn’t a quarter of that, and it wasn’t global. The last thing in the west that came (somewhat) close was the Napoleonic Wars with an upper estimate of 7 million, a hundred years earlier. China has had several massive death counts in various wars and rebellions, but that won’t have been very present to the average western civilian.
WW1 brought with it a slew of new developments in military technology and capability for destruction. For the world to have not just one, but potentially two conflicts considered at least on par with The Great War would be very concerning.
ExecWe should start talking about World War IV then
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. ~ Albert Einstein
abclop99I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. World War V will be fought with crossbows, World War VI will be lasers, and World War VII will be blowguns. I don’t know about World Wars VIII through XI. World War XII will use the same weapons as III, but will be fought entirely within underground tunnels. World War XIV will—Hey, come back! I have a whole list!
Carighan MaconarYeah, like in that Doctor Who special where they tell the WW1 soldier “Now let’s get you back to your first world war” and he goes “FIRST world war?!”.
future telling is kind of a lame answer
Few people would be surprised by it happening. They hoped it wouldn’t be for many decades but it was just known as the way future wars would go.
Wasn’t it known as the Great War until after WW2?
And yes, I am fun at parties.
I am assuming they'd put two and two together.
On account of the number 2, and how all their male relatives have been dead for less than ten years, that stuff is probably pretty top of mind.
ChaoticNeutralCzechEspecially if they have boys aged below 10 in the family
buh [she/her, any]The Titanic sinking kills five more
Oh, snap!
Crackle, and pop.
Lol, brilliant answer. I never would have thought of that.
8 billion people and growing.
Dharma CuriousClimate change, same sex marriage (though, perhaps not as shocking as some might expect, ditto anything trans related), potential mars colonization, coming off the heels of the Spanish flu, COVID news would probably freak em out. Ooh, the USSR being gone, and China being a world super power. The USSR would have been new to them, and it collapsing less than a century later would probably feel quite odd, especially if you could make them understand just how incredibly advanced the USSR got in such a short amount of time. Tons of stuff.
In the 1920s a state fresh off a recent regime change disappearing would have been extremely par for the course. You telling that to someone from the 1960s would probably have more of an effect.
I mean, if you showed them a map it'd look nothing like their current political divide. I'm not sure they'd be more shocked by the state of what then was Soviet Russia than by Czechoslovakia being broken up or the other half a dozen changes in Europe alone.
I’m Czech, and exactly 105 years ago (October 30, 1918) the approximately dozen nationally aware Slovaks met in an inn and wrote a letter to Prague that they agree to be part of Czechoslovakia as the “Czechoslovak nation” because they knew they couldn’t form a state on their own, and split off the hated Hungary. The 4 people who signed our “Declaration of Independence” 2 days prior needed someone to represent Slovakia so they went in the streets searching for a Slovak. Vavro Šrobár, a nationally Slovak lawyer who incidentally just arrived to Prague, came forth and signes the document, and became Minister of Slovakia a few weeks later.
The Republic helped Slovakia reach its industrial potential and gave its people democratic values (except for WWII, we don’t talk about Slovakia in WWII). Eventually, Slovak politicians wanted power so they broke off after true democracy was restored in 1989. The Velvet Divorce was so uneventful compared to the end of Communism that people did not really care at all.
So I agree that to informed people in 1923, Slovakia being separate a century later would be no surprise. However, the formation of USSR (which I know much less about) was pretty controversial and involved a civil war so they might be actually be surprised it did last 80 years.
Yeah, that's a fair point, they may be more surprised that either example lasted that long.
And yeah, like I said above, the entire concept of World War II would blow their minds, let alone the redrawing of maps worldwide afterwards.
Show them a time lapse animation of the countries borders as they changed in real time such that a second equals one month. Two minutes of “what the fuck just happened‽‽”
I don’t think Mars colonies would surprise them. If anything they’d expect us to have family resorts or Jupiter
potential mars colonization
That isn’t a new thing to hype and there was even an actually-competent grifter of his time as the basis of it.
potential mars colonization
Yeah because we’re real close to doing that in 2023
Yeah because we’re real close to doing that in 2023
has been hyping Martian adventures only 20 years from now for… over 20 years now.
ditto anything trans related
In fact, German medical science was on the forefront of chemical and surgical gender therapies, riiight up until Hitler. Quite a lot of seminal research was burned by the doctors responsible - to protect the identities of anyone involved.