Hitler lost WW2, the south lost the American civil war, and we haven't all nuked each other (yet)

I try to be a "silver lining" type of guy whenever possible, and a recent example that I've been using is mRNA vaccines. They were advancing achingly slowly before CoVID-19 basically turned the whole world into an mRNA lab. Now, thanks to that, there are vaccine trials underway for seasonal influenza, Epstein–Barr virus, HIV, RSV and several types of cancer. There's even talk of a bona fide cure for the common cold.

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01294-2
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-024-00902-1
• https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2307079

Near-infinite access to pretty much any information you can possibly dream of, content, questions, etc, on a little device in your pocket

I mean, we're communicating over the Internet right now, which is pretty cool. Right?

On Lemmy. For now. Things will change. But for now it's pretty cool. Um.

Hi. :waves:

Kids seem more aware of toxic behaviours and seem to clock their mental health better than I ever did. Even 10 years ago, talking about mental health was considered a taboo.

The evolution of our living conditions. We tend to forget how much things have changed. My grandmother grew up during WW2, she not only struggled to get food but also couldn’t go to school because she had to work (yes kids had to work, even in first world countries). She was heavily traumatized during the war because she had to take care of the dead bodies the Germans left behind them, she was only 16 at that time. The years after that were tough, she married a man from another country and was seen as an outcast. They worked their ass off all their life for very little money, then my grandfather died in horrible conditions and the company behind the whole thing has never been held responsible. My parents didn’t have much food either when they grew up but ant least they weren’t raised in war times, and they had access to basic education. As for me, I have done things my family couldn’t even dream of: I went to the university, speak 4 languages, married a girl from a different continent and we live freely in another country, there’s food on the table everyday, never had to go to war and even have time to waste watching shows or typing things on the internet. I am not saying the world is perfect today, there’s definitely a lot of things going wrong as well, but it’s definitely better than it used to be and we tend to forget that

Statically speaking, globally, we are living in the freest, most prosperous age in recorded history. It was the most peaceful as well, but I am unsure if recent events have changed that.

But by and large, we have more rights and are more prosperous than any other era of human history. And drspite the fact we could literally end the whole goddamn world right fucking now, it's very, very clear that the powers that be really like living, and most conflicts are more focused and less destructive than ever before.

It could very easily be way, way fucking worse. We are nowhere near the worst timeline yet.

There are multiple cases where pure chance and human hesitation prevented all out nuclear bombardment in the Cold War.

So for that alone we are extremely lucky.

Linux was invented and the concept of open web and right to your own hardware, although that could change.

Also, vaccines.

The way the moon is perfectly sized to just exactly cover the sun while still showing the corona and stuff like Bailey's Beads. It's an extremely rare cosmic coincidence, and a few million years before or after today and total solar eclipses as we know them wouldn't be possible.

I regularly shop at a supermarket built on a site where people were burned as witches in the 17th century.

A ship's captain was away at sea and died after his ship was wrecked in a storm. Back home, his housemaid was accused of having created the storm and was burned at the stake. And there I am buying lemons and ice cream and toothpaste. It blows my mind.

In terms of total war and death worldwide, this is the most peaceful time in known human history.

GAY RIGHTS

TRANS RIGHTS

it's not perfect, but we're still getting there!

LGBTQIAPN+ I stand with you!

Cheese

Oranges all year round. A heated house, lit after dark. Spices.

Good people still exist, so does love.

All the times where we narrowly avoided nuclear war.

I’m more a visual person, so let me show you some graphs: Famine rates are down: https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Famine-death-rate-since-1860s-revised_850.png

We can do so much more with our computing resources - Note, logarithmic scale: https://www.singularity.com/images/charts/MicroprocessorClockSpeed.jpg

Poverty is down: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2545610/Screen_Shot_2014-12-12_at_10.34.38_AM.0.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100

Billions of people live in a democracy, before 1850 almost none did: https://bigthink.com/the-present/democratic-rights/

We live in a timeline where open source exists, where computers arent as locked down as they could have been, where encryption is common

The fact that most of the world has decent access to food. And the fact that here in the first world (I'm in Canada), just about everyone has access to some kind of food.

I know it isn't perfect and there are still a small percentage of people that may have difficulty with access to proper food, plentiful food or enough food ... but everyone everywhere here has something to eat.

I'm Indigenous and when I was growing up in the 80s, mom and dad had enough for us to eat but we weren't starving or anything.

However, my parents were born in the 40s and they said they had to live through famines as children ... in modern Canada! They remembered a severe famine that swept through northern Ontario in the 50s where every hunter and trapper just couldn't find enough wild food anywhere to feed people. It was a normal cycle that happens in our part of the world that takes place at least once a decade - most times it is just small decline in animal populations but other times, everything just disappears for one reason or another (disease, migration, weather, temperature, animal movements, etc)

In my grandparents time ... starvation was a normal part of life to the point where lots of our old legends are filled with stories of cannibalism and murder because people were starving to death.

It all just means that in our modern era over the past hundred years ... food has become plentiful for the majority of the world and that starvation has become less prevalent than it ever was in human history.

In our modern world of interconnected finances, services, governments and systems ... it is all hinging on a very delicate balance ... because as Will Durant put it ..

"From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day"

Our easy access to food for everyone is only possible if we maintain a functioning world order of cooperation.

I'm sitting in my air conditioned house, watching not one, but 2 HD screens, one of which is playing cheers because I love that show and I can watch it all I want anytime I want. The other is my phone which is a absolute miracle of human achievement allowing me access to the sum of the worlds knowledge which I'm currently using to look at funny shit that amuses me. Also I didn't move a finger to say any of that. I just said it and it typed it for me, correcting most of my mistakes. And you, who are reading this, might be literally anywhere on this planet right now. I also used my phone to order my food which was promptly brought to my home for my enjoyment.

The world certainly has a lot of shit aspects but on the whole, we are living in amazing times right now for those of us fortunate enough to be in a safe country.

Instead of sleeping in a cave and spending all day trying to kill food with a sharp stick, you can use your pocket internet to have food delivered to your door. In your very comfortable living space. Thank you Science and all the smart people in history that brought us here. Life is not as bad as the losers would have us believe.

You, specifically, dear reader, are not dead. Well done for that, keep it up.

There are people who love you, whose lives are better because you're in them, and I'm seriously super proud of you for making it to today.

Nuclear war has been mentioned a couple times but i feel it deserves elaboration: We've been real fucking close a couple times. There was a Soviet "nuclear counterattack station", or whatever, that got the "nuclear strike detected, fire retaliatory missiles" signal and the person responsible simply refused. The signal was due to a glitch, there was no attack. That guy probably saved millions and millions of lives by refusing to carry out his duty.

If you consider (potential) timelines being "close" to ours in terms of only a small number of things needing to change to get us there, the one where everything went to nuclear hell is very close to ours--but we're not in that one.

Well, scientifically speaking, we are living in one of the best timelines possible because there is developed life to ask this question to begin with. It's all about perspective.

Everyone replying seems to be confusing "timeline" with "generation" or "era", discussing how this point in time is better than other times in history. That is not what OP was asking.

David Bowie and Freddie Mercury did a duet.

you can look at old 8mm documentaries from the 1960s

I don't starve if I don't work the fields.

Pizza

There are books written about this exact topic. The most famous in recent years is Factfulness.