Another hot day here today, and I didn’t spend much time outside other than filling the bird bath, heading to the pharmacy for a refill, and heading up the hill to the post office to check my mailbox. The house is at a very comfortable 78 at the moment, which is hotter than I would like, but I just have a hard time justifying cooling a house this big any lower than that for just one person. I have one of those portable ac units in my bedroom and in my office, and I turn them on when I am in those rooms. Other than that, the house will just have to stay at 78. Soon enough this heat wave will pass and I can open the windows at night and get temperatures down again.
I’m watching Dune again because I wanted to see the second installment but decided I should rewatch the first before doing so, and I have to say I am really impressed with how “big” and “grand” and “epic” the director made it feel. A lot of directors try to do that, but it just doesn’t work. This guy pulls it off. Several of his movies have that “big” feel to them, for lack of a better word.
Speaking of science fiction, one of the things I think about a lot is time. How we perceive it, how we treat it and use it, how our concepts of time change over time, etc. One of my favorite ways of looking at time is taking my current age (53) and go back to the year I was born, then subtract my lifetime, and you end up with the year 1917. Then think to myself- I know how long the time I have been a live has felt, and think back to what things were life in an equal period of time and you find us in the heart of WW1. And just think how different things are in that arc of time for which I have a frame of reference.
I suppose it is looking at time kind of the same way you look at the distance of a diving board before you jump. A six foot high dive seems so much bigger than six feet, and that is because it is. I’m six feet tall, so if I am standing on a 6′ diving board looking down, it’s not six feet from my eyes to the water, it’s 12 feet! Twice as large. It’s just a matter of perspective.
At any rate, it gives you a viewpoint on history and change that is different. It also leads to one of the things that irritates me a lot these days, which is that the rise of the internet and social media the virality of videos and well, life these days has really fooled so many people into thinking they are the main character when the fact of the matter is that in your life and personal story, you are the main character, but in the big scheme of things, you’re an NPC. More than likely you were cut from the game during beta.
If you think back to 1917 and on, how many people REALLY made history. How many people are in the books as titular characters of importance. How many do people currently remember. Honestly, how many people could you name from the last hundred years? A thousand? How many could the majority of people remember from the last 100 years? A couple dozen? That’s not to say most people aren’t important. Everyone makes a difference in someone’s life. But I digress.
One of the things that is curious to me is how an alien species would view time. We do things based on the time our planet rotates around the sun. How would alien life forms from different solar systems view time? Would they? Most certainly they wouldn’t in the same way we do. And how would it change their perceptions? I always thought the way the Ents took “forever” to the hobbits to think was for them no time at all was a neat framing. Then again, I don’t even really know how other people view time- I can’t really even know for sure if they perceive colors anywhere like I do. I’m almost sure they don’t.
I have nowhere to go with this thread and no I am not drinking again.
satby
Same, for all the same reasons. Except I supplement with fans, not small air conditioners. I can’t wait for this heat to break so I can open windows at night again.
SiubhanDuinne
I do that a lot, John. I will be 82 in a few weeks, so subtract that from 1942, the year I was born, and we’re in 1860 — the year before the Civil War started, the year Abraham Lincoln was elected President. It is sobering and a bit scary and kind of hilarious, all at once.
Ella in New Mexico
We’re heading back to my husband’s home town near Gettysburg PA for a family funeral.Leaving NM where today it’s been in the mid to upper 80’s due to cloud cover, was high 90’s past week or so but dry. Weather forcast in PA is 95 with humidity 50-60%.
And not a lot of places with air conditioners for the family visits.
Pray for us.
geg6
The HVAC guy just showed up with a new AC unit. I might just be able to sleep tonight! It’s only going down to 70F tonight, pretty much like the past four nights and I’ve been miserable.
Randal Sexton
interesting discussion on perspective. I just did your birth year age math, and came up with 1889 – which is the same year my Dad’s Mom was born, she whose diary details living thru the ‘Spanish’ Flu. She lived to see People on the Moon!
zhena gogolia
So glad for that last sentence, but I was thinking acid.
satby
@SiubhanDuinne: For me, it would be 1886.
My great-grandfather on my mother’s side died in 1934(?) at age 106. Puts that in 1722, 54 years before the Declaration of Independence.
History is never as ancient as we think, is it? Really humbling.
satby
@geg6: 👏 fingers crossed!
NotMax
SF and perspective call to mind both Rendezvous with Rama and Slaughterhouse-Five..
Ella in New Mexico
Also our 7 month old kitten (he had an appointment to be spayed but-surprise to us- was already pregnant when we got her) had 4 kittens last night and is not doint the greatest Mommying job–we’ve been supplementing with formula all day. Our daughter in law is a vet tech, and she’s going to graciously take them home with her while we’re gone but dang, couldn’t be a worse time for this to happen.
Starfish
When you are talking about the movie feeling “big,” are you talking about it feeling big visually or in space and time? I thought there were some scenes that felt visually big.
And in discussing visuals with my son (13), I told him that a lot of things were CGI. He generalized that concept of CGI to everything, and I grew frustrated when we watched older (Star Wars) movies, and he thought the CGI was cool, and I was like “No, that is real effects (unless we are watching some digitally remastered and updated nonsense.)” They did things with models to make everything feel big, but they didn’t have a computer to make that happen.
And everyone who makes CGI bugs needs to stop. Yes, even in that “Fly” episode of Breaking Bad that seemed pointless that all the movie people liked.
Elizabelle
Great essay, John. Thank you. It’s good to think about time, and about how so much “history” is actually the recent past.
I think a lot of us are in that frame, since we seem to be living through what people should have wised up to in the 1920s and 1930s. We were warned. At great cost to life.
Baud
I feel like the Internet has messed with our collective conception of time. The pandemic did not help either.
Elizabelle
@Baud: Attention spans are useful. So is boredom, as it eventually spurs one to take some action. In real life.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Find it slightly mind blowing that May Robson, who had a successful career in talking pictures, was born in 1858.
Miki
1917? My grandpa Erv shipped out to France in 1917. The war ended before he had to enter the trenches, but he was still surrounded by death and injury, including and maybe most especially from the flu.
1943? The same guy enlisted in the Navy, became a Sea Bee, and served in the South Pacific.
His grandpa and great uncle both fought in the Dakota War of 1862 and were in Mankato for the Largest mass of execution in US history, after which they marched to Tennessee and fought in the Battle of Nashville.
They both survived, although Uncle John lost his leg.
We know their stories in part from diaries they kept.
I’m old. I knew and loved some of these people so I can put names to the arithmetic.
Ain’t that the shits.
Cathie from Canada
@SiubhanDuinne: for me, it’s 1874. A decade prior, my great grandmother had emigrated to Canada from Scotland, when Canada was barely a country. The rest of my ancestors on both sides were still scattered over England.
The movie Midnight in Paris relates too, when Owen Wilson keeps going back in time and each generation keeps talking about how great the previous generation was, compared to now and he finally realized he could be happy in his own time. As can we, provided Biden wins the election. And Trudeau
Manyakitty
@zhena gogolia: don’t eat the brown acid
Manyakitty
@Baud: the pandemic broke people in ways we’ll be discovering for years to come.
twbrandt
Interesting exercise.
I am 68, born in 1955, so 68 years before would be 1887. In that time, there was the Russian Revolution, two world wars, the Holocaust, Hiroshima/Nagaski, and the Great Depression. Makes my 68 years almost tame.
Martin
@Baud: Yeah, it’s why I like Everything Everywhere All at Once so much. I think it does a very good job of capturing the overwhelming amount of exposure to the world thanks to the internet and of the sense of opportunities that we choose to not take.
Xavier
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim is captured by aliens from the planet Tralfamador, who look at time entirely differently..
CaseyL
That’s a fascinating perspective-trick. I was born in 1956, am now 68. 1956 minus 68 is, holy hell, 1888.
I’ll have to look up 1888 to see what was happening. But from what I know of late 19th Century history, very little was good: it was the high tide of European and British Imperialism overseas; the Indian Wars were mostly over (and so was Native American sovereignty); Reconstruction was undone; and the first wave of oligarchy was sweeping the US. Not a good time at all.
As someone who deeply loves Deep Time, I often think in terms of geologic or even cosmic time. All of human history is barely an eye-blink. I lately have been thinking a lot about a post-human world, wondering how long it will take Earth to recover from what we’ve done to it, and what the ecosystems will look like in a hundred thousand, or a million, years. It’s very comforting, in an odd way. Earth and its lifeforms have survived worse and bounced back. It may take a while, but…”life finds a way.”
UncleEbeneezer
Both of the recent Dune movies are excellent on a nice dose of edible. Or so I’ve heard…
For people who are into horror films, I watched Infinity Pool last weekend and it was really good. Alexander Skarsgaard and Mia Goth are really excellent. The film is about a tourist (Skarsgaard) who finds himself on the wrong side of the law in a third-world country. Don’t let the cover image or trailer fool you, it’s violent but not as much as you’d expect. It has a very Jordan Peele or even Ruben Ostlund (Force Majeure, The Square) kind of vibe to it. An interesting take on the vacation-gone-horribly-wrong sub-genre of horror.
Archon
My friend and I got into a heated debate about Dune. Can’t speak on the books or any previous version but this version to me was a supervillain origin story. I thought by the end it was pretty clear Paul was now the antagonist in the Dune universe. My friend was adamant he was still the hero who was forced by circumstance and destiny to make tough choices. I’m curious what other people think
mrmoshpotato
I want to cannonball into a pool now. CANNONBALL!
Kayla Rudbek
Ugh. I finished off something that was really difficult for me tonight, and two more unpleasant things to do at work tomorrow. Forget the stupid AI, I want forms that actually carry over data from one to the other. So I ate way too much tonight and right now all is dust and ashes and vanity; I am in official freak out mode. I want to go find a storage unit and haul everything out into it except the furniture and start painting the walls.
I need a haircut and a massage and a manicure and pedicure from a place that can help my soft peeling nails.
and it is too damned hot to knit and I have too many embroidery projects in progress none of which I want to work on tonight. So I am knitting on the monstrosity that seems to never end.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: Agreed.
Ohio Mom
Sometimes I think about how quickly we are all forgotten. I have a photo of my mother, her two siblings, and my grandmother from 1925.
That was the year my grandfather stayed in the Bronx and ran his business while my grandmother took the children to visit her parents and family back in Hungary; the photo is of the entire Roth clan, the Hungarians and the New Yorkers, 25 of them all together, in rows like a class picture.
There’s my mother, next to her cousin who somehow survived the Holocaust, next to her brother, the cousin who was in the underground. There’s my uncle at three, on his grandfather’s knee, his grandfather a foretaste of what my uncle would someday look like, and at the same time, my uncle is a foretaste of what his son would look like as a preschooler 38 years later.
I have stories about many of the others. They are remembered. But the ones who came before them, that’s a black hole.
They are totally forgotten. Even if photographs had been around for those earlier generations and had somehow been passed down in one piece, they’d just be anonymous faces without stories.
And so will all of us be similarly forgotten in a few generation’s time.
KrackenJack
@CaseyL: It’s bittersweet thing to find solace in geologic time.
eclare
@geg6:
Yay!
UncleEbeneezer
Seeing decent airfares to Vancouver in October and getting a little tempted to finally visit. But we are already planning our Eastern Sierra Fall Color camping trip (just booked a great site at Reversed Creek/June Lake) and that will be so much more affordable than Vancouver, that we will probably just stick with that for our Fall trip since we definitely can’t do both (time or $). Our love of the Sierra definitely keeps us from exploring lots of other places because it’s such a fairly easy getaway and there’s still a ton of it for us to see.
twbrandt
@Archon: Paul’s story arc goes from protagonist to antagonist due to the choices he made. Frank Herbert was pretty clear on this.
MagdaInBlack
@CaseyL: I found comfort in the same thinking. That earth will still be here, and we are just a blip in time. And how many other planets “out there somewhere” also had inhabitants who managed to destroy their environment.
Downpuppy
Dune drove me crazy with the endless brown & gray. You can’t blame the desert. Lawrence of Arabia had some of the most glorious colors ever filmed.
We have a house where the basement is chilly, first floor cool, 2nd floor hot. Dogmatic – who prefers subfreezing & tolerates up to about 21C – stays on the first floor. Hit the limit of fan cooling upstairs today, but the 2nd thunderstorm has it going down to where sleeping will be easy without cranking up the minisplit.
scav
Another detail to think of with those dates (for some of us, at least). When I plot back, my great-grandparents (on one side) had just immigrated. That family’s entire period in the US is my lifetime.
Hungry Joe
A time-travel thought experiment:
It’s 2024, so the year 1900 was 124 years ago. The halfway point is 1962. Take someone from, say, San Diego (my joint) in the year 1900, explain to him that you’re going to transport him to 1962, then do so. He goes from cobblestone streets, gaslights, and horses, to cars (blaring rock ‘n’ roll!), neon lights, and 707s overhead on the flight path to the nearby airport. He’s never heard of radio, much less television. He may have seen a telephone or two, but has probably never used one. He’d faint dead away from the shock of the alien world around him.
Now take a guy from 1962 and zip him to 2024. He looks around and asks why there are so many foreign-made cars. He looks up, sees a passenger jet approaching, and wonders why it’s so quiet. He’s impressed that we carry our phones around with us and can even Face Time, “Just like Dick Tracy!” He’s wowed, but not surprised, by the size of our TVs, laughs at the notion of 500 channels instead of three, and does a double-take when he hears someone on TV use an obscenity. If you put him in the driver’s seat of a car and show him how to start it and put it in gear, he’ll be able drive around town, and on the freeways, with no problem.
Things are always changing, but not as fast as they did for a while. The world of 1900 was nothing like the world of 1962. But 1962 is — overall — pretty much like the world of 2024.
I know, I know — computers. That has been huge. But most everything else from 1962 to 2024 has been a quantitative change; 1900 to 1962 was loaded with qualitative changes. The difference between no TV and TVs with three channels is gigantic, but going from three channels to 500 channels is (mostly) more of the same.
Ohio Mom
@Manyakitty: I like
to think that there are social scientists and historians of all stripes recording and documenting all ways the pandemic has changed us. The dust is still settling, we won’t have the results for a good while..
I know Ohio Son’s launching into adulthood was abruptly derailed. I feel like he is finally getting a fragile momentum going again. As for me, i have still not shaken off the asocial lifestyle I was forced into. I’ve grown comfortable in it and I don’t think it’s good for me.
Anoniminous
@Archon:
Frank Herbert considered Dune to be a cautionary tale against the idea of messiahs, strong leaders, and so-called “great men.” Paul Atreides became a messiah and an icon of devotion, and this only precipitates an unprecedented wave of destruction.
(And, yes, I stole that wording from the Internet but I heard Herbert say more-or-less the same thing in person)
Manyakitty
@Kayla Rudbek: some days are like that. Push through the misery tomorrow and reward yourself with one or more of the treats on your list.
Leto
1976 minus 48 gives us 1928. A lot of interesting things happened that year, stuff that still affects us now. Time is such an elastic concept: events feel so far away, but at the same time like they just happened. I’ve hit my 30 year high school graduation this year, but the 90s still feel… close. Closer than they actually are. Not always sure how to process that.
Leto
@Anoniminous: which is why what his kid, and Kevin J Anderson, did to his work (all the prequels, and the subsequent 2 part book 7) is such an absolute criminal fucking shame. And no, I don’t like Denis interpretation either. Visually beautiful, story wise…
Manyakitty
@Ohio Mom: I hope your son finds a good path. The introversion is real and, as you said, not necessarily great.
Another Scott
I have often thought about my mother’s father. Born in 1904 – a year after the Wright Brother’s first flight. Died in 1982 – the year when the Space Shuttle became fully operational. Lots and lots and lots of changes over that period of time.
His sister told some stories about an older relative who as a young man went off to fight in the Civil War and sent his pay back home to his family for safe keeping and returned to find that all the money was gone. :-/
It’s corny, but Biden’s right that there’s (almost) nothing we can’t do if we work together. But it’s not easy!
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
cmorenc
When my mother (born Jan1922) was a child of 8 in 1930, there were more veterans of the Civil War still alive (albeit in their mid-to-late 80s) than there are veterans of WW2 still alive today. And as much time has passed since D-Day in 1944 until now as passed between the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 and D-Day in 1944 (ok, so +1 more year Gettysburg => D-Day than D-Day-present, but that’s a relatively trivial difference).
One huge difference between now and past generations is that the personal history of our generation will be much better preserved in digital photos and videos for our great-grandchildren than my (obscure) great-grandfathers on either side are for me. I know next to nothing about my maternal great-grandfather except he was a farmer, and have but a single photo of my maternal great-grandmother standing on the porch of her house c. 1924 near the end of her life. But she lived near the end of her life in a neighborhood of a small eastern NC town that is very little changed over 100 years – four year ago. I got to see the house where the photo of her was taken on the porch, and the scene is identical to the 100 year old photo, except of course she wasn’t there. But I could so vividly imagine her from the photos standing there, I was overwhelmed with a desire to start a conversation with her, if only I could have. Photos weren’t yet a very common thing c. 1920, except in professional photo portraits.
Anoniminous
@Leto:
Oh I don’t know. the “Certified Public Accountants of the God Emperor of Dune Audits the Bene Gesserit” was a real page turner.
I got halfway through “Dune Messiah,” gave it away, and never opened another in the series.
Hungry Joe
Cultural changes have gone at a different pace. “Happy Days” premiered in the early ‘70s, looking back at that quaint, innocent time … 15 years earlier! Everything seemed different in the culture. Now imagine a show set in 2008. How could you tell? Well, the cell phones weren’t as good, and … and … ?
CaseyL
@MagdaInBlack: That’s my latest hobby horse. Sentience is fine, but sapience is a trap. In brief: Sapience means a species gets just smart enough to destroy its ecosphere, but not smart enough NOT to do so. So, no, there are no “advanced civilizations” out there; they all self-destructed, one way or another.
I have to say, I read the Dune books* as a young adult, and it always seemed to me Paul was – if not a victim of prophesy – someone who couldn’t think of a way out of it. In order to protect the Fremen, he had to defeat House Harkonnen and become Emperor. I did wonder why he didn’t try harder to defy his visions of the future, but again: short of changing his name and leaving Arrakis forever, I’m not sure how he could have done so. I never saw him as the outright “villain,” more the chew toy of Fate.
*Up to God Emperor. If Frank didn’t write it, I wasn’t interested in reading it.
MobiusKlein
It got up to 56 here in SF I think. Share the heats please
Elizabelle
The oldies stations are playing music from the 1980s.
Anoniminous
@Hungry Joe:
Could do a good series set in 2008. That was the year Obama was elected and a ton of Americans – *cough*whitepeople*cough* – lost their marbles & have yet to find ’em
MomSense
Finally able to open all the windows tonight as we had a wonderful thunderstorm pass through. I’m listening to the rain and the ceiling fan and it is making me sleeeeepeeey.
After work my son came over and helped me switch out my mom’s mattress and put the beds together upstairs. It was soooo hot and uncomfortable.
eclare
@Leto:
I think the high school years leave a much bigger imprint than we realize. I was thinking about what you wrote, and I thought yeah, the 90’s were good, and I remember a lot. But the 80’s, I was born 1968, I can still feel those years.
scav
@Hungry Joe: Oh, I have every confidence that a solid team of scriptwriters could concoct a simple innocence version of 15 years ago. In 2008 we’d elected Obama and Biden and thought the worst was behind us!
Hungry Joe
@scav: But were there malt shops?
MagdaInBlack
@CaseyL: He rejected his visions of the future, because he saw what was needed. Rather, he walked into the desert. I suppose thats sort of defying your fate. He left if for someone else to do.
scav
@Hungry Joe: Quaint local coffee bars.
strange visitor (from another planet)
paul does everything he can to reject his fate.
faced with the choice of becoming a monster or letting the human race die out entirely, he chose not to play the game and walked, blinded and alone into the desert. his son, leto II, embraces the decision, becoming the god-emperor and leading humanity on the blood-soaked golden path of mankind’s salvation (until the orange-eyed, honored matres come)
eta- more or less what magdainblack said.
Bill Arnold
@Anoniminous:
Somebody once asked me “What is the True meaning of the Golden Path?”
I’m curious about your answer.
Omnes Omnibus
The thing that always amazing me is that I knew someone who knew someone who fought in the Civil War. My great grandmother who died when I was eight was daughter of a Civil War veteran. She was born rather late in his life (1880s). He served with Grant and the Sherman from before Vicksburg until the end of the war.
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: amazes not amazing.
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
I know her name, of course, but had no idea she had been born that long before the turn of the century.
ETA: And for about three brief months, she and I were on this mortal coil simultaneously.
CaseyL
@MagdaInBlack:
@strange visitor (from another planet):
True. He did try, at the end. I guess he may have tried in smaller ways, through the years, but nothing worked. (And in the long run, neither did walking into the desert.)
Frank Herbert had his faults (no sense of humor, for one) but he absolutely nailed the dangers of heroes and religion, and how much worse religious heroes are.
prostratedragon
@SiubhanDuinne: Wow. It cracks me up that I (10 years younger than you) was born in the Truman administration. But I can get to the Civil War era in terms of people I actually knew, like some great-grandparents. Another, who died shortly before I was born, was herself born in the early 1850s.
SiubhanDuinne
@Hungry Joe:
That is a fascinating and insightful comment. I’m copying it to ponder and play with. Thank you!
Eyeroller
Alien life forms would not tie their experience of time to what we call a day or a year, but a “second” and things derived from that would be essentially the same. Time is a fundamental physical quantity. It is not some metaphysical thing. Our perceptions of the passage of time are actually pretty accurate even when we think they are not. We have a fairly elaborate system to align our circadian rhythms with the 24 hours of a day. Distortions of that sense of time (assuming appropriate exposure to light) are a symptom of some mental illnesses.
Color perception is interesting. Nearly all human females and most males perceive color the same. We can’t be sure exactly what goes on in another person’s head, but we can do color-matching experiments that demonstrate that most people match colors in the same way. About 8% of males have some form of color blindness that causes differences in these perceptions. But most mammals have more limited color vision than we have. They are the equivalent of red colorblind. On the other hand, reptiles and birds have four color-detecting proteins (opsins) to our three, and the two of the majority of mammals. They can see into the ultraviolet, and they can make finer distinctions among colors in the visual range. It’s extremely difficult or impossible to imagine how they perceive the world. It’s because of the “nocturnal bottleneck”–mammals sacrificed daytime color vision for better low-light vision (rods evolved from cones). Old-world primates recouped some improved color vision, but it’s still not as good as reptiles and birds.
scav
@prostratedragon: That is a fun twist. My great grandmother (I did know her) can overlap with Wilhelm I of Prussia b. 1797. So nearly to the Revolution.
RevRick
@Randal Sexton: Yes, that generation, born in the 1880s, witnessed the greatest technological advancements, going from horse and buggy, to automobiles, airplanes, and men in space, plus light bulbs, telephones, movies, radios, phonographs, computers and lasers.
@SiubhanDuinne: My subtraction takes me back to the administration of Ulysses Grant, but on a more personal level I possess my great grandfather’s Prussian work papers, when he was a 17 year-old in 1866. And my dad once showed me a photograph of his father’s great aunt, who as a child, witnessed Napoleon’s army passing through their village. The ripples of our lives probably span 300 years.
@JohnCole when it comes to time, aliens would experience it in the same way we do since the speed of light is an absolute constant, which interestingly enough! also factors into measurements of mass! The equations linking the two are fascinating.
Today, my wife and I took our granddaughter to the Da Vinci Center, which had an animatronic dinosaur display. Their run on Earth spanned about 200 million years and likely would have lasted except for that asteroid smacking into the earth off the Yucatán. There’s no way we can truly grasp that span of time.
But then there’s the photons which, since they travel at the speed of light, never experience time at all!
NotMax
A curiosity, The History of Time Travel is available on Prime.
@prostratedragon
Born in the Truman administration?
Raises hand high, albeit creakily.
;)
Kayla Rudbek
@Manyakitty: thanks! It would be so nice to have someone else do my nails for me. I tend to go about 3 or more months without having a professional do them for me, as I can ruin the manicure by looking at it cross-eyed and I don’t want to waste the money and the stylist’s time.
Leto
@Anoniminous: are you sure you were reading Messiah? There was no CPA work involved, haha, nor any real accounting work done. It was the start of the rebellion against Paul (water sickness), and the attempt to make him a figurehead to the religion he’d spawned via Chani. Which, no f’ing clue how Denis will make happen considering how the second part of the movie ended. He’s basically f’ed the entire Messiah book just by doing that. But, you know, it was pretty!
@eclare: Yeah, I’d agree with that. Lot of formative experiences are happening at that period. The 90’s are also just another inflection point between pre and post internet times. Yes we had usenet, and other primitive message boards, but what we think of as “the internet” was born around 95 to 97.
kalakal
@Hungry Joe: I’ve often thought on the same lines. Going back a little further
C. S. Forester wrote a very interesting book The General which is a sympathetic portrait of British WW1 General told in retrospect. Forester makes no attempt to excuse the boneheadedness of many WW1 senior commanders but rather portrays a not particularly bright but fundamentally decent individual totally out of his depth. He stresses that most junior WW1 generals would have been born around 1870, no electricity, internal combustion engines, radio, telephones, machine guns*, barbed wire artillery had a range of around 2 miles max, ships were nearly all made of wood and ran on sails,
By the end of WW1 they were having to deal with aircraft, machine guns, poison gas, radio, telephones, motorized transport, barbed wire, artillery that could fire 10 miles. In their careers they had probably never commanded more than a 1,000 troops and once and were having to coordinate formations numbering in the 100,000s. Add to that the sheer rate of change from 1914-18** and I had to concede Forester had a point
*Gatling guns were around from the mid 1860s
**In 1914 the British Army had 6 aircraft, by 1918 40,000
NotMax
@Hungry Joe
Ever read Looking Backward: 2000–1887 by Edward Bellamy (published in 1888)?
Leto
@MagdaInBlack: @strange visitor (from another planet): which is why his son branded him a coward, for letting himself be captured by the outcasts of Jacarutu, and being turned into a false prophet for their use. And that’s why Ghanima said: “He’s (Leto II) always been the stronger of the two of us.”
John Cole
@Eyeroller: interesting!!
BigJimSlade
My grandma lived to be 103 (she was born in 1900). Going back 2000 years is just 20 grandmas. I got fingers and toes to count that much. Makes modern history seem pretty short!
Then I think about layers of earth with tiny fossilized creatures that sank to the bottom of the ocean, then got pushed up to the current landscape where we can inspect it. All the time and all the generations of living things seems tremendous.
Also, while we’re on big topics, I think the biggest understatement of all is “space.”
Citizen Dave
I have been doing this with music. I can remember when Hey Jude was a (long) single on a.m. radio. August 1968. (I was 7). 56 years before that wikipedia says this one was popular: The Herd Girl’s Dream” by George Stehl, Marshall P. Lufsky, & Paul Surth, Columbia.
Not sure what is popular right now, and cannot imagine what could be 56 years hence, in 2080. Guessing it will be Holographic AI Elvis, but hoping it’s Muddy Waters.
Kayla Rudbek
And running with John’s gedankenexperimente, that takes me back to around 1920. My grandparents and great aunts and uncles were infants, small children, or not yet born.
Although I also had a bit of that “so much time has gone by” at my last college reunion, finding out that my classmate’s baby boy at a previous reunion is now a college student.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus:
And I am sufficiently older than you that I had two great-grandfathers who fought in the Civil War and lived to ripe enough old ages that I actually do remember both of them.
NotMax
@Citizen Dave
True to AI, it’ll be Muddy Elvis.
:)
Dmbeaster
Speaking of science fiction, one of the things I think about a lot is time.
My favorite exercise on this is remembering my grandfather, and conducting an oral history with him (he lived a lot of very interesting experiences, including elected National Commander in 1949 of the Disabled American Veterans, a rather significant post WWII organization). He was born in 1890. He told me stories of talking to his grandfather, who fought at Gettysburg, and his other Civil War experiences. Hearsay, but still testimony from someone who heard the stories from a witness.
The second Dune movie is even better. Enjoy.
prostratedragon
@Starfish:
Lots about miniatures. The upshot is that after ebbing for a while, their use is coming back. Ytube seems to have a number of videos on modelmaking for miniature sets.
Dmbeaster
@BigJimSlade: Being a fossil lover, I think along the same lines. A few weeks ago, collected upper Triassic ammonites in the Union Wash Formation, Inyo Range, California (you look at Mt. Whitney while collecting fossils). Around 240 million years ago. How many generations is that!
The adjacent White Mountains are loaded with lower Cambrian fossils, including the incredibly rare helicoplacus, the oldest known echinoderm (five fold symmetry, including starfish). Around 510 million years ago. Another favorite fossil spot
NotMax
@Dmbeaster
Alas, we never got Jodorowsky’s Dune. What a trip that might have been.
Leto
@CaseyL:
In the Dune Encyclopedia* is was explained as Paul was trapped by his prescient visions.
Essentially he started at point A, tried to envision the future at point H, then look back to point G, then see the line from A to G. It just didn’t work like that, and produced all sorts of unexpected results. And as he kept trying to look ahead/look back, it kept going skew.
This was taken from page 91, but if you start at page 89 (Paul Kwizatch Haderach) you can read about it there. If you care :P
* the Dune Encyclopedia isn’t considered cannon, even though Herbert gave permission for it to be written, and helped write it. At the last minute, he pulled his endorsement from it, but it was already being published. But it provides the most complete history of the series from just after God Emperor back. I have my copy sitting on my self, along with all the rest of the original novels. For me, and quite a few others, it’s cannon.
Manyakitty
@Kayla Rudbek: try gel. I started getting gel pedicures and it changed everything.
prostratedragon
@Anoniminous: Since that’s what I got out of the books it’s nice to know Herbert intended something like that. Incidentally, I also suspect that David Lynch, who throws nothing away, adapted that arc to the character Dale Cooper.
Jackie
My Dad was born 1918, in the midst of the Great Pandemic. Lived through the Great Depression, was part of the Dust Bowl – migrated from OK to CA and worked the harvest from CA to WA, back and forth with the harvest. Joined the CCC’s – by his words, the best thing that ever happened to him – and joined the Army Air Corp after Pearl Harbor was attacked. He lived to see the first man walk on the moon, enroll in our Community College to learn how to use computers, surf the web and keyboarding – he was already a skilled typist, was proud to vote for our first Black president and was devastated to see TCFG elected. His last years were spent hoping to piss on TCFG’s grave. Alas, he passed away just shy of 100, but he would have been thrilled about Biden defeating TCFG. Dad always thought Biden was a good man, but he wanted Hillary to be the first woman president.
Phein64
@Omnes Omnibus: My maternal great-grandfather was born in 1865, and he had older cousins who died in the Civil War (Battle of Iuka, and others). He was also one of the first pedestrians to be killed by an automobile in St. Louis (1931, corner of today’s Keener Plaza), and his death made the front page of both of St. Louis’s major daily newspapers (for a different reason). My mother never told me any of this.
RaflW
1907, my birth-age year, seems incredibly remote. It felt less so back when my grandfather was alive, he was born in 1899, and I’m reflecting back to the early 1980’s so 1907 was less than a lifetime ago (obviously! Gramps was alive).
I still think he lived through a larger and more displacing change from 1907-1965 than I have in my 58 years. I was a passenger in a Jet in 1966. We had a TV. Though in Geneva, Switzerland in the later 60s there was hardly a ting to watch.
Yeah, no internet in ‘ 65(and the social dislocation that is causing, while also connecting and improving other things about life). But many of the forms that make us were in place by ’65s. Cars & car-oriented cities (we lived in a far suburb of Geneva, dad was a US executive and brought his preferences and budget with him). Computers were starting to be used at big companies like where he worked. The UN had been meeting for 19 years.
Jackie
OT Bannon’s emergency plea to stay out of jail DENIED!😂🤣😂
Sister Golden Bear
@Eyeroller: @John Cole:
Humans are also far better than other mammals at differentiating between subtle different of color, more than just because we’re trichromatic. It’s why we generally can easily detect a gray squirrel on a gray tree trunk. It’s automatic and unconscious, are separate from color naming.
Color naming is cultural and has evolved over time — i.e. virtually all languages start with “light/dark” and red, later other colors get added, typically in a specific order.
Color naming also varies between societies and within societies E.g. how women in Western societies generally have far larger color vocabularies than men. For example, while men may just refer to something as being “blue,” women might call it azure, cadet blue, cobalt, cornflower blue, cerulean, indigo, peacock, powder blue, robins egg, sapphire, steel blue, Turkish blue, etc.
scav
@RaflW: For some, the social changes that have occurred in our lifetimes have been transformative. 1974, women could finally get credit cards in their own name. 1986 the Supreme Court found sodomy laws to be constitutional. (2003 to change their minds.) etc. It’s not all about the tech. Although, yes, there were entirely massive social changes going on for those earlier generations. Shit, a Catholic President!?! Black Baseball players? Women voting? likewise, etc etc.
SW
Time is really the missing bit when it comes to our under of the universe. There is no physical meaning to a privileged point in space time called “now”. It is entirely anthropic. A characteristic of life as we know it.
suilebhan
You’re a young whipper-snapper, John. It would be 1888 for me.
prostratedragon
@scav:
[long, loud whistle!]
prostratedragon
@NotMax: Need a jack for that maneuver?
BigJimSlade
@Dmbeaster: Anything from 510 million years ago is amazing! I hiked up Mt. Whitney when I was 11 (gulp, 1978), but didn’t do any fossil-digging. Heck, I didn’t even film a western in the Alabama Hills.
So, once you get bowled over by the generations of diatom-like things, then think about (I’m being super general here) the billion years where there was no life, then the couple billion years there were only very basic, single-celled things (like blue-green algae) before you finally get to more discoverable stuff… and that was 500 million years ago. That’s big t-i-m-e!
But it’s still only 20 grandmas to get back to the early days of the Roman Empire, lol.
Mick McDick
Cole’s perspective on the passage of time reminds me of something i once read: In every generation of man since the stone age, someone has reached the age of 80. If you took 100 of these 80 year olds from each generation and stacked their lifespans end to end, you could encompass 8000 years of human history in the lifespans of 100 people. All of our history can be represented by the experiences of just 100 people. I’ve always found this perspective compelling.
Matt McIrvin
@BigJimSlade: Deep time is really smaller than deep space, though, in human terms. There are, what, 8 billion people on Earth. Put our lives together and our collective experience today is longer than the age of the entire universe. But if you lined us up in a row, it’d be a fraction of the distance to the Sun, utterly lost in the universe. I find that strange. I guess it’s a consequence of our everyday biological processes happening on speed scales much slower than that of light.
BigJimSlade
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, like I said in my first comment:
Also, while we’re on big topics, I think the biggest understatement of all is “space.”
Kosh III
@Starfish: Show your kid a movie with effects by Ray Harryhausen.
Kosh III
@Archon: Frank Herbert clearly made Paul Muad-dib the villain. The books Dune Messiah and Children of Dune make that very clear plus FH had spoken about it often because many, who only read Dune thought he was a hero. The key is one of those intro statements to a chapter which talk about how disastrous the merging of church and state is. Pertinent today for sure.
Kosh III
A very timey-wimey thread today.
Hannah
Regarding Time, you should try Star Trek Deep Space Nine because the Prophets (a/k/a Wormhole Aliens), noncorporeal beings who exist in a wormhole, are extremely important during the entire run of the show and do not share or understand our concept of Time. They have no understanding of past, present, and future or of a linear existence and experience or are aware of the past/present/future all at once. It can make for interesting plots and telepathic conversations with Captain Sisko.
dearmaizie
I think you’ve had too many mushrooms.