If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared, what would be the most difficult thing to explain about life today?
If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared, what would be the most difficult thing to explain about life today?
Why the Nazis are back
This is the 50s, I think it'd be pretty easy to draw a line from casual racism to white supremacists. A key difference this time is that it's not just Germans led by one insane man, it's instead a bunch of redneck prices and conspiracy theorists.
That’s easy, people still wave the Confederate flag and that happened 90 years before the 1950’s.
Ironically, the confederate worship started in the 50’s and 60’s during the civil rights era. It was basically a rebellion against the civil rights movement, and an attempt to intimidate black people back into silence. Like “oh you want to use the same bathroom as us now? Well you can’t stop us from erecting this statue of a confederate general, to constantly remind you where you came from.” So depending on when exactly they came from in the 50’s, the confederate stuff may also be a surprise.
I presume you're not talking about Russia? You're going to have a hard time showing them those Nazis.
A person from 1950s will just be super confused when you say it because they're going to ask you what country is Nazi. If you say the US they'll just be confused further.
I think that wouldn't be too hard. He would just believe that they never left... which would be true
I mean by modern standards, almost everyday in the 1950s was a Nazi.
I'm just going to steal the response I read years ago.
"I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers."
I've started l to realize that actual information worth reading is not available. Like I cant access in depth medical course or text book in engineering. Lots of beginner tutorials marketed as 7 minute abs.
Information is valuable and nobody gives it away for free. We have access to a worlds worth of crappy, unvetted trash information. But the vast majority of the good stuff is still locked away as it always was.
Does MIT not have open courses anymore? Besides that I wonder what you are looking for? I can find free scientific papers to improve my hobbies, watch along as professionals explain and do their jobs, graduate level math and computer science videos from the comfort of my home. As a student around 2000 (Google existed, barely) it was not so easy, even with access to university library you still had to find what you were looking for with worse tools and there was less of it. And who on earth was going to take the time to show you exactly how it worked their lab a thousand miles away? Once a week you could go to a seminar and a visiting scientist gives a slideshow. It's better now.
Try google scholar.
This does make me think. I remember the days where I would turn up at the library to read books. With my phone, I can read and learn but instead I doom scroll.
I combine the two. I doomscroll looking for things to read and learn about, which enhances the doom significantly!
but instead doom Scroll.
One of us, one of us!
I find I'm involved in a combination of doom scrolling and reading through my digital books. They're not academic in nature but they bring me joy... I also leverage my device for googling the answer to any one of the thousand questions my offspring will ask daily.
"It arguably made us all a lot dumber..."
I don't know if the Internet has made folks dumber per se. What we may be experiencing is the visibility of semi anonymous unfiltered thought. I've had conversations with individuals online who have made claims that are egregiously incorrect and will defend those claims to the death but when discussed in person, they are amenable to discourse and can change their opinions.
I'm not saying this is true for all cases but I think the is a lot more going on here in our digital age.
Edit: removed an embarrassing typo.
And porn! So much porn!
I mean, Avenue Q said it best.
I dont think that is imdifficult to explain..
But HOW it works.. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I'm going to go on a different angle on this one and say that we are much tougher on sexual harassment. I feel like a lot of people from the 1950s who have grown up on pulp sci-fi like Flash Gordon could accept a lot of modern technology and the internet as basically just magic. To be fair is how a lot of modern people also accept it. But I don't think they would be able to process the move towards egalitarianism that we have taken.
That is not to say that modern society is egalitarian only that we have made good strides in achieving that aim.
Edit: Turns out Gordon is from the '70s, but other pulp sci-fi exist so my statement stands.
Edit: Turns out Gordon is from the '70s, but other pulp sci-fi exist so my statement stands.
Live action Flash Gordon was from the 50s
"Yes, they are allowed to be on the same bus as us. No, we don't call them that anymore"
"Bus? No we bulldozed hundreds of neighborhoods to build highways so now everyone has to have a car"
Depends where they appeared
And which person from the 1950s
And we had a pretty great black president.
I knew that would be the obvious joke but it's not like that was unfathomable in the fifties. Desegregation was obviously where the world was headed and I'm sure everyone was expecting (or dreading) modern racial relations.
If the 1950's person was a white man from the deep south, they'd probably still be shocked. Not only can a black man ride the same bus as a white women, but they can be MARRIED as well and have kids.
Heck, that black man could be married to a white man if they so choose.
1950's Deep South Man would be outraged.
Things they considered morally fine (smoking, dropping litter, 40 year olds dating 16 year olds) is morally reprehensible, while things they thought were morally wrong or even outlawed are totally acceptable (homosexually, porn, divorce).
Charlie Chaplin's daughter died recently and I looked him up on wikipedia. Charlie married last wife, and the mother of the recently deceased, when he was 54 and she was 18.
It may not technically be pedophilia, but it damn sounds like it.
Depends where they live, too
That smoking is bad for them. You'd just be banging your head against their socially-acceptable-at-the-time drug addiction.
Person from 2020 magically appearing in 2090 and being told caffeine/excessive sugar is now regulated and ID checked
Grew up in the 50s and 60s. Had a pediatrician who chain-smoked, and had ashtrays all over her office literally overflowing with butts.
I read your response and immediately thought of homosexuality. That would be hard to explain, why now we have a big pride parade celebrating it. (Im gay, dont com at me!)
Seems like this was already know in '47
Why the Nazis are back, and in America of all places
Seeing how much overlap they have with the KKK, I don't think it'd be that surprising
They are back In germany too. Although I wouldn't call it they are back, but they are open about it again
Depends a lot on the color of their skin.
"You're telling me there was a black president and he wasn't assassinated? Sure, buddy! Now let me get back to my sharecropping."
We walk around with a little rectangle in our pocket that gives us access to the sum total of human knowledge, but we mostly use it for looking at funny captioned pictures, the same pictures over and over just with different captions.
It's called a phone but no one ever uses it as one.
Also, the "video telephone" that everyone always so desperately awaited from the future? Yeah, we have that; no, nobody uses it, because we can't be bothered to dress up for a phone call.
I also thought no one used facetime until I worked retail recently... The amount of people I saw come in on a facetime calls where they both just had their cameras pointed at the ceiling was bizarre and boggling.
Tell that to the tonnes of people that facetious in public but neither them nor the person they are calling are actually in frame
That pretty much sums it up.
The phone never leaves my side, but I dread getting an actual phone call.
"You see, the file itself can be copied by anyone, but this one little piece of metadata can never be duplicated. That means you own the file."
“What is a file? Are you working for the FBI?”
The price of housing
Also nearly everything else. Computers would be an obvious exception, a couple years ago I paid USD$40 for a smartwatch with specs exceeding a $2000 computer from around year 2000, and millions of times more powerful than computers from the 50s which cost millions of dollars at the time.
The Internet, social media and how we can access absolutely everything from this tiny device
#3 Why we still haven't got colonies on the moon
#2 Climate change
#1 That fascism is back
they knew about climate change in the 50's- actually, greenhouse gases were first proposed in the 1820s.
You'd think most of them are more fascist than the people you consider fascist now. Remember what England did to Alan Turing. They'd be amazed we let women and minorities work with us and we don't persecute gays. They'd think the commies won.
Most difficult imho would be to explain why we haven't advanced any further. If the person is 50 in 1950 he started with horse carriages and saw development to intercontinental bombers, rockets etc. The landing on moon would astonish him, advances in medical sciences and computing too but he probably would ask: "And what are you using that neat little gadgets for?"
I'm using this little gadget for all my banking needs, a significant amount of my shopping, to stay instantly connected with friends/family and strangers with common interests all around the world, to almost instantly find information on almost any topic, to watch any of a hundred thousand movies or TV shows instantly on demand, and it's also a telephone.
I think you're severely underestimating how our daily lives have advanced. We've advanced so far that we don't even regularly use the thing that would blow the mind of someone from the 50s, like calling someone on the phone. Calling someone with your phone would already blow their mind, because the first handheld phone didn't happen until the 70s. But we don't really call people anymore. We send instant messages or if we want "a call" we do video calls, which is guaranteed to blow their mind because a) most people in the 50s had a black and white television, so being able to see colored picture in real time is just next level shit, b) you can see someone else in real time on the other side of the planet and c) it's going to feel like you're there because the image quality from the 50s is like a cave painting compared to what we have today. And that's just calling someone. Imagine what else would blow their mind, modern cars probably.
Also, remember that the previous generations versions of a “phone call” was the mail, or sailing across on ocean, or being carried by a horse, or even walking for years or decades to get to the person you want to make contact with.
Maybe I'm underestimating individual benefits of digitalisation. But I tried to remember talks with my grandfather. He was born in 1912 and lived to the age of 87. He could remember the coronation of the last austrian-hungarian emperor Karl. People then were not as individualistic as we are today. Technological, social or cultural advancements were seen more on a collective scale. The mere possibility of calling or texting someone didn't impress or astonish him much. Especially in the 50's and 60's promises of a bright and shiny future were made. Just think of the exploration of space or the deep sea with proposed bases on moon, mars or the seabed. It wasn't called the atomic age for nothing. What I experienced was that those now long dead relatives appreciated the individual improvements of their lives but they felt a certain slow down in regard to an overall progress of society.
Porn mostly
This I disagree with. Porn has always been widely available throughout human history, it just wasn't as widely openly available and distributed as today. Case in point, my grandfather died in Vietnam back in '63, all of his barracks stuff went into a box that was sent home. My grandmother never opened it, to the extent it was still sealed with navy tape from the 60's. When she died, my father didn't even know it was in the attic.
When he passed back in '15, I was cleaning out this attic and found the box. Ontop some actually really cool shit- you guessed it, I found a literal shitload of vintage porn. Grampy was dropping loads left and right with these bitches. A LOT of hair back in the day I might add.
Why doesn't anyone think of the memes?
You have to goto the store to buy milk instead of having it delivered fresh
My parents still do. The person who delivers it also delivers butter and eggs.
I'm not sure where the butter and eggs and stuff come from but he owns the dairy the milk comes from and he's part of a cooperative that pay for the equipment. According to him it's just not worth selling to the big stores as he makes more money with fewer customers doing it himself.
That we’ve been to the moon - in there 60s - but haven’t been back or been out further. I think it would just be against all their expectations.
There were several places in the media that had stories of landing on the moon as a real possibility. Almost a forgone conclusion.
How easily we can know anything, yet how diligently we fail to learn anything.
Nothing as sobering as showing a techno-optimist what the future really looks like
A lack of 'whites only' signs.
Brown v. Board of Education was filed in 1951, and decided in 1954. The desegregation movement was well underway. Some folks from that era might not be happy that segregation went away, but I don't imagine too many would be surprised.
What a dumb answer that completely ignores that was a topic of debate at that time. The concept and topic was WELL known. 17 upvotes 🤦♂️.
We still work 8 hours/day!
But we also won the cold war
“”””””””“””””Won””””””””””””””
School shooter drills
They'd wonder why nobody got their shotgun from their locker and fired back.
nature and resources are not infinite. you are responsible for your actions no matter how terribly hard your childhood was. you cant buy a house for a years loan. we are all fucked.
A significant chunk of Americans support Russia over their own country and are actually opposed to the US providing aid to a country being attacked by Russia. I mean, I guess they had the Red Scare, but this is more Americans opposed to Left-leaning politics who support Russia's authoritarianism.
"The Soviet Union did fall circa 1990, though."
"Oh, so it's different people in charge of Russia now."
"Well..."
"Aside from anyone they respected enough to elect."
"Uh..."
"At least their neighbors are generally safe and separate."
"Hmm..."
Statistically? Ok, you have to learn Mandarin and there are these things called time zones but you only get one but shouldhave at least 3.
Like 1 out of 4 people at the time were from China.
Mandarin probably wouldn't help you much, since only about 40% of people in China even understood it, the 7 decades since then have changed that by quite a lot.
The return of the Nazis
The acceptance of them maybe. There were neo-nazis in the 50s. Plenty of Americans had no problem with them before we joined the war.
Ronald Reagan was President for 8 years.
The actor? Then who was vice-president? Jerry Lewis?
I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady?
That's heavy doc
Not to mention the Bush imbeciles.
How after World War 2 we didn't truly learn and still fight wars over racism, nationalism and other reasons that keep us from uniting.
How we managed to ruin the earth to a severe degree in just 50 years or so.
And video games.
And The Flintstones.
How after World War 2 we didn’t truly learn and still fight wars over racism, nationalism and other reasons that keep us from uniting.
I mean, we've been doing that for thousands of years. I feel like it would be more unexpected if we stopped.
And families don't sit around the radio or TV to consume their entertainment, we all sit around the dinner table staring at our phones not talking to each other
How nothing got better and people like killing children in the school system as sport. Oh, and ask this person what pronouns they want for their identity.
Christine Jorgensen began transitioning in the early twenties and was a pretty major celebrity. When the Nazis took power some of the Authors they attacked were sexologists. Trans issues weren't something completely alien to them, they probably wouldn't take asking them their pronouns well but it wouldn't be hard to explain.
Compared to some of the answers in the reply sections, this is definitely one of the more hard to explain ones
We're still nowhere near making space travel as easy as taking a cruise ship.
It seems to me we're actually close in terms of esse, just not cost or risk. Risk will likely stay high, cost may go slightly down, but will never reach cruise ship levels unless you already find yourself in space. Accelerating a massive cruise ship in space is far easier when it doesn't have to leave Earth's gravity well.
The TikToc NPC trend
You know what I'll be just take them grocery shopping at a supermarket and show them that for X amount of money you'll get less items.
That doesn't have much meaning once you explain inflation as a concept.
They'd already know about the basics since fiat currency existed long before the US.
The concept was known but far fewer people had been exposed to those ideas and thought in those terms. That you think it is so obvious or that math as complex as geometric compounding is so obvious to you would be the actual big reveal.
On prices, the really interesting thing is not that prices are higher but that what things are expensive and what thing are cheap has radically changed. Basic food and clothing is dramatically more affordable. Anything involving human craftsmanship is much more expensive. What os available for sale would absolutely boggle the mind. Not only did a huge amount of it not exist in the past but, only a long could even contemplate buying most of what did exist—at any price. Food is a great example. Empires rose and fell pursuing or exploiting the riches of fruit and spices I can buy for the change in my pocket from any of a half dozen merchants within a couple miles of me competing for the privilege.
The fact that I can buy anything not only by waiting a piece of plastic at time but also the magic brick in my pocket ( phone ) might intrigue them as well. Basically, not matter what wonder you go to show, the real magic might be something so basic to our everyday that you did not even consider that it was required for the thing you are trying to show.
“Wait, so you guys are getting paid close to 20 times less then I was when adjusted for inflation???”
Probably how we went to the moon and then later successfully sent a rover to Mars to study and take pictures. It's something I can't really explain on a technical level but it happened
In the fifties they were aspiring to that already, engineering seemed unstoppable. May not understand how we could pull it off and then our own kids don't believe us, though.
Frankly, the hard part would be explaining why got there and then just sort of stopped. They'd be disappointed we don't have a permanent lunar colony and manned missions to Mars yet!
The internet. Youd first have to explain computers, and thats not easy. Going further just compounds the issue.
This thing does math really really fast.
Cause it does math fast, we can use math to have it draw pictures like how you plot a graph.
These picture drawing math machines also talk to each other like a really fast phone call, all the time. So we can transfer pictures and words between them.
Also it makes phone calls but it doesn’t need a cable.
Also the pictures it can send are slowly eroding the foundations of our society like tides against a cliff, and we all feel the ground getting thinner beneath our feet, but if we turn off the water, like 5 people will be marginally less rich. And having 5 slightly less obscenely rich people is deemed unacceptable in our increasingly surreal society.
I think that’s a pretty good explanation for a person from the 50s
Smoke breaks.
If they are from the US, it's probably that leading republican candidates don't see Russia waging war on a democratic country as a problem.
That we've been to the moon and back, and that they can casually toss into their pockets a device with enough "thinking" power to do the necessary math for the task and then some.
And that we still can't make nylon stockings that don't "run," but that nobody cares because we don't wear them anymore.
That, and transgender is normal.
That, and transgender is normal.
If they don’t like that they wouldn’t have to travel very far to find a bunch of people with a 50s mindset about it.
toss into their pockets a device with enough "thinking" power to do the necessary math for the task and then some.
"And then some" is a bit of an under statement. An iPhone 14 is literally millions of times faster than the Apollo Guidance Computer.
We still haven't used another nuke.
Let me introduce you to one of the most depressing lists in the world.
Before you open the link, take a guess how many times the US alone tested nukes, from the smallest to the biggest ones.
How many times do you think the United States alone tested a nuclear bomb?
Take note of the years that these nukes were tested.
how old were they in the 50s and how old are they now? That's probably the crucial thing to know. 70 year old was born in the 1880s and probably would have difficult time to understand much of the current society. 15 year old would probably learn quickly new technology and societal norms. If they'd be middle aged or a bit older man, they'd probably be quite uneducated and would probably have difficult time socially to adapt modern society, where you can't casually sexually harass women and where you don't get job simply by walking to work place without a college degree.
What’s wrong with his car and how to fix it.
"that's not a car, that's a computor on wheels!"
The internet
Why civil rights are a thing.
More like why civil rights still arent a thing even though we passed a law in the mid 60s about it.
If it was the early 1950's, then: Black people and white people can use the same facilities. There aren't "black bathrooms" and "white bathrooms." There aren't separate water fountains depending on the color of your skin.
Segregation was still around a mere 70 years ago.
Were Americans in the 50's as surprised when they travelled abroad?
Fascism
Florida Man
Def not education
I think where technology is in general would be really difficult to grasp. Imagine telling someone you can instantly get a hold of all of your family members and friends wherever they are. Or that They could just press and button and get instant, overwhelming amounts of entertainment or up-to-date information from across the world. Imagine trying to explain how airpods work to a person that has never experienced active noise canceling. Or rule 196, or rule 34 for that matter.
The remote control T_T
That we gained the capacity to send people to the moon only to use it for winning a political dick-measuring contest in the 60s and not do anything with it again for 50 years
Why is every comment just about the US? Skin color, school shooter drills, actor president, support for Russians by US politicians...
Lemmy try something more international:
France and Germany have founded the European Union.
First Japan, and now China (and Taiwan) and Korea are the technological superpowers.
Car industry in the UK basically doesn't exist anymore.
Cuba is still communist af and yet looks like a chill place.
Czechoslovakia has split. (Funny how even 30 years after the fact some people don't believe it, so I can imagine it being inconceivable before.)
There are 8 billon people.
We still don't have nuclear-powered flying cars.
We still don't have nuclear-powered flying cars.
Not because we couldn't make them, but because the idea is really stupid in the first place.
If your tire pressure is low, you have to pay money….for air.
What? Where do you have to do that? Air is still free in my country :-(
It was the 50s they'd have been used to car adjustments. This was THE AGE for small- adjustment businesses
Too broad a question.
Select a specific person.
Alan Turing
Interesting question. Given how intelligent he was, I don't think that modern tech would be very hard for him to grasp.
I think that he'd find it difficult to understand how people the likes of Musk waste so much time and money on bullshit like Twitter instead of changing the world for better, with a snap of their fingers.
His name is Steve.