and earlier, back as far as old news clips go and wondered how people and the world could ever have been like that? Do you find the world "gets stranger and stranger" the further back you go, as if you have stumbled into a temporal looking-glass paradox as Lewis Carroll might have imagined? And if the 1890's seem foreign to us, how much more strange and bizarre the 1680s or 1340s? Now ask yourself what the significance of this phenomenon is. It's not just technology that changes. People do too and the way they occupy their space and their time. Even allowing for differences in motion photography people in the 1920s seemed to move differently than now. Now speculate on how we will be viewed 25, 50, 100 years hence. Will we been seen as primitive and undeveloped as many of the people in even the not so distant newsreels seem to us now? Will a time traveler from 2106 visiting the present exclaim after a day or two, "Beam me up, Scottie, they're no intelligent life forms down here."
2006-11-09
03:01:27
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11 answers
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asked by
Seeker
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