Would you rather live 100 years in the past or the future?
Saturday, December 5th, 2009Here’s an interesting question: would you rather live 100 years in the past or 100 years in the future? There are good arguments for both sides. Let me try to make a list of advantages for each below.
The past
- Families are closer together geographically.
- Families spend more time together. No tv or video games to distract them.
- Communities are closer together.
- People aren’t as distracted or dumbed down by technology.
- Life is perhaps more of an adventure? Everything is more difficult, from keeping food safe, to traveling, etc.
- Most work is physical, working the land with your hands.
The future
- People are healthier and live longer (better healthcare).
- It’s easy to travel all around the world (or beyond it?).
- You can stay connected with people from everywhere.
- You can get information quickly and easily.
- We’ll have computer or robots that can perform lots of tasks that people do now.
Personally, I am really curious about the future, what it will be like, what we’ll be like, what technologies we’ll have, what we’ll be able to do, etc. I think the past would be neat as well, as it would be nice to have a tight-knit family and community, and I feel like it could be slightly more adventurous, as just traveling across the country would be a big deal.
This is a crazy thought, but I feel an interesting balance between these things in a few decades would be to live on Mars. It’s still the future and you get all of those things. But I also assume its a very small group, tight-knit, probably without tv and those things, and probably working the land to survive (although probably with machines). That can be another blog post: If you could move to Mars, would you? What if you could never come back?