Quote:
Originally Posted by VaporPunk
But if you then told them there is increasing evidence that whole nations will be swallowed up by rising ocean waters, a man with a suitcase or a test tube could kill thousands and make vast cities uninhabitable, or that our entire civilization is relying on a cheap energy supply that will run out in the next few decades with cataclysmic consequences, they might not wanna swap.
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I think they would swap in a heartbeat. They would crawl across broken glass to swap. Today, people can reasonably expect to live to an old age. They can expect that their children will survive to adulthood. They wouldn't expect that in the past. One look in a grocery store in winter would be enough to get them to switch.
Sure, there's the man with a test tube who might kill them, but that man is a whole lot dangerous than smallpox, the black death, diphtheria or any number of epidemics.
There is a cemetary in North Dakota with seven tombstones, for seven children from one family killed in a diphtheria epidemic. We don't reaize how good we have it. What average people have today, kings would have envied. If Henry the VIII had had access to modern medicine, he would have lived a long, healthy life surrounded by his sons.
And if that the energy resources we had were limited, but that we had plenty of other energy sources, such as wind and solar, we just needed to be willing to take advantage of them, they would probably say "What's the problem?"
Sure, the present has its own problems, I'm not saying that there is no place for dystopia, I just think that there should be some balance.