[…] Machiak, principle blogger at Terminally Incoherent, shares those sentiments. However, he also sees drawbacks to wanting to live in the […]

@ Liudvikas:

I only moves at the speed of 1 horse if you can afford a horse. Go back far enough and the information transfer rate is so slow that it can be measured in lifetimes of monks who copy it by hand onto new volumes. :P

@ Luke Maciak:
Cheating? Sometimes it’s fun to wreak havoc with cheats enabled. Besides impending death kinda ruins the whole experience, at least in the present I can pretend we will solve it before old age takes me. Also without something fun to take my mind off things I would go insane in the past, information moving at the speed of 1 horse is too slow for me.

@ k00pa:

Oh, we have plenty of wars. We just call them “peace keeping”, “war on terror” or “stabilizing the region” nowadays and we have a sort of agreement we keep them out of the first world countries (aka the rich suburbs of the planet). ;)

@ Liudvikas:

Well, I think cybernetic body and superpowers is kinda cheating in terms of this thought experiment. lol

@ Kevin Benko:

Wow, very true. There is the other thing – I happen to be a straight white male, so I’d be pretty privileged throughout most of the past, in most of the western world. But if my skin was brown for example, I’d there would be time periods I would want to stay the hell out due to stuff like slavery for example. Even if I happened to be a woman, going back few decades too far in US would effectively strip me of the right to vote or decide for myself. Past kinda blows if you are anything other than straight, white, christian male. :(

@ Matt`:

Nah, I doubt this will ever happen. We will always need servers, and cheep hardware to run them on. Also, said locked down appliances can and will be re-purposed. I mean, look how many people root their routers to run custom firmware. Hell, even I installed Linux on my PogoPlug NAS just for kicks. We tinkerers will be fine… At least for the foreseeable future.

@ IceBrain:

This is so true. People who complain about shitty music today vs great music of yesteryear forget that shitty pop music has always existed. There was always shit on the radio. The thing about shitty music is that it ages quickly and becomes forgotten almost as quickly as it takes over the charts. Only really great stuff survives the test of time.

So when you look at the past and see all these great bands from this or that decade, you are essentially looking at the cream of the crop – the most memorable, successful and talented performers from that time period. For each of them there were hundreds shitty pop starlets who faded from our memory.

I agree. I’m reminded of this quote from Trasmet:

The future is an inherently good thing, and we move into it one winter at a time. Things get better one winter at a time. So if you’re going to celebrate something, then have a drink on this: the world is, generally and on balance, a better place to live this year than it was last year.

Of course, I’m a technologist. I was reading [i]Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance[/i] yesterday, where he talks about the people who dislike (often in a fuzzy and indefinite way) modern technology and I can understand why they might have preferred the past. Maybe not anything that far, but sometime during the 40s when men were men and smoked near little children.

That said, this sentiment comes often related to music and how today’s music is crapped compared to . While I mostly listen to old stuff, I think they’re nuts to want to actually leave during those times. Sure, I would’ve loved to have experienced the New York concert of The Doors, or going to Woodstock ’69, but in our daily lives, never had the people from that time had so much access to their own music as we have now.

I think the problem is that people compare the everyday monotony to a few glory days in the past, without thinking of the pain of traveling to work uphill both ways.

Giving birth to me sounds like it was complicated – premature, sideways, umbilical around my neck, emergency c-section… so hooray for modern medicine. Even allowing for that, I’m with you on the general crappiness of the past. I doubt I would much enjoy living in pre-technological times.

Maybe nudge back a li’l bit, to live through some of the early stages of the tech boom, feels sometimes like I missed out on learning the nerdy things of that era. Conversely, go forward too far and I’d be a little worried about losing that even more – skipping ahead to a time where locked-down Apple-esque appliances are, if not all there is (hopefully the future isn’t so bleak), then shiny enough to distract from needing to know how things really work.

Don’t want to miss that immortality boat, but I’m enough a product of my time that I can’t see myself coming out of any other era and remaining ‘me’ in the full sense.

I have some medical problem such that some of the problems have solutions today, but were, somewhat, barbaric if I had been treated 10-20 years earlier, and would have probably killed me. So, since I love my life, I likewise love living in this very decade.

If I had to go back in time I would need a full technological support. Something like Safehold series (it’s great, you should totally read it) – AI, electronic encyclopedia, cybernetic body. Being immortal and nearly indestructible and having the entire knowledge of advanced society would make it kinda fun to mess with historical events. You could go about it with subtlety and try to influence development with least amount of interference, or you could dive right in and declare a one man war against the world. It all comes down to immortality if I already undergone full synthetic body treatment then it would be bearable living in the past, but as I am now I wouldn’t last long before getting killed or going insane.

I think that the current decade is just fine.

All this technology coming out all the time and there aren’t any major active issues that affect my life. (wars/pollution etc)