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ScaleneWangPole t1_iy86dzb wrote

Reply to comment by ajabardar1 in How will the space economy alter society? by Gari_305

I don't think that's a fact. It depends on your definition of better. Have their been technical advances and innovations that make life better? Sure, but at a cost to society, the health of the planet, and betrayal of the human condition.

Cottagers in the late 1700s had a great thing going until economics forced them into pauperism due to not being able to compete with big manufacturing plants. Maybe they didn't have many physical items, but they lived a simple life near family and local communities. Their needs were met. They didn't have cell phones or access to the worlds knowledge at their fingertips, but they didn't get those things in cramped cities either living to make some rich guy more money.

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ajabardar1 t1_iy874u9 wrote

cottagers in the late 1700 where specifically? and what percentage of population where these 1700s cottagers? 0.001%, 0.1%, 1%, 10%?

society is way better in every metric possible. that is just a fact. ted, please, your manifesto was wrong. idealism is not a metric.

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Shillbot_9001 t1_iy8ffzc wrote

>society is way better in every metric possible.

People back then had enough kids to prevent population decline, that's one catastrophic metric right there.

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BKGPrints t1_iy94u04 wrote

No it's not. There are indications that prosperity leads to lower birth rates. A lower birth rate is not necessarily a bad thing.

It took thousands of years for the population to increase to two billion by 1900. It took less than a century to get to six billion and then another twenty years to get to eight billion.

During that time, most of the population growth was in impoverished countries in Asia, Africa and Indonesia.

As the economies of many of those countries have improved, so has the birth rate decline. But at the same time, recognize that a significant part of the population decline is because many of the population is just getting older and dying out.

And to support that poverty increases birth rates. The population for Nigeria, which more than 90% of the population is considered to live in poverty, is expected to double from it's current population of 210 million to more than 400 million by 2050.

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ajabardar1 t1_iy8kreb wrote

less kids die today. i guess if you just measure quantity yeah, you are correct. if you want to measure quality, infant death is a great metric.

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1015267 t1_iy87faj wrote

They also died of paper cuts and mama/aunt sally was buried out back because she died in childbirth. Uncle Reg was locked in the upstairs attic because ghosts had sickened his brain.

The whole family had worms and scurvy

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ScaleneWangPole t1_iy88swy wrote

There are plenty of people in the US post industrialization still believing in ghosts and sky man and unfortunately eugenics for that matter. But at least they weren't filled with microplastics and their food wasn't poison. They didn't die from the sun or peanuts. We can only sit here and say it's better now because we've robbed the global south thanks to industrialization. These exploited countries aren't gaining from all the innovation that they paid for.

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Shillbot_9001 t1_iy8fjjr wrote

>and unfortunately eugenics for that matter.

Eugenics are real, just not very ethical.

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