OK, now I’m imagining Scotty watching as all the dials go into the red zone, just being on the comm to the bridge/brain saying “The gut biome is destabilizing, Cap’n! The fibre and sugar ratio is unstable! If this keeps up, we’re goinga blow!”

In London in the 1850s, there were about 10,000 private carriages for a population of about 1,000,000. Basically 1% of the population had a private vehicle, everyone else walked, took the omnibus, used river boats, took the train, or hired a cab. History pretty clearly shows it’s possible to have a populous city without everyone having their own personal transport, and being able to hail a cab is part of that.

> At the end of the war it was a mad rush to take as much territory as possible before the Russians.

It was kind of the opposite in general. Eisenhower was urged by a number of his people to keep heading east, but he was pretty content to mostly stop at the previously agreed upon demarcation line. The end of the war might have been less bloody if he has pressed on. At the end, the Germans were surrendering to the Allies in the hundreds of thousands, and in some cases fighting their way west specifically to surrender to the Allies rather than to the Soviets. But the Germans fought to the bitter end against the Soviets.

Yep. It used to be that if you wanted to hear live music, you went to listen to local musicians. Perhaps you joined a choir, religious or secular. Maybe you went to see a military band - and that the military got to listen to a lot of music was a big recruiting tool. Maybe you went to local concerts, or you and a bunch of families gathered to watch your children all sing and play instruments. Maybe you went to kitchen parties where someone had a fiddle. And there was certainly no skipping church, with all the wonderful music there! And then came the radio, and we gained the ability to hear music all the time, from professional musicians, and a lot of musical our culture faded away.

But that’s what happens when technology does it’s thing. The printing press put scribes out of work. Paper making technique improvements mostly eliminated the need for vellum. Books aren’t bound by hand anymore. We have much less live theatre due to TV and movies. Local journalism suffers when people can get news from around the world. Computer animation has substantially replaced hand drawn animation.

I’m sure that there are even things we can’t talk about here until the 2040s that are going to impact act and culture.

For better and for worse, innovation kills jobs, and innovation creates new jobs.

We don’t all need vehicles. But we probably do need some vehicles as a society. When my brother wants to haul in soil or haul out yard waste, or when I want to get furniture from IKEA, we’re going to want a truck. But there’s no reason for either of us to own a truck for those things we do only a few days a year. Some combination of rentals, a car/truck share program, or an Uber style of thing fills out needs. And on the other hand, my father needs to haul a large trailer full of equipment around the province on a daily basis - he absolutely needs a truck.

London in the 1850s had about 10,000 private vehicles for a population of 1,000,000. People took the autobus, the trains, or just walked. If we could get to the point where less than 5% of the population had a personal vehicle, we’d be doing pretty good and could cut out a lot of CO2 emissions.

He suffered from mental health issues. I suspect it’s related to that, but I’m no expert on him or on mental health, so take that with a massive grain of salt.

It was left at Reading Station while he was changing trains. So he rewrote it from memory, having burned all of his notes. But it was a mess. So he rewrote it again. And then he did a proof-printing, and then substantially revised it. And then he put out a limited edition version that people could actually get, but that put him deep in debt. So he cut out half of that version for the version that went out to the public.

It was not a smooth process by any means, and it means that there is no definitive version of the text, even among the works that weren't lost.