Has anyone ever thought about how little we, as individuals, know? Imagine being sent back 1000 years. Think about what you could really offer to ancient civilizations? Technologically speaking I could not do shit for them. I can't show them how to build a car, or create electricity, light a bulb, etc... Know what I mean? Maybe not, I'm pretty high, so that's all I have to say.
It's not difficult to create electricity - a lemon and a little metal thread will do it. Creating the bulb to run off it though - now that will be some feat using 11th century tech. Aside from the technology, we'd be more similar than different to them, apart from the way we speak that is. What some of us would be able to bring would be a better understanding of tolerance, the realisation that religion is fucking them up, but most of all, we'd get to learn something from them. To realise how living a simple life can have so much more to it than most people's hectic, facebook filled, consumer driven, modern lifestyles.
I can't remember where I read this, but Hippocrates (way back in 400 BC) attacked diseases in a different way because he knew that diseases were caused naturally and were not some magical spell from a god or deity. Think about how long ago that was. Human beings have evolved to magical places, but are we close to knowing everything? Of course not. The universe is one example, albeit a big one, as to how much humans still have to come to terms with and understand. But plenty of progress has been made; just look at what we are posting on and how our computers send signals over an Internet connection that is most likely wireless. It's crazy.
Some say we used to know a lot more. That we've reached higher heights and ended up destroying ourselves. More than once. Take away our technology. ignore the differences in language, and place us a long way back in history. I think we'd not only recognise the people we find there as being just like us, but see how cultured and sophisticated they are. It could be said that the more we surround ourselves with the latest tech, improve medicine to keep people alive longer, the less we know. After all, the planet is currently bulging at over 7 billion people and rising, we cannot feed them, while the majority of the wealth is still with the minority. We rape the earth of its precious resources, cut down rain forests that breathe oxygen into the atmosphere, only to squander everything on making shit we don't need. Trouble is, too many people think they really do need it, as they queue up at midnight to replace their perfectly fine and working iPhone with the next one. Apologies for the rant, but I feel strongly about this. Yes, I too love the technology we have today. I'm writing this on Apple's latest, smallest, very capable laptop. I remember a time when there were no mobile phones, computers or internet, yet it's hard to imagine not having them now. Sometimes I think we need one of those solar x flares to wipe technology out in one swoop - force us to be real human beings again. Who knows?
In regards to technology, I think it has made society feel plenty more entitled. It has also made people dumber in essence. Rather than want to learn and aspire to be more intelligent, people have computers or phones do their bidding for them. It's funny to think about social media and how the social part actually spreads society apart. It's like saying that Facebook brings people together; it doesn't. It brings them apart.
Yes, exactly. For how much we have, it is amazing at how little we can actually understand, and thus reproduce. It is obvious society as a whole has gotten stupider over time (just look at basic statistics, literacy levels, etc), but we definitely have gotten a lot more reliant on each other.
The more we know, the more we don't know. It's fascinating how much humans changed from time of the caveman towards the 20th century when we started to invent some of the most useful and essential items in human civilization.
I've thought about this before. It seems like as a race, humans are getting smarter, but as individuals we aren't really significantly smarter than the average person 300 years ago.
I couldn't teach them much, the common sense or wisdom or understanding that I have, is probably less than what they are already have. But knowledge-wise, now that would be something! I think I would give most of them a brain malfunction, from blowing their minds. It's probably why we guided ourselves slowly to our current database of knowledge.
We will always keep having ambitions to discover the unknown, yet the unknown will always be driving us to venture into the realm that is always discovered. I've always turned to microbiology and technology to be relative in regards to this thought, simply because when I'm looking out the window of a plane and see a web of electronic fusion that represents human culture - whether that be sociologically (on a large scale) or micro-biologically (minuscule depending on how you look at it.)
That is a cool perspective. But bringing the past into a better perspective of what is relevant to them is more important. We would need to teach the past how to appreciate what they got, and to not destroy the earth, and to not take what they got for granted. And to appreciate whatever freedom they got, because soon, the devil would have it that all be oppressed and subjected to him. Devil = Modern Society.
Because we go to school from a young age to learn what the schools and govt and media want to teach us, because we are malleable and have been taken advantage of. Were being controlled with money
We don't have to know everything though, that would be pointless. Now finding the key to understanding and acceptance. That is a grand journey...
I always think about this. If I was sent back in time, how much could I actually help to create with my knowledge? Which makes me wonder why we as a human race do not know how electricity works, or how physics, and mechanics work, or how to stay alive in the wilderness, or any number of things that make up the skeleton of our modern civilization. But why learn all that when we can pay other people to know it, and watch television instead, right?
That's not what i'm saying. DO you really understand most of the things we take for granted? You may understand a few things, but in reality, what you know, (I doubt at least, truthfully I have no idea how much you know), will likely not be that much of a benefit to societies hundreds, or for that matter thousands of years ago.
I think I could offer some tactics to past armies. Like "hey how about not charging across no-mans-land into machine gun fire? You could just fucking dig a tunnel under no-mans-land. Worked in the Civil War bro. Come on."