I’m going to go on a different angle on this one and say that we are much tougher on sexual harassment. I feel like a lot of people from the 1950s who have grown up on pulp sci-fi like Flash Gordon could accept a lot of modern technology and the internet as basically just magic. To be fair is how a lot of modern people also accept it. But I don’t think they would be able to process the move towards egalitarianism that we have taken.
That is not to say that modern society is egalitarian only that we have made good strides in achieving that aim.
Edit: Turns out Gordon is from the '70s, but other pulp sci-fi exist so my statement stands.
That smoking is bad for them. You’d just be banging your head against their socially-acceptable-at-the-time drug addiction.
Person from 2020 magically appearing in 2090 and being told caffeine/excessive sugar is now regulated and ID checked
I’d be okay without excess sugar, but I’m a firm believer that it is virtually impossible (for me) to function in modern society without caffeine. Our bodies want to sleep when we’re tired, but I have never had a job where I could say “I’m tired. I’m going to nap and come back in 8 hours.”
You know you can sleep at night and work during the day right?
Also napping isn’t sleeping for 8 hours.
You (and a lot of people tbf) need caffeine to stay awake mostly because your body gets used to it and then can’t function without it. Plenty of people do just fine without caffeine or other substances. It’s not magic and we’re not super humans or anything. We just don’t drink caffeine multiple times a day every day
I would argue those of us on a shifted circadian rhythm that lags 4 hours behind the farmer personalities in our society need caffeine to fit into the rigid corporate structure those first hours of the work day, and those high pressure professionals, VCs, high tech biotech silicon valley wall street types need caffeine (and cocaine for some lol) to function in their 17h 6-7 day work weeks (not me). I just take a caffeine break on vacations to reset my sensitivity and then slowly build up over the next 6 months to a pot of coffee all the way through before bed time to function.
90%+ of the population does not fall into that category though.
I guess my point is that with work, personal obligations, family, etc, there aren’t enough hours in the day to so what needs to be done and still just sleep and wake up when you’re no longer tired.
It’s great that it works for you, but it just never has for me. Also, to be fair, it’s been 20 years since I worked a job with a regular 9-5 schedule, so I’m admittedly biased.
How would you regulare excessive sugar? Have a weekly quota of sugar that can be contained in food you purchase? Are they going to ban growing fruits?
Taxes on sugar beets and standards for manufactured foodstuffs, I’d assume. Chopping down the apple tree in your front yard is clearly absurd (or is it? I’m not sure what’s too absurd to happen anymore…), but saying that any loaf of bread with more than 20g of sugar must be labeled “cake” and taxed as such? That type of thing has already been happening for years.
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Ration books. If they’re from the 50s they’ll probably understand.
I read your response and immediately thought of homosexuality. That would be hard to explain, why now we have a big pride parade celebrating it. (Im gay, dont com at me!)
“Yes, they are allowed to be on the same bus as us. No, we don’t call them that anymore”
“Bus? No we bulldozed hundreds of neighborhoods to build highways so now everyone has to have a car”
And we had a pretty great black president.
I knew that would be the obvious joke but it’s not like that was unfathomable in the fifties. Desegregation was obviously where the world was headed and I’m sure everyone was expecting (or dreading) modern racial relations.
Why the Nazis are back, and in America of all places
Seeing how much overlap they have with the KKK, I don’t think it’d be that surprising
They are back In germany too. Although I wouldn’t call it they are back, but they are open about it again
Depends a lot on the color of their skin.
We walk around with a little rectangle in our pocket that gives us access to the sum total of human knowledge, but we mostly use it for looking at funny captioned pictures, the same pictures over and over just with different captions.
It’s called a phone but no one ever uses it as one.
Also, the “video telephone” that everyone always so desperately awaited from the future? Yeah, we have that; no, nobody uses it, because we can’t be bothered to dress up for a phone call.
I also thought no one used facetime until I worked retail recently… The amount of people I saw come in on a facetime calls where they both just had their cameras pointed at the ceiling was bizarre and boggling.
Tell that to the tonnes of people that facetious in public but neither them nor the person they are calling are actually in frame
That pretty much sums it up.
The phone never leaves my side, but I dread getting an actual phone call.
The Internet, social media and how we can access absolutely everything from this tiny device
Plenty of SF writers lived in that era and they predicted the Internet.
For example: I can name the writer and his novel where he predicted AI writing engines.
“You see, the file itself can be copied by anyone, but this one little piece of metadata can never be duplicated. That means you own the file.”
#3 Why we still haven’t got colonies on the moon
#2 Climate change
#1 That fascism is back
they knew about climate change in the 50’s- actually, greenhouse gases were first proposed in the 1820s.
You’d think most of them are more fascist than the people you consider fascist now. Remember what England did to Alan Turing. They’d be amazed we let women and minorities work with us and we don’t persecute gays. They’d think the commies won.
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The price of housing
Also nearly everything else. Computers would be an obvious exception, a couple years ago I paid USD$40 for a smartwatch with specs exceeding a $2000 computer from around year 2000, and millions of times more powerful than computers from the 50s which cost millions of dollars at the time.
How easily we can know anything, yet how diligently we fail to learn anything.
Nothing as sobering as showing a techno-optimist what the future really looks like
That we’ve been to the moon - in there 60s - but haven’t been back or been out further. I think it would just be against all their expectations.
There were several places in the media that had stories of landing on the moon as a real possibility. Almost a forgone conclusion.
I believe that the area of disbelief would be that we just… stopped.
Unmanned space exploration is amazing, and we’ve done a ton in LEO, but we haven’t put a person out past the Hubble telescope since Apollo 17, which was 1972 if I remember correctly.
“Yeah, we went there a few times, there was nothing there besides a bunch of rocks. We brought some back for study, and spent the next few decades on more obviously productive pursuits. Like putting robots on Mars!”
I think it would depend who they were and what/who they knew. Political will wasn’t all that great for the moon, Kennedy even invited Russia to make it a joint venture multiple times more or less to save face while splitting the costs (in the 60s, but still). If Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated there’s a very good chance it wouldn’t have happened when it did and it would be seen as Kennedy’s folly or something.
So someone in the late 50s who was familiar with the actual feelings around budgets and such, might not be so surprised.
A lack of ‘whites only’ signs.
Brown v. Board of Education was filed in 1951, and decided in 1954. The desegregation movement was well underway. Some folks from that era might not be happy that segregation went away, but I don’t imagine too many would be surprised.
What a dumb answer that completely ignores that was a topic of debate at that time. The concept and topic was WELL known. 17 upvotes 🤦♂️.
You have to goto the store to buy milk instead of having it delivered fresh
My parents still do. The person who delivers it also delivers butter and eggs.
I’m not sure where the butter and eggs and stuff come from but he owns the dairy the milk comes from and he’s part of a cooperative that pay for the equipment. According to him it’s just not worth selling to the big stores as he makes more money with fewer customers doing it himself.
