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EcchiOli t1_jdqzv4i wrote

Reply to comment by Conscious_Stick8344 in Latest video of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter kicking up dust and taking off for Flight #47. Ingenuity is well beyond its warranty at this point. The video was captured by the Mastcam-Z imager aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover on March 9, 2023. by ICumCoffee

I try really hard to tell myself there are changes, only they are too gradual to notice.

Some centuries ago, it was perfectly acceptable to slaughter indiscriminately and to brand people with different beliefs or body appearance as non-human.
Not anymore.

Just a century ago, half of mankind (women) were essentially public property and beating them, deciding what to do with them, was the norm almost everywhere.
It's now becoming a minority.

Things suck real hard. But, morally speaking, they used to suck even more although it's hard to realize.

All I can hope is that we haven't capped how far we, as a species, can morally progress (because, fuck, there's so much more potential progress it's like we have just started moving past the starting line). But that'll be for our grandchildren's grandchildren to observe :-/

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Conscious_Stick8344 t1_jdr2ieh wrote

I couldn’t agree more!

And, being a constant student of history myself, I’ve seen how we’ve taken a constant “two steps forward, one step back” approach to progress. Of course, that’s generally speaking; we’ve made great, irreversible progress in some areas, and not so much in others. If anything, your comment reminds me of two quotes.

One is by documentarian Ken Burns. He said that one of the lessons he learned about history is not that it repeats itself, but that “human nature never changes.” I’d add to that that it’s cyclical in nature, where one generation starts forgetting the lessons learned in the previous ones, even though it instinctively builds on its accomplishments. Hence, we keep moving forward despite our ignorance of past lessons learned. That gives me hope, even though it’s a constant struggle to ensure we move forward with time. (And maybe that’s our lot in the universe; if we buck time and try to turn the clock back, we always pay a price for the friction we cause.)

The second quote is from Carl Sagan himself, and the comment stands on its own:

“If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves. Our very existence in that distant time requires that we will have changed our institutions and ourselves. How can I dare to guess about humans in the far future? It is, I think, only a matter of natural selection. If we become even slightly more violent, shortsighted, ignorant, and selfish than we are now, almost certainly we will have no future.” — Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

So, in closing, I think it’s up to people like us who applaud progress, understand human nature, and do our moral best to educate and enlighten those around us to the mystery and beauty of our planet as well as the universe. And we do it by supporting scientists and sources like these, popularizing it as we go, to ensure we don’t keep turning on ourselves and using technology only to destroy.

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