h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This is one of these things that I have been thinking about in the past few days (I come up with these thoughts every so often) :-

Say a guy from the Seventies finds out how to travel through time and appears right now, in the months just shy of the Year 2000. What would he think?

You see, I think his initial impressions would be that very little has, in fact, changed. On the surface, they had pretty much the same back then as we have now. The changes that have occurred in the last 30 years are changes in intensity or style, rather than earth-shattering future shocks. Get on a train, they had trains back then. Drive a car, fly a plane, ditto. The same goes for listening to pop music, watching television, living in suburbia, going to school, washing, shaving, computers, credit cards, microwave ovens, you name it. The only changes are in style (cars and washing machines look different now, and our hair length has reduced significantly), and intensity (it's the same, except there are more of them - airplanes and computers for instance).

So this talk about life changing at a faster and faster rate with each year is just guff. It's a clever illusion designed to get us to buy more things. In fact, I believe that the OPPOSITE has happened. The rate of innovation in modern day living has actually SLOWED DOWN!

That said, some lifestyle changes have taken place due to the introduction of new technology. Such changes include CD-ROMs, the Internet, the um, er, surely there must be something else....