Looking waaay back at 2010

It's fun to think about the future. A slight twist on that is looking at the present as if it was many years ago... one way to do that is to think about problems/challenges/annoyances that you think there should be solutions to. Let's pretend it's 2060. I would be 80 years old.

Remember 2010?

Cars. Everyone was still driving these antiquated things that burned gasoline, which was derived from oil. And there was no such thing as a vehicle being able to drive itself back then... that lead to far more accidents. For instance, people would fall asleep at the wheel while driving late at night and their car would just drive off the road.

The Internet. Back in 2010, the Internet was still in its infancy, and the data rates weren't anything like they are today. You couldn't even really watch a movie over the Internet, you had to download it over the course of a few hours. And back then, the Internet was connected to your computer, but it wasn't connected to your TV. Today the Internet is an essential part of our society, but back then there were other ways to do most things, and some people didn't have Internet connectivity at all. There were separate wires that came into the home to supply video to your TV and yet another wire for you to make voice calls.

In 2010, you could make these video calls they called "Skype", but if you've ever seen a recording of what they were like, it's abysmal. The video is highly compressed with a low frame rate and the audio was hard to hear. Most times people would still talk to each other over phones that only had audio.

Storage. Back in 2010, people actually thought 1 terabyte was a lot of memory. Isn't that crazy? Today a cheap device has many many thousands of times that much memory, but back then people would buy these 1 TB hard drives and think they were really big. Memory cards back then were so small that you could only fit a few hundred high quality pictures on them.

Trying to manage your digital information was challenging. You could buy music on the Internet, but then it was difficult to move that music around. If you wanted it on your phone, you'd have to physically plug it in and then wait for it to download, and if you bought the music in one format, then it might be incompatible with other devices. Same with movies. It was a frustrating age to live in.

In 2010, it was still extremely special to go to space. There were literally only a few hundred people in the entirety of history that had gone to space, nothing like today. A few companies were working on commercializing space, but it was still something that people looked to the future to. And tickets were being sold in advance for upwards of $200,000, which might not sound all that high today, but back then it was the cost of a house!

It is also hard to imagine what medical technology was like. Medical imaging was still very poor, and it was very expensive and special to get what they called an "MRI", which was a very low quality 2D image, and so sometimes people would be almost dead with cancer before their doctor would even know! Beyond cancer, many of the things today that are detectable and fixable before they become an issue would develop into life threatening illnesses. And healthcare in the US was still something that millions of people didn't have adequate access to. That was before some of the major reforms that have occurred in the past decades.

Most of what we know about the brain we've learned in the last 30 years, and although we still have a very long way to go, it's incredible to compare what we know now with what we knew in 2010. Likewise for DNA and many other facets of biology.

But some things remain... and of course, more than a few things are worse. There are major challenges we face today that people back in 2010 didn't have to worry about. Despite the challenges many years ago, some people consider them to be the golden years.