You know, I just realized: I'm not going to be able to play much of this Splatfest. Why's that? Because it'll take place at the same time as
Arcade Expo 2016, and that, being a once-a-year thing, takes priority to me. Sorry, squid kids. (I'll also be participating in It Never Drains in Southern California, but I don't think I'll do so well with that.)
On the other hand, Franklin's old neighborhood is now a place you wouldn't want to be caught walking around at night. The future doesn't always work out as well as one might hope. ;)
On the flip side, the importance of knowing the past should tell use the familiar pattern. There is no "future", there is only history repeating. Many times before, things got better and better. Until they didn't. The future IS the past, in a slightly different guise. I suspect the tendency to see all the good things without understanding what has been lost as a result eventually catches up to a civilization, thus the repeating cycle. Natural disasters, cycles, and population pressure have a way of catching up with societies. Considering the current population is no longer sustainable through natural means but through the benefit of our scientific advancement it's all too easy for a chain reaction of bad events to ripple and create a disastrous ****tail. Which is, of course, how all disasters happen, not through a single event but through an unlikely series of events all happening in just the wrong place and time. The Titanic would still be floating as a museum if just EVERYTHING hadn't gone wrong exactly when and where and how it did. All the good things cited are true, but we've also foolishly built a house of cards while even more foolishly convincing ourselves we have not. Things will continue to be fine and dandy as long as no one removes the wrong cards. Which is, of course, inevitable. Nature figures out a way to do it, time and time again. Regardless, the answers to the future are almost always found in the past.
An ounce of preparedness is worth a pound of cure though. There may be more problems and bigger problems now, but we are at least aware of them, and there are people dedicating their lives to stopping or preventing them.
Until the 19th century, for instance, people didn't care one bit about endangered species going extinct. Then, the
passenger pigeon incident happened, where a once-abundant creature was hunted down to extinction. People's eyes opened to the idea that, once a species dies out completely, it will never come back, and that people have not only the power to drive virtually any animal to extinction, but they also have the power to protect them. Currently, every remaining white rhinoceros has armed guards to protect it from poachers. Such a thing would've been inconceivable even 50 years ago, but here we are now.
It used to be that people would dump carbon monoxide and aerosols into the air, and so a hole had opened up in our ozone layer with an intensified greenhouse effect, which was growing (and still is). But once the public became aware of that, CFCs became banned, and there began a new wave of clean energy sources. We got nuclear energy (that's suspect, but it in fact pollutes less than fossil fuels), solar energy, wind energy, hydroelectric energy, and geothermal energy, and in the 21st century, there have been two new types: wave energy and tidal energy. All of these energy types (maybe except for nuclear) are gaining progress every year. I live in a region with little rain (maybe a bit too little, if you know about our drought), and I'm seeing more usage of solar energy all the time. The ozone hole still needs to be patched up, but we're on our way.
And then there's safety. There are the obvious ones, like the creation of the Food and Drug Administration and the regulation of hazardous waste, but when cars were first available to buy, those Model T's were roaming about everywhere with no traffic laws. So many people died, especially in areas of heavy population like New York City, that the newspapers didn't even bother talking about them. Plenty of people still die in traffic accidents today (but that might change drastically with driverless cars getting close to public consumption), but the proportion of deaths to motorists dropped drastically and has dropped with each passing decade due to improvements in vehicle design, new features to save lives both inside and out, and new laws to prevent unsafe driving with traffic cops going about enforcing them.
Really, I wouldn't want to go back to a time when non-whites were hosed on the street, to a time when a country that lost a war had its entire population put into slavery, to a time when people just dumped their solid waste onto the street below, or to a time when everyone lived in constant fear of the Mongols or the Huns or the British or the Romans or whatever dominant conquering, killing force was at the time. (Know how Hernán Cortez and his small band of conquistadors were able to take down the mighty Aztec Empire? Because he had a knack for persuading leaders of peoples the Aztecs had conquered and uniting them all against the Aztecs.)
There was always crap on tv. In my opinion. cartoons we have today are just as good as the ones that came beforehand. Steven u, over the garden wall, adventure time, wander over yander the recent tmnt reboot, regular show, gravity falls and adult cartoons like rick and morty, bob's burger, archer, bojack horseman. I know it's all opinion, but you're stating it as if it were fact that cartoons of today aren't good. Are you sure you didn't just, i don't know, grow up.
As someone who consumed a lot of cartoons back in the day and am still an animation fan now, I'd say there'splenty of good animation on TV right now. Look at that, I have an avatar of Star Butterfly from
Star vs. the Forces of Evil, and I usually have an avatar of Sunset Shimmer from
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (as divisive as that show is, I personally quite like it, and the fact that it took off against all oddsshows there's still quite the demand for American animation).
