Alcock and Brown crossed the Atlantic in under 16 hours in 1919.
Keith and Ross Smith flew from London to Darwin in 136 hrs flying time, also in 1919.
It's like nobody believed flying would ever become a common means of travel.
By the 1930s, Constantinople been a long time gone. It had been Istanbul not Constantinople for centuries by that point.
They Might Be Giants - Istanbul (Not Constantinople) (Official Music Video)
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1. As a kid, my dad had told me that China was the Japanese name for the country, but according to Wikipedia, the name is actually derived from Sanskrit.
2. Which reminds me of the fun challenge of Czech (and many other Slavic languages) is that unlike other Indo-European languages³, the declensions of adjectives follow a different pattern than the declensions of their corresponding nouns,
3. Or at least the Indo-European languages that I have familiarity with.
Well that's a cute explanation, but strictly speaking the UN adopted the new spelling in 2022 and the ISO swiftly followed with a revision to ISO 3166.
If your "they asked nicely" was true then by that argument the people of Taiwan who constantly "ask nicely" regarding the removal of "(Province of China)" from their ISO 3166 entry would have had their wishes granted by now ... ;)
LLM aside, it tracks that with a civilization in truly dire straits, portrayal of the future would trend increasingly more towards being positive and fanciful: because at some point things would be so bad, that imagining the future will be even worse becomes a deadly thing for the modicum of hope required to even stay alive, let alone push forward.
I personally always think we have a lot of fat to trim before we get there. Our descendents can have a wonderful quality of life even if a lot of institutions and supply chains regress. The era of summoning food from a handheld computer might go away and we'll still be pretty well off (if not strictly better off)
Never heard that one before!
Oh good, for a moment I didn't think reeducation camps were in our future.
> Architecture will be freed from ugliness
Uh, friend, I have some bad news...