[stylin_geek]

I ran across a remark by an elderly woman who, when asked what the most important invention she’d seen, responded “indoor running water.”

She was old enough to remember the invention of the airplanes, television perhaps even the telephone.

From the responses to the survey, it looks to me like a lot of people take all the trappings of civilization for granted. Evidently, they’ve no concept of how complex the machinery of modern society is.

[C19fan]

Exactly. I can live without the internet but hard to live doing number 1 and 2 in a chamber pot then throwing it out the window onto the street.

[spetznaz]

Totally agree. There are some ‘basic’ things that are taken for granted (and would never appear in any survey) that if removed would INSTANTLY be missed and pined for. Without indoor running water, for instance, it means living near a water source ...and fetching the darn thing. Or else, boreholes and wells. There are all sorts of ‘simple’ things that revolutionized life as we know it today, and the IPhone is not even in the top thousand by my guesstimation.

[a fool in paradise]

An iPhone doesn’t do much good without an internet or satellite.

[attiladhun2]

Sounds like entitlement mentality. The accoutrments of modern life are by no means assured. Social and political unrest can disrupt things like running water and electricity, even permenantly. Look at Sierra Leone. As a Bristish colony and in the early days of its independence, the nation was called a model 3rd world nation. The nation's advance to a modern, industrial state seemed certain. However, although the situation there has much improved, it is still a basket case. No society is immune to this, and globalism has likely made global social chaos more probable, rather than less.

The old Star Trek vision of a united world of plenty with everyone jetting around the universe is simply not going to happen. Too much of the world is dysfunctional and corrupt and too many of this its inhabitants have an entitlement mentality. I don't see this changing at all.