Industrialism is only 10-15 generations old.

Industrial plastic production is just 1 generation old and in just a generation plastic has reached from almost non existent outside labs to literally everywhere in the Earth.

You’re way off. A generation is roughly thirty years, and industrial plastic production has been around longer than that. Bakelite was invented in 1907 and widely used in consumer goods already in the first half of the 20th century. Then, styrene was widely produced by the 1950s. You can watch Alain Resnais’s 1958 documentary film Le chant du Styrène[0] to see the vast industrial apparatus that had already been built in France to produce it.

What is true is that plastic wasn’t such an everyday feature of the developing world until the last few decades, and it was the combination of increasing plastic use and lack of organized rubbish collection that led to plastic-strewn streets and polluted waterways there.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_chant_du_Styr%C3%A8ne

The plastic which is the problem is at max. 2 generations old so the previous poster was off by 1. Considering this sites affinity with software development, an off-by-one error should be acceptable :)

The first microplastics, from tyres for example, date back over 100 years, or about half the time of industrialisation as a whole (say from Ironbridge onwards)

Tires used to be made from natural rubber, not the modern synthetic stuff we call plastic. Similarly, cellophane wrap (Saran wrap) and cellophane tape (scotch tape) used to be made out of plant fibers.

I'd say a generation is the time for a newborn to grow up and have their own first kid born. Typically that's been under 20 years. May be changing now, getting later, but I usse ~20 years as rule of thumb for one generation.

I strongly agree, but then again "generation" has always been a highly imprecise unit, enough so that I wouldn't outright call "30 years" wrong.

We have lots of examples like that, for instance lots of people complain when "a couple" refers to any number other than two, and yet common usage is for it to be pretty synonymous with the more obviously vague term "a few".

Another reason to be strict with output and flexible with input.

This 1958 short film (in French) about Plastics is available on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1hZyQUF6Y

Was commissioned by an industrialist selling plastics, but is rather high-end for and ad ! Worth watching. I love HN for this kind of unexpected discoveries.

Plastics were regarded as a miraculous material in the 1950s.

I thought of life expectancy and took that as a generation. Thinking back, yes generation obviously means 20 years not 80.

Indeed. I just find it makes me feel more connected and closer to stories like this one, when thinking in terms of generations, rather than years.

And yet 4200 years is less than the life time of some of the worlds oldest trees - a single generation if you will.

Lol you're living up to your username I guess.

I mean that's a fairly profound thing to say, but in reality single-trunk trees with 4000 years of rings are very, very rare. There's a list of them on Wikipedia, there are like a handful over 4000 years.

So yeah their life time can be up to that level, but it's so rare that your profound analogy kinda becomes humorous.

From what I understand, a generation is the average length of time a species needs to successfully propagate. If we were to use the oldest known member of the species, a human generation would increase by four times.

I too think it is interesting to look back in time using the generation metric. Also interesting to think about a generation still alive, those born in the 1920s and 30s and the huge changes in the state of the world seen in those lifetimes alone, and what that may portend for younger generations.

It's interesting to speculate whether the rate of change speeding up or slowing down...

For example, housing and transport - the two major physically obvious measures - are perhaps not changing that much these days.

On the other hand, the internet and mobile connectivity have transformed the way people live their lives, without such an obvious physical manifestation.

Technology is a lot like science.

In science, new theories don't always invalidate the old -- Newton's Laws are still useful and used and valid, within a certain range of conditions, they're just incomplete the situations where relativity comes into play.

In technology, the problems the old technologies were solving don't necessarily go away as we invent new technology, so new technology solving the same problems as the old will often be quite similar.

I've got a house built in the 1920s. The framing is all 16 inch on center, with studs milled to the 1.5 x 3.5 dimensions used by modern 2 by 4's. It uses sheetrock for all of the interior walls, although it was new enough at the time that the sheets have printed instructions on the reverse to tell you how to hang it. But the walls are all uninsulated; it originally had a coal furnace in the basement and you would just throw more coal in if it wasn't warm enough, although that was upgraded to a oil burner & baseboard system that burns an absurd amount of oil instead of coal. Besides leaking a lot of heat, the lack of any sort of moisture barrier means that the house is dry as a desert in the winter. It has electricity, but the older circuits are all ungrounded, with the lights wired before the switches instead of after, and while it has a modern panel with circuit breakers, instead of the original fuse box, they're just circuit breakers and not arc-fault interrupters or combined arc-fault & GFCI.

The general shape of the modern house and the 1920's house is quite similar, because the problem they are trying to solve hasn't changed much, but the technology they use has continued to change the solution in small ways that are very important for efficiency and safety.

Sure - new houses/cars are more efficient - the technology is constantly being improved.

But a car from 40 years ago is basically the same ( in terms of how it's used ) as today, even electrification, in the end, won't change things much in terms of how people live their lives.

Modern mobile phones on the other hand ( say starting around 2007 ) have transformed how people live their lives over the last decade or so - however I suspect the next decade or so will be pretty much more of the same in that regard - ie the change has happened very quickly and we are already into the slow evolutionary phase.

What's interesting about the impact of mobile internet devices, is that impact isn't so visible in photographs - yet it is a profound change.

Makes you think what changes we might have overlooked in the past.

But again -- the problem cars were solving haven't gone away. We still need a way to get 1-to-N people and cargo from point A to point B.

Improvements in cars over the last forty years: anti-lock brakes and airbags are now standard. Backup cameras are now standard. Cars can be fully electric now, and there is coast-to-coast charging infrastructure.

The biggest change in my use of a car -- besides being able to charge it at home and not care about the price of gas -- comes from the team-up between cars and mobile phones.

I no longer care about directions. My friends don't need to tell me about the red barn or the corner where the big tree used to be when I want to go visit them. I don't need to call AAA and request a map with directions to the antique mall in Binghamton. I don't need to backtrack to try figure out why I'm now in the wrong state.

I just sit down in my car, it pairs with the phone in my pocket, and I say "directions to the Papa John's on Plank Street", and turn by turn directions pop up on the car's display. If I'm driving around somewhere, take a wrong turn and get lost, the directions I'm following will update or I can request new directions home.

Sure, it might be the cell phone that enables it, but it makes a huge difference in how I use a car versus 40 (well, 10-20) years ago.

Err I think you made my point.

What's changed your life is the internet connected device in your pocket.

However that change is more visible in social history type records than simple lists of technologies etc.

Those born in the 20's & 30's are already in the "music on demand" generation, who grew up after the point at which you could listen to your favorite artists play your favorite songs [on record], whenever you want, or turn on a radio and hear new music any time you wanted to.

That’s an interesting point of reference. I have thought about what a big change it was to go from a sheet music and live performance only world to a world with audio recordings.

You’ve identified the early electromagnetic signals era, then think about the huge expansion in bandwidth those signals have undergone. From a handful of local radio stations and a finite number of grooved vinyl(or whatever medium) at your local shops. To a virtually infinite arrangement of pixels on your screen, waveforms coming out of your speakers. A few taps on your local signal processor and you can have virtually anything delivered to your door, or undertake any number of your other day to day affairs.

I knew my great grandmother well, played games with her into my teens, she was a little over 100 when she died.

She grew up on a plantation, had sharecroppers and knew many civil war veterans.

A lot of people think of that era as ancient history.

It really hasn't been that long.

I share that sentiment.

OTOH, as soon as I start to consider infinite growth an illusion, the velocity reminds me very much of this book:

https://humanistperspectives.org/issue217/book-review-blip-h...

Which I haven't read, my world view is bleak enough as it is...

What if our tremendous progress is mostly an increase of efficiency in spending (or wasting) limited resources?