Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes...
(actually "Yes", "Yes", "Not in Russia", and "Yes, but they ruin countries in result")
... but normals just don't get that. The scale I gave an example of is a scale of many normal people I know. They don't appreciate antibiotics, phones and electricity -- they take it all for granted. Their life expectancy from 200 years ago is totally irrelevant to their everyday life.
(Prediction: Russia will come around in < 50 years
Revolutions help because you threaten politicians with them so they cooperate, actually doing them sucks but you have to to keep the precommitment believable.)
I agree they don't get it. But they don't have a point, they're making the common mistake of failing to learn from history. People are crazy, the world is mad.
Also, do they appreciate indoor plumbing? Much of my 1960's-born family grew up without it, but they seem to consider it mundane now. What about cell phones?
When attempting to introduce non-rationalists to the ideas of cryonics or Strong AI, it appears that their primary objections tend to be rooted in the absurdity heuristic. They don't believe they inhabit a universe where such weird technologies could actually work. To deal with this, I thought it would be useful to have a cache of examples of technologies that have actually been implemented that did, or ideally, still do, challenge our intuitions about the way the universe works.
The first example that comes to my mind is computers in general; imagine what Ernest Rutherford, let alone Benjamin Franklin, would have thought of a machine that uses electricity to calculate, and do those calculations so fast that they can express nearly anything as calculations. Nothing we know about how the universe works says it shouldn't be possible, indeed it obviously is knowing what we do now, but imagine how weird this would have seemed back when we were just coming to grips with how electricity actually worked.
I suspect there may be better examples to challenge the intuitions of people who've grown up in an age where computers are commonplace though. So does anyone have any to volunteer?