Emma Morano died yesterday. Over 7.5 billion people currently alive on this planet didn’t know her at all. At the end she was a historical curiosity as she was the last remaining person known to have been born in the 1800’s. A stark reminder that time knows no mercy. All our time is limited and each generation passes on quietly disappearing from the view of each new generation that comes to replace the previous.

Such is the lot of every living thing.

But Emma is a reminder of the ghosts of time that surround us every day. Ghosts that we ourselves will become some day.

For most of human history we have only our imagination to give us a glimpse of what life was like for older generations, what they must have seen, how they may have experienced the world.

What was life like when Emma was a young child?

Watching some of the rare clips below I can’t help but imagine that life looked pretty amazing actually. Cities from Berlin to Munich, San Francisco and London, etc. Bustling with life. People full of conversations, troubles, joys, and with their own struggles going on about their lives. All irrelevant to us today, but all very real before we came to be. Reels filled with the ghosts of time.

They didn’t have the technology we have now. Many things are better now than they were then. But they lived life with what they had and, from what I can tell, they had much more style than we seem to have today.

100 years from now people will look back at our time. I wonder what they will say about us. Part of me shudders at the thought.

Amazing clips below: