Innovation of new forms of society and technology. It is the key to our progress. It has allowed us to evolve from naked hunter-gatherers to the dominant species on this planet. This process is slow, normally taking hundreds or even thousands of years. But occasionally evolution leaps forward. **
Many people look to the future with fear. We see this fear throughout the web. Right-wing sites describe the imminent end of America: overrun by foreigners, victim of cultural and financial collapse. Left-wing sites describe “die-off” scenarios due to Peak Oil, climate change, and ecological collapse – as the American dream dies from takeover by theocrats and fascists.
Most of this is nonsense, but not the prospect of massive changes in our world. But need we fear the future?
The past should give us confidence when we look ahead. Consider Dodge City in 1877. Bat Masterson is sheriff, maintaining some semblance of law in the Wild West. Life in Dodge is materially only slightly better from that in an English village of a century before. But social and technological evolution has accelerated to a dizzying pace, and Bat cannot imagine what lies ahead.
- Edison has just built a phonograph, his first great invention. More will come from him and a thousand other inventors.
- The Transcontinental Railroad unites America, beginning the end of the regional identities that until now divide us (It was completed in 1869, three years after the first transatlantic telegraph line).
- The theory of evolution remains controversial, seventeen years after the famous debate between Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley (”Is it on your grandfather’s or your grandmother’s side that you claim descent from a monkey, Mr. Huxley?”).
- Medicine and public health remain primitive. A bedside manner and diagnostic skill are doctors most reliable tools. In three years Pasteur will discover the first artificially generated vaccine (for chicken cholera).
- Next year Karl Benz will design the first practical automobile engine and Paul Haenlein will fly the first aircraft powered by an internal combustion engine.
- Geo-politically stability results from a multipolar system in which Empires play the largest role, and most of the world consists of western colonies. We are two-thirds through the Long Peace between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI.
- The deterministic certainties of Newton still rule in science. Great discoveries in thermodynamics and electromagnetism gave confidence that more discoveries lie ahead.
Bat died in 1921 as a sportswriter for the New York’s Morning Telegraph, in a world drastically changed from the into which he was born. Three more decades of rapid change followed. By 1951 the world assumed the shape we see today, and the evolution of culture, science, and geopolitics slowed.
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