The common meme you hear in the news is that the world is changing ever fast than before. It’s not. It took mankind less time to get from the first airplane flight to the first person on the moon than from the moon to today!
Computers may be faster since then and the internet may have connected them all together, but that change pales to the 19th century when mechanization led to a drop from 75% farmers to 2%, when electrification let us be productive, fed, and entertained after sunset, when the telegraph increased the speed of communications from a horse to the speed of light, when the steam engine and later the internal combustion engine increased the speed of movement from the horse to the locomotive to the airplane.
Certainly life changes faster here in the 21st Century than in the 18th and all times before then, but more and more we seem to be at a peak of change, nearing the top of an S-curve, at a crossroads that could lead either to the demise of modern civilization or the beginning of a new golden age as if (and only if) we find a path to environmental sustainability and expand out civilization beyond Earth.
