What Is New Under The Sun?

Some things in our era have genuinely never happened before in human history.

1. There have been few times in history where a smaller percentage of the global population has been subject to rule by hereditary monarchs and aristocrats with actual power.

2. Big cities are bigger than they have ever been. And, there are far more cities of any given size than there were not so long ago.

3. Science has never been so advanced, we have never understood the universe and our world better.

4. Technology is at an all time peak.

5. The world, measured in the time it takes to communicate to distant places and to travel there, has never been smaller.

6. We have been to space and still have people in space, something that is very recent indeed.

7. It hasn't been all that long that we have lived in an era where no one knows how everything works, and indeed, no one knows how everything the deal with in their daily lives works.

8. It hasn't been very long that almost all children live to become adults.

9. It has only been quite recently that large shares of the global population are not religious.

10. It has not been very long that many many millions of people, are familiar with the foods and music found almost everywhere in the world.

11. Computers and artificial intelligence have only been remotely so powerful very briefly.

12. The percentage of the global population that lives in slavery is near an all time low.

13. Average global temperatures are the highest that they have been, at least, since modern humans left Africa, and everyone was a hunter-gatherer.

14. We have more control over our reproduction in the last eighty years than in any era that preceded us.

15. We are the most educated people, on average, that have ever lived.

16. We have for a brief time, been the only people who have the power to destroy the world and end our species.

17. We have consumed energy so abundantly only briefly.

18. The population of the world is the highest it has ever been, and close to the highest it is likely to ever be.

19. Our power to health with medical knowledge and technology has never been greater.

20. We are continuing a brief period in which we are the source of unprecedented rapid mass extinctions.