The 20th century experienced an era of unprecedented cultural change. Of the 50 most significant evolutionary “jumps” since the first flickering of life on Earth almost 4 billion years ago, approximately half eventuated following the first half of the century. Biological cells, photosynthesis, nervous systems, tools, thought, speech, and the use of fire all emerged in the prehistoric past. The domestication of plants and animals, the wheel and the lever, cities, writing, mathematics and logic, and the use of metal all belong to the past 10,000 years of civilization. Explosives, printing, electricity, the telephone, and disease control were developed in recent centuries. But jets and space rocketry, nuclear fission, solar power, semiconductor technology, computers, molecular biology, recombinant DNA, and feedback control are essentially post mid-20th century developments.
All this has amounted to much more than the technological changes - such as the textile mill, mass-produced iron, the steam engine, and the railroad - that led to the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. The escalating rate of change during the 20th century, notably the latter half of the century, was perhaps even more dramatically different from the Industrial Age than that age was from the Middle Ages. But such change represents merely the most recent episode in a continuing process of evolution. |
marking as great a leap in communications as the emergence of speech and language, writing and printing. We now use electronic processing, transmissions and storage of data with increasingly powerful computers for solving problems at speeds millions of times faster than before. The number of computer networks is doubling every few years. Radio, television, the internet, and mobile communciations devices penertrate every region of the planet. Earth's human population has become both extensively and intensively interconnected.