The Mugwumpery

In the traditional inverse-log focus:

Big bang. Galaxies. Earth. Life. Bacteria. Plants. Oxygen in the atmosphere. Animals. Smart animals. Then fire and cooking. A lot of fighting.

Then agriculture. Soon after, writing was invented around 10,000 years ago. Recorded history begins.

Then wheels. Empires and a lot more fighting. Classical civilization (Greece and Rome) rose and fell. Big organized religions.

Printing press. Perspective drawing. Global travel by sailing ships. Epidemics. First global maps. Securities markets. Corporations. The beginnings of science around 1650, mostly in northern Europe.

18th century: Notions of human rights proposed. More empires. Symphonies. European colonization of Africa and Asia. Newtonian physics. Bach. Beginnings of chemistry.

The great 19th century: Industrial revolution – steam engines, precision machines, factories, mass production, electronic communication. Photography. Railways. The first time substantial numbers of people lived at above bare subsistence level. Periodic table. More empires and wars. European domination of the world. Slavery mostly abolished. Darwin’s discovery of evolution. Classical physics.

20th century: Relativity. Quantum physics. Aviation, cinema, automobiles, radio. Ideological extremism. Nuclear power, electronics, computers, primitive space travel. Rock and roll. Molecular biology. More wars, less empires. The early Internet.

21st century: A majority of Earth’s population lives above bare subsistence, mostly thanks to reforms by the Chinese Communist Party (not communist in anything but name). Advances in cosmology and computer science. Wars, but less so.

And here we are.

Added January 2024: …Signs of a renaissance in space travel. Early AI.