Which of these time periods do you think the world changed the most dramatically?

Great Debates
1

Out of curiosity, I broke down human history into 100 billion person-year chunks:

2001 - 2015
1983 - 2000
1956 - 1982
1910 - 1955
1840 - 1910
1740 - 1840
1570 - 1740
1350 - 1570
1100 - 1350
700 - 1100
250 - 700
350 BCE - 250 AD
1000 - 350 BCE
2000 - 1000 BCE
4500 - 2000 BCE
Pre-history - 4500 BCE

Looking through this list, I found it exceptionally hard to pick out any periods that I thought were exceptionally more or less influential than any others. Polling friends also revealed a vast diversity of opinions.

After a lot of consideration and a whole lot of back and forth, I ultimately landed on 1570 - 1740 as my top candidate. The Treaty of Westphalia and the birth of the modern nation state, along with the European invasion of the New World and the establishing of parliamentary democracy put this era over the top for me. Other candidates for me were 350 BC - 250 AD (rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity) and 1740 - 1840 (Industrial Revolution).

But honestly, I could make a convincing argument for pretty much every era on this list, except 2000 - 1000 BCE. That was a real dud of a millennium.

2

Human history wouldn’t include pre-history, unless you meant the entire period to be human existence. If so, then I’d pick the last period on your list since that is when civilization and the invention of agriculture occurred. Without those two things you don’t have any of the subsequent things.

If we eliminate that era, then I’d go for 1840 - 1910. That’s when you get the full flowering of he scientific revolution and the birth of modern medicine (germ theory wins out over miasma).

3

The problem with picking any specific period when some great transformational events occurred is that we’re on a path of exponentially faster change, a change that’s fueled by the corresponding exponential growth of knowledge and technology. So while you can pick a period where some really foundational changes occurred, there’s always another period just a little later when even bigger things happened.

For example:

One might say that one such major event was the spread of the first species of humans, the predecessors of homo sapiens, from Africa to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Yet these species, who were for practical purposes much like us, achieved nothing much else for two million years except the development of primitive tools.

Or one might say it was 12,000 years ago with the domestication of animals and the development of agriculture and permanent settlements. Surely that was transformational!

Yes, it was, but we had to wait more than 11,500 more years – until roughly the period 1500-1600, for the first glimmerings of what became the scientific revolution. Maybe that was it.

But just a few hundred years later – just 200 years ago, practically yesterday in the large scheme of things – was the first time that scientific advancement had a huge and absolutely transformative impact on the whole of society, by enabling the industrial revolution.

Since then we’ve had the information revolution and the advancement of technology in such leaps and bounds that new wonders are occurring every few years and society is being transformed and re-transformed faster than we can track the changes. On January 13, 1920 the New York Times ridiculed the idea that a rocket engine could work in the vacuum of space; 50 years later we walked on the moon, and the planet itself ceased to be the limit of the human domain. Today we have virtually all the information in the world at our fingertips, we’re surrounded by robots of one sort or another, and have sent them to every planet in the solar system.

In short, I think what makes the question difficult to answer is that the best answer now to when the world has changed most dramatically is almost always going to be “the last 25 years”, with that critical time period perhaps getting shorter and shorter as we move forward, some of the changes increasingly more dramatic.

4

…and if that kind of compression into shorter periods of time continues, it won’t be many centuries until there are major advances in the format of civilization every few minutes. Is that possible?

5

But that’s why I think normalizing by person-years makes this a more interesting question. Take 2001 - 2015 compared to 350 BCE - 250CE for example. 2001 - 2015 brought us what? A terrorist attack, the rise of smartphones, an economic recession?

Compare that to, in Europe, the entire rise and fall of the Roman empire, multiple different political systems that rose, got corrupted and fell, this hoopy frood named Jesus who had a cool message to share.

That’s not even counting the Qin and Han dynasty that unified China for the first time and introduced much of what would be the modern Chinese state, as well as the War of the Three Kingdoms.

In India, the Maurya Empire was the first to unify the Indian sub-continent and Mahayana Buddhism was first formulated and, thanks to the Kushan Empire, spread across the ancient world.

I find it hard to argue that the developments from 2001 - 2015 could credibly stand up to the developments of 350BCE - 250CE. Not only entire empires, but entire forms of political organization, religion and science were radically altered during that time period.

6

My guess is that the rate of societal and technological change will be limited in very short timeframes by natural sources of inertia, but that aggregate changes over decadal timeframes may become increasingly more radical. Imagine, for instance, the impact of transhumanism – the integration of the human mind with artificial intelligence, and its embodiment in an artificial substrate.

Go back a little further, say to 1990 so that you’re looking at the 25-year period that I mentioned. What you see there is the rise of the Internet from almost nothing to dominant ubiquity, the rise of the dot-coms (and the fall of some) to astronomical heights, and the creation of a dominant new industry that created multi-billion dollar corporations almost overnight, making their money doing things that nobody had even imagined before and that were socially transformative.

Your person-year metric is not as meaningful as you think. Some processes are sequential, changes have to propagate, and information has to be communicated and learned and become part of the community intelligence. You cannot recruit nine women to have a baby in one month, and as Frederick Brooks stated in The Mythical Man-Month, adding more people to a late project usually just makes it later.

7

But how does that compare to say, the Dutch East India company and the rise of the first multi-national? Or the barons of the Gilded Age like Standard Oil or JP Morgan? Both seem plausibly equally as consequential.

But I’m not asking about progress in generalities, I’m asking a specific question. Either pick the era 2001 - 2015 or 1983 - 2000 and make the argument that the change in society over that timespan exceeds every other choice on that list.

8

If it helps, here’s an adjusted 165B person-year splitting that gives you your 1990 - 2015:

1990 - 2015
1944 - 1989
1846 - 1943
1644 - 1845
1281 - 1643
759 - 1280
48 BCE - 758 CE
1222 - 49 BCE
3925 - 1223 BCE
Pre-history - 3926 BCE

Now you have to argue that the Internet was more important that the entire post-war period, among other periods.

9

I agree with this. It creates artificially short periods of time that are, frankly, ridiculous to compare with certain millennia or even hundred-year intervals.

10

Interesting, but what does “one hundred billion person year chunks” mean and how was it calculated?

Understanding that change builds upon earlier change, I would select 1350-1570 as the most dramatic change in world history, for it was then that global history took on a new character, away from a world of diverging traditions and independent centers of civilization to the story of the increased dominance of one civilization, that of Western Europe, as the world became integrated and united in a way impossible prior to the invention of the press (1453), the Renaissance and humanism, the voyages of Henry the Navigator, Columbus, et al.

With the conscious decision by European rulers to colonize the newfound lands, the nascent scientific and mathematic revolution which started perculating in this period (Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler), the ability to print and replicate VAST amount of long-lasting data, the invention of double-entry accounting (one of the prerequisites of capitalism and finance), this period marked the start of a new epoch in global history and, therefore, makes my list @ #1.

11

Data was sourced from HYDE (pre 1950) and UN (post 1950) and compiled into a spreadsheet.

Population is linearly interpolated between two dates which gets more inaccurate the further back in history you go which is fine because the estimates get more inaccurate anyway. Estimates of exactly when the next 100B is passed is also linearly interpolated but again, only become really inaccurate in the BCE Era.

12

But what I found interesting was the lack of bias using this metric. If this was a biased metric, you would expect answers to strongly cluster on one end of the spectrum or the other. Instead, answers appear all along the spectrum.

It’s not a perfect clustering by any means but what I found interesting was how such a crude measure seems to do such a good job balancing the increasing speed of change with the lengthening of eras as you go back in history.

13

Emphasis added. What answers are you referring to?

14

I’ve been collecting answers on FB and here and have about 15 datapoints so far.

15

I realize that I wasn’t directly addressing your question. But I thought it was important to make the closely related point about the rapidly accelerating rate of technological and social change, which started with about two million years of essentially no change at all. That point being that no matter what period you pick, there is probably a much shorter and more recent period, or soon will be, at which even greater changes have occurred or shortly will.

There are several problems with your specific challenge. One, you’re still assuming that “person-years” is a meaningful metric for normalizing the measurement of change, and I’ve already explained why it isn’t. It’s not meaningful for normalizing technological change, and even less so for social change, where in fact larger societies may introduce greater inertias resisting change. Two, if you want to get specific, you would need to be a lot more specific about what kinds of “social changes” you want to use as your metric. And three, as John Mace correctly points out, short time periods are a poor basis for comparison because they may be anomalous, either because some changes may not propagate fast enough, or because change isn’t continuous and, just like the weather, a short period may have trends that run counter to those of the longer term.

Isn’t it also relevant that technology grows at an accelerating rate as a natural consequence of building on its own prior achievements, while population grows at an accelerating rate simply due to geometric progression, and that the two things are completely unrelated? For that reason alone, just for starters, that coincidence is likely to give you a magnificent correlation.

And is it not also relevant that, to the extent that there may be a causative relationship, that technological progress drives population growth (and not the other way around) by creating safer and more hospitable communal environments and mitigating disruptive factors like infant deaths and disease? And that larger populations inherently create inertias resistant to cultural change? And, again, not meaning to be argumentative in your interesting thread, but keep in mind the overrated fiction of the man-month (or person-year, or whatever). In many important instances, especially those involving innovation, it has only a tenuous relationship to productivity.

16

I feel like this has gone too far down the weeds of methodology when all I really wanted was for people to just pick an era and forcefully state their case.

I just found it personally interesting that I had such a hard time picking. If you think the choice is super obvious, then say so and say why it is. Alternatively, pick an era to shit talk and explain why it’s the era with the least shit going on. You’ll have a hard time convincing me it’s not 2000 - 1000 BCE though!

17

If it’s not a meaningful metric, then the challenge should be even easier, there should be 1 era which you can convincingly make a solid argument for. I don’t particularly care if the metric is meaningful or not, it just clumped years up in a way I thought was interesting.

Pick an era, make a case for why it’s the best era!

The question is deliberately open ended, it’s up to you to decide how to balance out the various forms of change across all of history. Different ways of seeing the world will result in different answers, that’s the entire point. For example, one of my friends picked 1910-1955 because of the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process, and ignored the two other rather big occurrences that happened in that time period, which I thought was an interesting way of viewing the world.

18

1910 - 1955, no question.

Prior to this time, horses were a primary mode of personal transportation. After this, they were gone, except as curiosities.
Prior to this time, metals were accepted as money, and bank notes were considered to be a risky bit put on top of these. After this, they were gone, except as curiosities.
Prior to this time, no nukes. After this, we are now living in a nuclear age where conventional war has been reduced to regional conflicts.

Horses were the primary mode of personal transport in Eurasia for thousands of years before 1910 and in the New World from the time of Columbus right up until then. After, poof, no more.
Metals, from copper to gold, were considered money. Bank notes, not really. But after, everyone takes bank notes, and metals are no longer money except residually, at best.
War was a constant threat before 1910. After, war gets reduced to small rebellions and regional conflicts between minor powers. There is zero possibility of war on a global scale, which is completely different from the period before, when you had (post-Roman) the Arabs and the spread of Islam, then the Mongols; arguably the invasion of the New World by Europe, then the Seven Years War followed by the Napoleonic Wars, then WW1 and WW2. If there’s another world war, it’ll be the last, and everyone knows this.

19

You must be new around here. :smiley:

I doubt if that’s true for the entire world.

I don’t think WWIII would mean the end of mankind. Count me as someone who doesn’t know that (emphasis added)

20

Well, true. It would be the end of life on Earth. Except for the cockroaches.