The Stone Age lasted a few million years while hominids sorted out our evolutionary path.
The Bronze Age was a couple of thousand years (about 3000 BC to 1200 BC) as we graduated into metal work.
Then we had the Iron Age, and then the Middle Ages. We had the Renaissance, the Industrial Age, even the brief Gilded Age. Some are now referring to our current last decade or two as the Information Age.
Some of these were a few decades, some a few centuries, some a thousand years or more.
I wonder, if we took the 20th and 21st Centuries together 1900-2100, what this Age might be known as?
The Electric Age? (From electricity becoming widespread in the early 1900s to the total electrification of transportation and more this century?)
Or maybe just The Energy Age? (A blossoming of industry because of coal and steam all the way through a total transformation of energy use and production by 2050 or so?)
The Autocratic Age? (Let’s hope not….though there have been some doozies). Or maybe instead The Age of Democracy (where democratic approaches finally took hold of most nations by the end of the 21st century? Please?)
The Technology Age? (Broader than ‘information’ perhaps - incorporating the Green Revolution in the 1950s/60s all the way through to renewable technologies.)
It probably won’t be known as The Biodiversity Age, or The Age of Trees, and I really hope it’s not The Plastic Age, but perhaps we could stretch to The Sustainable Age, where we finally figured out the ingredients and put processes in place to sustain our food, environment, economy, and other human needs all at the same time? Frankly, we might have to hustle to be known as that….
I’m thinking it might be something more like ‘The Global Age’. We went from mostly knowing our small local communities at the beginning of the 20th Century, to being able to talk on the phone with anyone anywhere, to driving across the country, to flying across the world, to viewing Earth as a whole from space, to being able to work remotely and see the people we’re talking to in any country at any time in real time, to global agreements on climate change and sustainable development, to…..who knows what’s next, but I bet the world becomes ever more accessible.
Your thoughts? Comments open to all.
Fascinating to think of it all this way....