Age of Discovery summary

Are you feeling overwhelmed, stressed and disorientated? Maybe that’s because we are currently living in one of the most dynamic periods that human civilization has experienced in the past 500 years.

The last of these eras of great economic and cultural expansion was the original Renaissance, which lasted from 1450 to 1550. It was a time of great discoveries and accomplishments, ranging from the development of the printing press to new forms of art that culminated in the masterpieces of Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci. Similar phenomena are happening today, from the development of international trade and exchange at an unprecedented level to the effect of the internet and new media on the exchange of information.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

• how computer chips are changing the world we live in;
• that you know even more people on Facebook than you think; and
• why periods of progress are also periods of instability causing radicalism and violence.

Our world is practically unrecognizable from the one that existed a mere 25 years ago. Politics, the economy and society have all dramatically transformed, opening up stunning parallels between this modern transformation and the one that took place in the fifteenth century.

For instance, centuries ago, the printing press revolutionized communication over the period of just a single lifetime. It began around 1450 when the German entrepreneur Johann Gutenberg (1395–1468) invented movable type. He used it to make the world’s first major printed book, Gutenberg’s Bible.

Because of this breakthrough, a person born in the 1450s could look back on her fiftieth birthday to see that 15 to 20 million books had been printed during her lifetime. This number easily surpassed the number of books written since ancient Roman times by all European scribes combined.

This hypothetical person would even have a difficult time remembering a world without books, although the generation before had relied solely on face-to-face conversations and handwritten manuscripts for communication.

Similarly, the internet has transformed at an incredible speed the way people today interact with one another and the world. Since 1988, when the first intercontinental fiber-optic cables were installed, the number of users connected through this infrastructure has grown more than seven-fold. In 2000 it was 400 million; in 2005, it was one billion, and by 2015 it had reached three billion.

The internet age marked easily the fastest mass adoption of a technology in the whole of human history, and one that radically connected all of humanity.

Just think about it this way: if Facebook were a country, it would have a population of 1.5 billion, making it the largest nation on Earth. What’s more remarkable is the fact that two average users on this social network are less than four degrees of separation apart. Most people on Facebook know someone who knows someone who knows one of their friends.

You can’t read the news today without getting a seriously dreary picture of the world. But is it really all doom and gloom?

Actually, today, the quality of global health and wealth are at their highest level ever, even for the most disadvantaged populations on earth. Life expectancy has risen by almost two decades since 1960, climbing from 52 to 71 years.

To put that in perspective, the last 20-year improvement in this metric took 1,000 years to achieve, not 50. As a result, a baby born today in practically any country can expect to live longer than at any previous point in that country’s history.

Crushing poverty has also seen a dramatic improvement over the last 25 years. In 1990, something like two billion people were living below the World Bank’s international poverty line; by 2015, although the human population had grown by two billion, the total number of people living in extreme poverty on less than $1.25 per day had dropped by over half to just 900 million.

This progress is the result of interconnected economies and improved medical care. The expansion of trade and the jobs it has created have helped raise the incomes of poor people.

Competition has increased, which has, in turn, lowered the prices of goods and services while boosting their quality. As a result, small businesses and households on a budget have been empowered.

During this time, technological advancements and better practices in public sanitation, clean water, hygiene, pest control, vaccines and drugs – along with growing public budgets to support them – have helped combat disease. In 1990, 13 million children under the age of five died from infectious diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis and measles. In 2015, only 5.9 million children died from the same infections.

The incredible accomplishments realized during the first Renaissance makes it seem like a magnificent cornucopia of progress. But we now know that wasn’t the case.

In fact, there were clear signs that the progress attained during this period had disparate outcomes. While average welfare rose during much of the period, the wealth gap between rich and poor grew dramatically.

Exact data from the first Renaissance is a bit patchy, but all the information that’s available points to a rise in income inequality alongside the expansion of manufacturing and trade. By 1550, in practically every Western European town of any decent size, the top 5 to 10 percent of residents owned between 40 and 50 percent of the town’s total wealth, while the bottom half owned little more than their own labor power.

This phenomenon was primarily precipitated by falling wages on the lower half of the income scale. Such cuts were felt particularly acutely by women. Between 1480 and 1562, a nanny’s wages did not increase at all, yet the cost of her daily necessities rose by 150 percent.

Outside Europe, matters were far worse. Some 150,000 Africans were enslaved between 1450 and 1550, and the European Age of Discovery meant the total destruction of entire civilizations in the Americas.

Unsurprisingly, a polarity between rich and poor is also central to our current Renaissance. While average global welfare is rising, the extremes have grown even more distant.

In 2010, the 388 richest people in the world controlled more wealth than the poorest 50 percent of the population. By 2015, this number dropped dramatically as just 62 people controlled more wealth than the bottom half.

Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent of society – some 3.6 billion people globally – subsist on an average of just a few dollars per day.

In 1495, Italians began to experience horrific symptoms caused by a mystery disease. The victims of this ailment spat up blood and suffered from boils the size of breakfast rolls, which oozed dark green pus. The disease left people sick for months and sometimes years.

What was it?

Well, disease spread rampantly during the Renaissance, and we now know this particular affliction as syphilis. Within four years of its emergence, this sexually transmitted disease had spread all over Europe and was a global menace a mere five years later.

The deadly advance of syphilis was facilitated by populations concentrated in urban centers. This urbanization created mutual interdependence, which did wonders for creativity and cultural exchange but also produced ideal conditions for the spread of disease.

Given the similarities between then and now, you might have guessed that the modern world’s concentrated yet fluid populations produce comparable risks, not just for health, but also in other aspects of life. The massive rise in air travel neatly mimics the population exchange and economic linkages that enabled syphilis to spread throughout Europe and across the sea.

A good example is the Ebola epidemic that broke out in December 2013 in West Africa. By March 2014, it had claimed 60 lives in Liberia and Sierra Leone; by mid-2015, over 28,000 cases had been reported, along with 11,300 deaths.

And this was no accident. Such massive pitfalls appear regularly as side-effects of positive phenomena like rising global financial investments and the construction of the incredible infrastructure behind the internet. In fact, the interconnectivity of the modern world means that when something happens far away, it’s likely to rapidly become a problem at home.

Just consider the 2008 financial crisis, which began in the United States but swiftly became a global issue. Or take cyber attacks: these data crimes can be committed anywhere in the world and prey on anybody, anywhere.

As the world of the first Renaissance evolved at an astonishing rate, people often experienced fear, doubt and insecurities. This climate proved fertile ground for radical messages proclaiming doom and a need for extreme action.

Just take Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar who, in 1497, incited his fanatical followers to gather every piece of evidence they could find of their strange new age. They hunted out immoral books, nude paintings and sculptures, indecent perfumes, heretical texts and exotic musical instruments.

They piled everything up in Florence’s central piazza and set it ablaze in what has become known as the Bonfire of the Vanities.

Within a year of this spectacle, the friar became the most powerful figure in Florentine politics by launching a public campaign of moral purification that called for draconian laws prohibiting vice. His rapid ascent to power was mostly a product of good timing. After all, he was preaching his apocalyptic message as the year 1500 drew near – a year many Christians believed would bring the Last Judgment.

Today radical messages of hate and extremism also pose a threat. Just take the rise of Islamic State, fringe Christian denominations that preach Islamophobia and homophobia, Orthodox Israeli Jews who assault gay people at pride parades and conceive plots to bomb Arab girls’ schools and, of course, the resurgence of neo-Nazi groups.

All of these hate groups are examples of what can happen in a rapidly changing world marked by deepening inequality and general disorientation.

So, the Renaissance wasn’t all great back then and it’s not all great now. But does that mean the future is bleak? As you’ll find out in the next blink, we have good reason to think the opposite.

This comparison of ugly histories and current situations can be a bit frightening, but it’s essential to understand that even at times when the world as we know it might vanish down the drain, there’s still potential for tremendous good.

Despite all the worrying developments, there’s also great progress being made today. While extremism and fear make it easy to be skeptical about the role of scientific and artistic advances in transforming the world, there’s good reason to believe in them.

However, it’s difficult to measure this type of progress as the gains produced by acts of genius are often unquantifiable. The strength of innovations in the creation of wealth, health, art and justice is hard to measure in numbers. However, new technologies are still dramatically transforming the way we understand the world.

Just remember, a mere 20 years ago, we thought Earth-like planets were rare. Today, because of better telescopes, computers and the thousands of astronomers who are linked together through the internet, we know that the Milky Way alone holds at least 10 billion other planets that are of the appropriate size, temperature and orbit to support life. This discovery has upgraded the possibility of alien life from remote to virtually certain.

Or consider other intangible goods like those in the digital realm. If one million copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were sold for $1,000 each, it would add $1 billion to GDP. Contrast that with the fact that when one million users log on to Wikipedia, no money is produced – although immeasurable good is still provided.

Thanks to phenomena like Wikipedia, humanity is much better off in terms of time and money saved, even though GDP isn’t directly affected. And just about anyone can attest to the tremendous wealth of education and entertainment that can be gleaned from the internet without spending a penny.