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How Was the Modern World Created?
How Was the Modern World Created?
Three forces of change gather momentum and help create the modern world, transforming the biosphere.
As this video progresses, key ideas will be introduced to invoke discussion.
Think about the following questions as you watch the video
What drivers of change were responsible for making industrialization go global in the last 100 years?
How have networks changed in the last 100 years from what they were like at the time of the Industrial Revolution?
How did commerce and capitalism help create a world of wage earners and city dwellers?
How did the failure of communism in the twentieth century illustrate the power of competitive markets?
How has global consumption of energy accelerated in the last 100 years?
What are some of the indicators that suggest that the rate of innovation in the modern world is being sustained?
What twentieth-century developments suggest that not all innovations are positive?
What observations have led scholars like Paul Crutzen to suggest that the Earth has entered the Anthropocene epoch?
: In the last 100 years or so,
: the revolutionary changes of recent centuries
: gathered momentum.
: They transformed human societies throughout the world,
: but they also turned us
: into the most powerful force for change in the biosphere.
: So much happened in this period that what we're going to do
: is take a bird's-eye view of some of the main events.
: First of all, the three drivers of change
: that we've already studied-- global exchange networks,
: competitive markets and increasing use of energy--
: began to operate with more and more power.
: Global exchange networks became larger and larger
: and more and more dynamic.
: In the first half of the 20th century,
: conflicts between the major industrial powers
: led to devastating world wars, the first real world wars
: in human history,
: as they dragged their colonies into their fights.
: But in the second half of the century,
: international trade relations resumed
: to create the largest, most dynamic world market
: that's ever existed.
: Today, more goods, more people, more ideas, more money
: are being moved around the world
: than ever before in human history.
: Industrialization went global,
: spreading to the East Asian tigers
: of South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan,
: but also to the old superpowers of India and China.
: And in fact, in the early 21st century, the Chinese economy
: was probably the fastest growing in the world.
: The colonial empires of the 19th century
: were dismantled, creating new independent states.
: In fact, by 2007, the United Nations--
: the body created as a sort of foundation
: for international governments in 1945--
: contained 192 members.
: New technologies in communications
: and transportation accelerated the pace of change.
: The Internet provided instantaneous communication
: between millions of people all around the world.
: It also stored more information
: than you could have found in all the world's libraries
: just a century earlier.
: And as for transportation, think of this:
: In just 70 years, we went from the first planes
: to a machine that could carry people to the moon and back.
: Governments were also transformed.
: In particular, as an increasing number
: of decisions had to be taken globally--
: such as decisions about global warming
: or the world economic crisis--
: the framework for such decision making
: was already beginning to appear in the United Nations and NGOs.
: At the same time, governments built
: more and more sophisticated and complicated partnerships
: with their citizens
: as democratic methods of rule began to spread
: around the world.
: The second great driver of change
: has been the spread of competitive markets
: and what's often known as capitalism.
: These forces now dominate the world economy.
: Let me give two illustrations of their meaning.
: First, the modern world is no longer
: a world of peasants.
: Instead it's a world of wage earners.
: In addition, it's become a world of city dwellers.
: Early in the 21st century,
: for the first time in human history,
: more than 50% of humans lived in cities.
: Peasants were driven to the cities
: partly by employment opportunities,
: but also because new technologies--
: such as new forms of medicine,
: new forms of transportation, better sewage systems,
: the provision of electricity-- made cities,
: for the first time in human history,
: healthier places to be in than villages.
: The second great illustration of the power
: of competitive markets
: is the failure of the great 20th-century experiment
: with non-market societies or communism.
: By the 1990s, everywhere in the world,
: those societies were collapsing,
: and the reason for their collapse was precisely
: that they could not generate the innovation
: that market societies generated.
: The third great driver of change
: was increasing use of energy.
: It's estimated that in the 20th century,
: global consumption of energy increased by 16 times
: and most of it came from fossil fuels.
: In the early 21st century, the use of fossil fuels
: is probably increasing, particularly as a result
: of the rapid industrialization of huge societies
: such as India and China.
: As these global drivers of change gathered momentum,
: rates of innovation accelerated to unprecedented levels.
: I'd like to give some examples.
: Let's begin with food production.
: In the 20th century, food production increased
: faster than population growth.
: This was a result of many new technologies--
: the creation of artificial fertilizers and pesticides,
: genetic modification of crops and new forms of irrigation.
: But the remarkable result was that we have not yet seen
: a global Malthusian crisis, though there have been
: many devastating local and regional famines.
: Total economic production increased
: in the 20th century by perhaps 14 times.
: And according to some estimates,
: industrial production increased by 40 times.
: As a result, there has emerged
: a growing global middle class
: whose living standards are rising very rapidly indeed.
: Millions of people continue to live
: in dire poverty, but many members
: of this growing middle class are enjoying living standards
: that even aristocrats could only have dreamed of
: in the agrarian era.
: Meanwhile, life expectancies have doubled globally
: and educational levels are rising rapidly
: as a result of the spread of compulsory mass education.
: Early in the 21st century, it's estimated that 80%
: of people over the age of 15 had basic literacy.
: In many areas, gender inequalities are diminishing
: as a result of changing family patterns
: and work patterns, though it remains true
: that women's income levels and educational levels
: lag behind those of men.
: But of course not all innovations were positive.
: The killing power of human weapons
: has increased exponentially, from machine guns
: to poison gas to atomic weapons.
: Early in the 20th century, millions died
: during those devastating world wars.
: In 1945, atomic weapons were dropped
: on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
: Hundreds of thousands of people died within just a few days
: and many thousands more died over the next few years
: as a result of radiation sickness.
: In October 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis,
: the world came within a hairsbreadth
: of an all-out nuclear war.
: If it had happened,
: its impact would have been as devastating
: as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs
: 65 million years ago.
: That was a very, very close shave.
: But the real significance of these changes
: will not become apparent until you see
: that they are transforming our relationship
: to the biosphere.
: If agriculture counted as an energy grab
: by one species,
: the modern revolution
: is a takeover of the entire biosphere.
: A Dutch scientist, Paul Crutzen, has argued
: that since 1800, the Earth has entered
: an entirely new geological era, which he calls the Anthropocene.
: This is the era in which, for the first time
: in four billion years, a single species has become
: the dominant force for change in the biosphere,
: and that species of course is us.
: Now, is he right?
: Well, his evidence is pretty compelling.
: Since 1900, human numbers have increased by four times,
: human energy use by 16 times.
: And according to some estimates, of all the energy
: that enters the biosphere through photosynthesis,
: we are managing the use of between 25% and 50%.
: Meanwhile, by burning fossil fuels,
: we're transforming the atmosphere.
: We're pumping back into it carbon that was buried
: over hundreds of millions of years.
: Extinction rates are rising sharply
: as we take over more and more of the biosphere;
: as we pave it over for roads and cities,
: as we clear forests for farmlands or timber,
: and as we divert rivers for irrigation.
: The result: other species are vanishing
: at a rate perhaps a thousand times as fast
: as had been normal in the last few million years.
: We're also changing the chemistry of the biosphere.
: We're changing how nitrogen, sulfur and carbon circulate.
: And we've created perhaps a hundred thousand
: entirely new chemicals that never existed before
: in the form of plastics and rubbers,
: of fertilizers and pesticides, of synthetic textiles and drugs.
: Finally, human weapons are now so powerful
: that in principle, they could destroy
: much of the biosphere in just a few hours.
: That is why we regard the revolutionary changes
: of recent centuries as the eighth major threshold
: of increasing complexity in this course.
: They have created something entirely new,
: a single global system that's more complex
: than anything we know of in the universe
: and that has the power to shape the fate
: of the entire biosphere.
: Think of the power of a species that can do these things.
: Will we use that power wisely or not?
: That will depend, at least in part,