Industrial revolution
Challenge the belief in this as a special time when technology changed.
50,000 years and 360 degrees of human experience
Seneca (the Younger, c. 4 BC - AD 65)
All the human race, whatever it is and whatever will be, is condemned to death. All the cities that have ever held dominion over the world, and that have been the great decorations of empires not their own, someday people will ask where they were. And they will be destroyed by various types of destruction: wars will ruin some, idleness and the kind of peace turned to sloth will consume others, and by luxury, a deadly thing to people with great wealth. All these fertile plains will be blotted out of sight by a sudden overflowing of the sea, or the slippage of the settling earth will sweep them suddenly into the abyss.
(Letters #71)