by Jasper Gilley

There were 1,944,139 people born in Germany in the year 1900.¹ Suppose you’re one of those people. Furthermore, suppose you live for a reasonably long time – you die at age 100, in the year 2000. I would venture to argue that you, in the course of your life, witnessed more change than any other individual that has ever existed.

When you were born, horses were the primary means of short- and medium-distance transportation. As a rule, getting from one place to another required a biological organism to do work – be that biological organism you or a horse. Railroads were certainly used for the occasional long journey, but most humans did not have large amounts of direct contact with them.

When you were born, Germany was also the ascendant hegemon of the world. The work of Otto von Bismarck and hundreds of years of industrialization had paid off, and Great Britain faced a serious threat to her global martial supremacy. The times were changing quickly. When you were 5, one of the five Great Powers of Europe (Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia) was defeated for the first time by a non-European nation. Newly-industrialized Japan sank the Russian Pacific fleet in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, and when Russia sailed their stronger Black Sea fleet through the Mediterranean, around the Cape of Africa, and through the Indian Ocean to Japan to retaliate, Japan promptly sank that fleet as well.

Back in Europe, the peace that had existed since the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 was deteriorating quickly. As one historian put it, Germany was “too big for a balance-of-power, too small for total hegemony.” Late in his life, Bismarck remarked that the next major European war would come from “some damned affair in the Balkans,” and when you were 14, he was proven right: the assasination of the heir to the Austrian throne by a Serbian nationalist group triggered a diplomatic crisis that, in failing to be resolved, prompted the First World War.

Imagine living through this time: the first truly global war, accompanied by the application of horrific new weapons. Chemical weapons debuted en masse in the First World War. It was the twilight of the age of artillery – massive standalone guns blasted shells of unprecedented size – but the dawn of the age of airplanes. For the first time, humans could fly! And all this accompanied by claims that this would be “the war to end all wars.”

While most of the world was busy warring, the Russian Tsarist state was busy collapsing. Defeat at the hands of Japan, combined with heavy spending on the First World War, combined with a weak Tsar produced conditions that gave rise to an oft-forgotten Republican government, which was subsequently overthrown by Lenin and the Communists (that should be a band name.) A new form of government was born, one that seemed to pose a viable challenge to all established governments worldwide. In this age of rapid, drastic change, the phrase workers of the world, unite! seemed to be credible.

When you were 18, the Great War came to an end. Along with airplanes, it had brought the genesis of ships that could go underneath the water. We take this for granted today, but for contemporary ocean-goers, the thought that there might be a hostile warship submerged just below you must have been incredibly frightening. Back on land, the borders of Europe were redrawn by the Treaty of Versailles. One day, you might have suddenly found out you were living in a new German republic, or Poland, or Czechoslovakia, or a territory administered by a new organization called the League of Nations.

Throughout the next decade of your life, you watched the liberal world order that had been created by the Treaty of Versailles slowly unravel. When you were 22, Benito Mussolini took power in Italy, abandoning all pretense of democracy when you were 25. Adolf Hitler staged a coup against the German republic when you were 23, and though it failed, he was nonetheless elected democratically a decade later.

Meanwhile, the established economic order was quickly deteriorating as well. The Great Depression in the United States caused global economic troubles, particularly in the still-nascent German republic. Stagflation (inflation without corresponding growth) was rampant, and the German currency became almost worthless.

This was the world in which the Second World War broke out, in your 39th year. Due to its “bigger explosions and better villains,” the Second World War is better known than the First, so I won’t go into a lot of detail here. Nonetheless, World War II inspired the development of such technologies as the atomic bomb. For the first time, one explosive device could level cities. As is well documented, the combination of the nuclear threat and the ascendancy of the Soviet Union under Stalin caused unprecedented mass hysteria in the West, particularly the United States.

Despite being defeated when you were 45, Germany remained the epicenter of global politics in the coming years. As was the case following the Treaty of Versailles, German citizens such as yourself might have woken up one day to find themselves living under either a republic (West Germany) or a Communist state (East Germany.)

World War II also gave impetus to the development of perhaps the most important technology of your lifetime. Starting when you were about 50, the Soviet Union (and slightly later, the United States) began passing milestones in spaceflight: first rocket to reach space, first artificial satellite (Sputnik), and first human in space (Yuri Gagarin.) The culmination of this era occurred when, in July 1969, humans travelled to an extraterrestrial body – the moon.

Let’s put this development in context. What might a biologist list as the five most important developments in the history of life? The transition from bacterial to eukaryotic life would certainly make the list, as would the evolution of a central nervous system. The differentiation between plants and animals would be on there, as would the rise of mammals. Yet all of these developments occurred on Earth. In 1969, life left Earth for another solar body for the first time – and that deserves a place on the list. That means that you were 69 when one of the five most important events in the history of life occurred. Given this, everything else that occurred during your life seems inconsequential.

When you were 91, you saw Communism – the ideology that viably threatened the entire world when you were 17 – come crashing down. In your late 90s, humans began increasingly to use a new technology called the internet to exchange information. When you died in the year 2000, the internet was causing what, at that time, was the biggest speculative bubble in history, yet of course the euphoria must have seemed very real at the time.

Perhaps, on your deathbed, you compared the world in which you were then living to the world into which you were born. It very well might have seemed like two entirely different worlds. When you were born, most people used horses to travel, Germany was the ascendant hegemon of the world, and humans communicated by sending letters via the post. When you died, most people used automobiles to travel, Silicon Valley was the ascendant hegemon of the world, and humans communicated via ones and zeroes represented by quantum magnetic states beamed invisibly, instantly, around the world. These really were two different worlds.

And yet, you lived through every moment of the continued metamorphosis from the former to the latter. Would it really have been so impossible to extrapolate the coming transitions?

I was born in 1998 – not a bad analog to 1900 for you. If I die in 2100, will it be such a different world than the one into which I was born? Or was the 20th century unique in its rapid change? More importantly, what nascent revolutions are present today, waiting for the right moment to burst forward?

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1 – Official government figures