100 Years Ago

100 years ago... One hundred years ago, humans on Earth were emerging from a viral pandemic that killed millions of people worldwide. Meanwhile, people died of diseases that today are commonly cured. Many are long forgotten. With vastly improved nutrition, medicine, and public health measures, we are now living 50% longer than we did back then. The environment was quite unhealthy a hundred years ago, with air, rivers, lakes, and land contaminated by industrial pollutants. Though we’ve made many improvements over the decades, the ignored warnings from scientists about global climate change continue to haunt us. Legislation to empower the disenfranchised, long resisted by those in charge, was hard fought — one of many progressive triumphs to follow that comprise the moral arc of the universe, as it bends, however slowly, towards justice for all citizens of planet Earth. Wars continue, but there are fewer of them. And in the past century, we’ve reduced the fraction of the world’s population living in extreme poverty by a factor of five. So overall, things are looking better. Much better than they were way back in 2023. Sincerely, Citizen of the Year 2123.