A hundred years ago, we couldn’t really forecast that the transportation and manufacturing technologies we were developing would enable a new form of industrial warfare that would wipe out tens of millions in two World Wars. We didn’t recognize early on that the invention of the radio would enable a new form of mass propaganda that would facilitate the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany. The progress of theoretical physics in the 1920s and 1930s wasn’t accompanied by anxious press articles about how these developments would soon enable thermonuclear weapons that would place the world forever under the threat of imminent annihilation. And today, even as alarms have been sounding for decades about the most dire problem of our times, climate, a large fraction (44%) of the American public still chooses to ignore it.
