It's strange how many different boundaries "the modern world" has.

[riley@toot.cat]

It's strange how many different boundaries "the modern world" has.

In some sense, the world was not truly modern until we had trans-oceanic telegraph.

In some senses, it was not truly modern until we knew, from some poor blokes' experience, that chemical weapons were a Bad Idea.

In some senses, it was not truly modern until we had cure for random wounds and syphilis.

But then again, in some senses, it wsa not truly modern until going to a doctor started to outperform not going to a doctor, until France had taken head off Citoyen Capet and forever decided to be a republic, until the discovery of the Trade Winds, until the conversion of Constantinopolis to Istanbul, or the establishment of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

"Modern world" has been trickling in, bit by bit, over many centuries. In some fields, we put the boundary to where the last significant change happened; in others, though, an earlier change has clearly been more significant than the last one. The rise of the Ottoman Empire, for one, has been far more significant to the creation of the Modern World(tm) than the Ottomans subsequently exiting stage right; the promulgation of the Great Law of Peace far more significant than its eventual fall into disuse; and the establishment of the Fort Arguim trading post far more significant than its subsequent abandonment.

Which important boundaries of Teh Modern World will be trickling in over the next few years?

[riley@toot.cat]

Sometimes, there's even gradation. Both the magnetic compass and invention of precision ship-grade clocks lurched us straight into the Modern World, on the same axis which is open sea navigation, just at different degrees.

And centuries later, GPS lurched us into an even moderner world. For now, the pre-GPS world is within the living memory, but soon, it will be just a bunch of quaint old-time problems that people used to work hard to wrestle with, like dead reckoning and the Longitude Problem used to be.