In The Great Escape, Nick Schultz interviews Robert Fogel on The Escape From Hunger and Premature Death:
One of the points I make is that it took 4000 years to go from the invention of the plow to figuring out how to hitch a plow up to a horse. And it took 65 years to go from the first flight in a heavier-than-air machine to landing a man on the moon. Not only did that happen in such a short period of time, but over a billion people all over the world watched it happen. So we had communications revolution in a very short period of time.
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Look, 1000 years ago, nothing happened. Each generation experienced life more or less as the previous ones had, with maybe some random factor thrown in for weather and pestilence. But, it’s only in the past 300 years that science has become so powerful that it could influence the course of events. And it has, and I expect it to do it in an accelerating rate.