Once upon a time, we saw progress, particularly technological and medical progress, as both miraculous and uniformly desired. The romanticized meta-narrative of the the Twentieth Century was that it was the age of startling innovation and that indeed humanity might find its salvation in the latest invention to improve the human condition. The most common utterance at the time to describe this phenomenon was what will they think of next? The airplane and the automobile revolutionized travel and with it the spread of information and population dispersal. Penicillin was considered a wonder drug upon its introduction and indeed many lives were saved when it began being used on a wholesale fashion to combat infectious disease. The first pesticides were considered miraculous because they greatly increased the yield of crops, with the hopes that their introduction would increase the food supply and in time make widespread hunger a thing of the past. It was believed that our own ingenuity would be our salvation and in time, there was no telling what long-standing problem would have a easy, understandable solution.
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