It'll certainly depend on your yardstick, I agree. Scientically, technologically, we've seen more progress in under a century than we've seen in millennia. It'

It'll certainly depend on your yardstick, I agree. Scientically, technologically, we've seen more progress in under a century than we've seen in millennia. It's maybe easy to hand wave that off on advances in machine computation (computers), but computers are a globally coordinated effort. Foundaries, manufacturing techniques, CS research, etc are coordinated and advanced globally because of the internet. M-RNA vaccines are the cummulation of a decades of advances. Genetic sequencing was a major advancement, but actually being able to make sense of it and do something with that information, and then to go encode your own M-RNA and trick the body into producing parts of the virus in order to teach it about a virus it's never actually seen is soo far removed vaccines of old, which was basically repeated exposure to a similar, weaker virus. Could we have gotten here without the internet? Maybe? It's hard to tell, because the road to M-RNA vaccines was paved by decades of global coordination in the fields of CSE, virology, material science, chemistry, physics, etc etc. And this ignores everything that goes into manufacturing this at scale, coordinating availability/priority, etc. It's probably easier to look backwards and see what was lost and rediscovered. Feats of architectural engineering, Roman concrete, etc history is full of major advances being independently discovered and lost due to the inability to share, search, and archive information at scale