By what measure do we judge our progress?

 There was a time when the night sky was not a canvas of wonder but a map of terror. Thunder was a god. A comet meant doom. Fire was magic. Disease was a curse. We huddled in caves and leaned on myth to make sense of a world too vast, too cruel, too unknown.

And yet—bit by bit, we pushed back the dark.

From the first chipped stone that turned a fist into a tool, to the first carved letter that captured thought and carried it across time, we became the species that remembers. We learned to tame the world not through strength, but through thought. The plow was our first engine. The wheel, our first revolution. The alphabet, our first internet.

The great ancient cities—Uruk, Mohenjo-Daro, Teotihuacan, Athens—were not just clusters of stone and clay, but crucibles of law, literature, architecture, and debate. They gave us the blueprint: that humans, when organized, can build wonders.

For all the beauty of those times, we must also acknowledge their limits: lives were short, brutal, and bound. For most of history, the average person lived only into their thirties. Four in five children died before adulthood. Nearly all worked the land and died without ever seeing a map of the world they lived in.

But progress, once sparked, proved inexhaustible.

In 1800, nearly 90% of the world lived in extreme poverty. By 1950, it was down to 60%. Today, it is under 8%. That is not a typo. It is the result of centuries of small steps—steam engines, sanitation systems, vaccinations, electricity grids, microchips. Each innovation built not just comfort, but capacity.

Two hundred years ago, fewer than 10% of humans could read. Now, over 90% of the world’s youth are literate. In 1900, one in three children died before age five. Today, that number is less than one in twenty globally, and falling.

In 1960, only about one in five people had access to electricity. Now, over 90% do. Clean water access has risen from about 50% in 1990 to over 75% today, sparing millions from waterborne disease.

Famine, once a regular specter, has become rare—largely political when it occurs. Our ability to feed billions is no longer constrained by nature, but by systems. And though climate change threatens this balance, the tools we have now—satellites, AI, global cooperation—are the most powerful instruments of resilience ever assembled.

In 1900, there were no antibiotics, no planes in the sky, no computers humming in homes. There was no internet to carry your voice across oceans, no vaccines for measles or polio. A broken bone could mean death. A scratch could fester into agony. A mother’s childbirth often came with the risk of her own.

Today, we can land robots on Mars. We can edit DNA. We can simulate the birth of the universe in particle accelerators. We are beginning to treat cancer like a chronic illness instead of a death sentence. We are, perhaps, on the edge of ending aging—not in myth, but in medicine.

And still, the story is not finished.

There are still millions who suffer from poverty, from war, from the cruel whims of power. But the arc is visible. Progress is not a myth—it is measured in heartbeats saved, in books opened, in diseases defeated. It is found in the hands of children who will never know a world without light, and in the minds of students who will invent a world we have not yet dared to imagine.

So let us not romanticize the past, but honor it. For all its blood and brilliance, it brought us here.

And let us not fear the future, but build it.

Because progress is not automatic. It is chosen. And every generation must choose again.