Since Wired's birth five years ago, life has never been better.

The life of Wired coincides with the five best years that humanity has ever experienced.

Two developments typify this. One is part of the age-old swing of the pendulum between war and peace: the world today is wonderfully free of large-scale conflict. It is a change that could, sadly, be reversed. The other great happening in Wired's short lifetime is technical and economic: we are squarely in the midst of the most amazing upsurge of knowledge and wealth ever seen on Earth. And that trend is - for the first time in the human history - irreversible.

With the breakup of the Soviet empire, the world now enjoys a state of real peace for the first time since the 100-year period that ended in the holocaust of World War I. Over the past five years, the countries of Eastern Europe have transformed themselves into normal nations. Some have moved smoothly, others are still stumbling. But taken together, they confirm a worldwide trend toward democracy that has been gathering strength in Latin America, Asia, and even Africa.

Will that continue? Surely there will be no return to communism in Eastern Europe; people there have had a gutful of the brutality of totalitarian régimes and the poverty of socialism. But what George Washington called "the restless mind of man" seems to excite an unslakable appetite for rivalry and communal hate. That inability to focus our energies on building up rather than tearing down will forever endanger the peace. Only good judgment and luck will keep our world from occasional descents into destruction.

But let's cheer our Golden Age of (mostly) peace and stability while it lasts.

By contrast, the other great happening in Wired's lifetime - an unprecedented upsurge of knowledge and knowledge-based technology - cannot be rolled back, no matter how stupidly we behave. A single development dramatizes this: the fight against AIDS, in which progress has been made that was considered impossible as recently as when this magazine was born. bet365体育赛事 and industry have produced drugs that are snatching people from what were thought to be inescapable deathbeds. A preventive vaccine that could literally eradicate the scourge may be in the laboratories already - remember smallpox? And even if present candidates fail, powerful new research tools make the likelihood high that a successful vaccine will soon emerge.

All this occurred from a standing start in considerably less than two decades. In earlier times, centuries were needed to make even slight headway against killers like leprosy and cholera - and even then, mainly by isolating the sufferers. The progress with AIDS research demonstrates the awesome intellectual power that humanity can now muster against threats to our well-being. This power results from knowledge accumulated during the past millennia, especially the past two centuries. It also flows from our collective wealth. More than merely the ability to attain and enjoy gadgets, wealth represents the capacity to mobilize nature to our advantage, rather than just accepting what fate hands us.

Exciting as Wired's years have been, however, they are but a blink in history. Winston Churchill is credited with saying, "The further back you look, the further ahead you can see." And the further back we look, the more surely we see that the long-run prospects for all humanity are spectacularly good.

The history of human welfare divides sharply into two distinct periods. Prior to the middle of the 18th century, all but a tiny fraction of us lived almost as poorly as most had lived 2,000, or even 20,000, years earlier. For most of history - let alone prehistory - nothing happened to humanity's everyday predicament, except for some slow accretion in our numbers. Knowledge grew, but it was of little benefit to most people.

By contrast, the past two centuries have seen amazing change. Starting around 1750, humans began to achieve objectives they had dreamed of since time immemorial - fast. There was a miraculous takeoff in consumer welfare, and almost every trend in this area shows continual accelerated improvement, almost everywhere.

It is our good fortune to be living smack in the midst of this most remarkable age. In our era, the standard of living has progressed at an amazing and ever-accelerating rate. The most important and striking change is in mortality: throughout history, death rates nearly equaled birth rates, with just enough positive margin for slow population growth over the centuries. Now, most of humanity enjoys not only good health, but a life expectancy far higher than that of even the wealthiest people in the richest countries earlier this century.

Breakthroughs in communications have been especially discontinuous. On a recent flight, fittingly, I met a man whose family started the Pony Express across the American West. He surprised me with the fact that the entire operation lasted only a single year. When the telegraph reached across the continent, in an instant the speed of communication leapt from the speed of a horse to almost the speed of light - and the Pony Express went kaput. The pattern has since been repeated by the telephones, radio, and TV, each of which radically enhanced our ability to communicate. Today's greatest breakthrough, the Internet, has covered the globe in just the lifetime of this magazine.

Education has seen similar advances. To pick just one astonishing statistic, two-thirds of those born in India around 1930 were (or still are) illiterate as adults. But among those born just 40 years later, only about one-fifth are illiterate. This crucial transition has taken place within the lifetimes of most of the people who are reading this article.

And consider our ability to view the world. Until about 1200, the naked eye was our only instrument of vision. Eyeglasses and telescopes emerged eventually, but no further progress occurred until the turn of the 20th century, when the X ray allowed us to see below the surface of the human body. Now we have radar, microwaves, electron microscopes, CAT scans, magnetic imaging, and electron telescopes - taking us ever further, ever deeper. You can watch on a video screen as the dentist works on your teeth. And when a utilities crew comes to your street, they snake cameras through the pipes without marveling at the wonder of it all.

The same holds for our ability to reproduce information. For some 30,000 years, ideas could be recorded only via drawings or various forms of handwriting on parchment, stone, or cave walls. Then, half a millennium ago, Gutenberg invented movable type, and images and words could be published widely. Printing improved with metallurgy and mechanical power in the 18th and 19th centuries, but fundamentally little changed until the information age struck.

Skeptics will say that our present glorious age could be just another blip in history, as were the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman empires, and the Golden Age of Greece. They'll ask why we should believe that the progress of the past two centuries is an irreversible breakthrough.

But there are several reasons to believe that there has indeed been a discontinuity in history.

One, ours is the first age in which material gains have reached more than a mere fraction of humanity. This is the first time well-being has moved beyond the rich to the vast majority, who previously subsisted at best.

Two, every indicator of human material welfare has shown a dramatic upturn, not just life expectancy and human mortality. Until 200 years ago, urbanization worldwide never rose above 10 percent; now it is pushing toward a majority of humanity. Transportation, communications, nutrition, leisure time, you name it - every measure shows dramatic change, and this is the first time in history that anything like this has happened.

A third reason why this change is irreversible is that its basis - our enormous and growing stock of knowledge - is widely distributed. Libraries containing millions of printed books, personal computers, the Internet - even after a disaster, all these would be the basis for rapid rebuilding. No longer can a single cataclysm wipe out an irreplaceable store of vital knowledge, as happened with the destruction of the ancient library of Alexandria.

And last, the concept of evolution argues that - in the absence of an unimaginably huge alteration in the physical world, such as climate change or planet collision - humanity will continue to go forward. Had each generation not left the next generation a little better endowed with knowledge and capital, humanity would have died out long ago. We ride the greatest trend of all, the drive to create a bit more than we use, and to leave the world a little better than we entered it. This is the strongest reason to believe that humanity will not retreat to the Stone Age or sink into extinction.

I'll end with three forecasts.

First, in 50 to 100 years, most of humanity will attain the standard of living now enjoyed by middle-class people in the wealthiest countries. The current economic miracle goes far beyond any precedent. Its magnitude dwarfs any small, temporary miracles of the past. And the gains it gives us will be permanent.

Second, the greatest single transformation will be the expansion of educational (and thereby economic) opportunity to almost all humanity. Young people everywhere will have their chance to take full part in the modern world and put their talents to work. No longer will tens of millions of children be shut out of schools because of the lack of funds, or because they live in areas cut off from roads and cities.

And last, events on Earth aside, the most dramatic event could be the terraforming of Mars. The Red Planet could be converted into a habitable human environment, replete with breathable air and drinkable water. Engineers have developed eye-popping but workable plans to get the job done in less than a century, at an acceptable cost. The only restraints that could hold us back are the lack of political will or of economic need - because humanity will be living so well on this planet that we won't feel the need to look elsewhere, not for sustenance anyway. But if we do go ahead, the task could divert our energies away from destructive earthly strife and into a great cooperative enterprise.

Let's go for it.