#im sorry too tired to add descriptions of the maps

[straightlightyagami]

copying my addition to this post into a separate post:

some modern problems:

climate change

high tech surveillance

nonzero risk of nuclear war

environmental destruction, pollution, etc on a greater scale

modern capitalism/imperialism (not that the 1600s were better just the economic system is pretty different now)

conversely, some things that have significantly improved:

the best way to illustrate the huge impact of modern medicine on the world: infant, child, and youth mortality has significantly decreased due to improvements in medicine.

compare this to about every other child dying in the early modern period. in fact there are even significant improvements compared to a few decades ago. there is a huge gap visible between different regions of the world less, but nonetheless, the general trend has been improvement (because of improvements to medicine and sanitation) and the fact that in some countries over 99% survive childhood shows that it's possible, which would be unimaginable 400 years ago in any society. life expectancy has also significantly increased.

also, smallpox, a disease that killed hundreds of millions of people throughout history, has been eradicated for over 40 years thanks to a global vaccination effort. smallpox used to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths a year, with a death rate between 20 and 60%.

(I'm not going to put in all the graphs but read this article)

another historically deadly disease, the plague does still exist despite unsuccessful attempts at eradication (notably by the ussr. these attempts at total eradication, despite initial apparent success, were hindered by spillover from animal reservoirs), but it is restricted in geographic range. with timely antibiotic treatment, the death rate for those infected drops to around 10-15% (down from 30% to 90% for the bubonic plague and 100% for the pneumonic and septicemic plague. cw for images of cases in the articles). (although it could become a greater threat if it developed drug resistant strains like tb.)

I could go on with other examples but you get the general picture.

and this has been a tangent but that's why you should never take anything said by anti-vaxxers, or anyone who adopts a blanket "anti-civilization" view, seriously.