“Present-day man has recently become aware that history has been accelerating – and this at an accelerating rate. The present generation has been conscious of this increase of acceleration in its own lifetime; and the advance in man’s knowledge of this past has revealed, in retrospect, that the acceleration began about 30,000 years ago … and that it has taken successive “great leaps forward” with the invention of agriculture, with the dawn of civilization, and with the progressive harnassing – within the last two centuries – of the titanic forces of inanimate nature. The approach of the climax foreseen intuitively by the prophets is being felt, and feared, as a coming event. Its imminence is, today, not an article of faith; it is a datum of observation and experience.” – Toynbee, A.J. (1947), A study of history.