I remember watching Back to the Future with my dad, probably in the mid-2000s, when he mentioned he thought it was depressing that you could easily see the difference between 50s-era Hill Valley and 80s-era Hill valley but that 80s-era Hill Valley looked more or less like any town in modern America. Which is true; architecture, mechanical design and so on have been built mostly along the same lines for the last few decades. We don't have cars that look vastly different, our storefronts and buildings look more or less the same, and people even dress similarly.

Our physical world hasn't taken many huge leaps, but Doc Brown would never have conceived of accessing the entirety of human knowledge from the palm of his hand. No one would think they could one day scroll through a feed of the mundane shit their friends and family happened to do that day.

We're a bunch of curious primates and somehow that drives us to explore and learn and create. The human race , through war and peace, thick and thin, for good or ill, always moves forward. And the pace is accelerating.