What would humanity do without the differing degrees of apprehension felt concerning the next apocalyptic lunch date with the Eschaton? How would we survive without the vague possibility of not surviving looming on the flip-side of the desktop calendar?
When we run out of specific time frames for the fruition of our myriad existential risks, what then shall we have to fret about as a species? Specificity is the key distinction regarding this phenomenon as we shall always retain plenty of factors which threaten our race. The lurking fears will always haunt us pacing just outside our door: nuclear destruction (mutually assured), epidemic, extraterrestrial invasion (via life-forms or supersonic projectile matter), supernatural reckoning per prophecy or otherwise, etc.
The date 1 January 2000 stood to play this role of possible global disaster and waited impatiently to wreak havoc upon our power grids and digital fiat money stores (i.e., our bank accounts). As we approached this milestone, turn-of-the-century event, we raced against time to update our operating systems and governmental databases to ensure that massive cybernetic haywire did not ensue thus rending useless the technological achievements of the entire 20th-Century and triggering the distress that having to adapt to a lifestyle known all so well to our quite recent forebears would lead to.
Indeed when the proverbial clock struck midnight, the celebrated ball dropped much less clumsily than our collective jaws as we exhaled a great sigh of relief, albeit in amazement, wary though it may have been. And on into the 21st-Century we headed full of apprehensive hope as a resurgence in our possible capabilities to technologically survive ourselves was reawakened after our Space Age, Promethean dreams had been slowly sobered due to the natural course of events playing out according to a different script than the sci-fi writers had envisioned (with notable exceptions such as William Gibson coming to mind).
The accrued time-binding of human knowledge logically led to the Industrial Age, and furthermore, had led to sociopolitical restructuring as an offshoot of the cultural ramifications thusly resultant thereof. The previous governmental dichotomies of the Eastern and Western world of the Enlightenment had been totally reworked both due to imperial colonization of the former and the uprising of democratic, humanistic, individualistic revolutions in the latter.
Philosophically, the Lockean movements for individual freedom had led to the classical liberalism, which in one form or another, affected much of the Occident and America as well. In the United States especially, this libertarian, though specifically Calvinistic, push for 'the American Dream' coupled perfectly with scientific, technological breakthroughs which ushered in industrialism. This state of affairs led to gigantic corporate entities wielding power previously unseen by nongovernmental organizations (the addition of a phenomenon known as corporate personhood further complicated this matter).
Immanuel Kant gave way to Hegel and before you knew it, Marxism is born. The Marxist ideology was picked up by disenfranchised, yet-to-be-unionized American dreamers of the Industrial Revolution giving birth to the union.
In Russia, the Axis shipped a sealed boxcar containing a 'plague bacillus...more deadly than any bomb' (Churchill's words), Lenin, who promised 'bread, land and peace' to the war-weary, disenchanted people and communism had a breeding ground ripe for the taking. An Oktober Revolution later, the Czar was unthroned, a dictatorial authoritarianism was instituted and the Soviet Union erected itself. By the 1940s a treaty signed in another German train was broken and the major powers of the world were in heated worldwide conflict again.
This time around, of course, the Russians did not accede to their Teutonic neighbors and Stalin teamed up with Roosevelt and Churchill to fight a multi-theatre full-scale war against the Nazis leading to the ultimate victory in Europe thanks to Hitler's decision to pull a Napoleon qua Operation Barbarossa. The ensuing political and geographical dynamic turned into a geopolitical chess game the likes of which Great Britain's eternal sunshine had never known.
The ideological differences once swept under the carpet for the purpose of defeating Hitler were now no longer confined to academic debate. The US arose with peerless hegemony in the realms of financ, production, and hence political, not to mention military power. The Soviet Union on the other hand with their own ideas of national sovereignty and individual liberties (or lack thereof) began jockeying for position as the benefactor of the world.
It took until the Berlin airlift and multiple violent national takeovers until the US realized the new state of affiars - they were now th leading proponent of 'democracy' and their erstwhile allies, the Soviets, were now trying to outbid them for the future of this new world.
Compounding this issue was the fact that the European empires were now in shambles all over the world. The race for hegemony now became a bit of a bidding war, cold though it may have been - usually, over which newly independent countries would choose to side with whom: puppet states of either the democractic ruling power or the socialists.
This led to scores of engagements over hitherto unknown nations and innumerable amounds of covert operations by the CIA and the KGB and their allies' counterparts. Every possible measure was employed by both sides, and the technology boom which the Second World War had launched did nothing but gain momentum as the competition heated up on both sides.
Global hegemony in a nuclear age called for further and further capability to strike first and have as much intellignece on the other side as possible. Von Braun's rocket program in Nazi Germany evolved into the Space Race, ushering in the new age, and with it new possibilities.
Von Neumann and Shannon et al. brought us number and information theory, eventually the personal computer as well as communication theory leading to that crowning achievement, the World Wide Web.
It must be noted that the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about was not the sole progenitor of Western technological revolution as Stuart Brand of the Merry Pranksters and the whole '60s movements in hallucinogenic, antiwar fuelled cultural backlash were and are heavily responsible for the direction so many of those technologies took once in civilian hands. This is not to mention the influence of the sometimes utopian visionaries like R Buckminster Fuller and the science fiction and underground writers of the '50s, '60s and '70s.
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