Not to know times and seasons. As Scripture says. At a guess, not necessarily…
Disasters and war and famine, etc…have always happened; the only change are two factors - the media and which means that we are a more globally aware peoples and technological industries. In terms of pestilence, maybe more because of pollution. Wars…there are more people to be at war with, though there has always been war.
That said, terrain was less human friendly in the natural sense and the world poorer as a whole percentage with people having to live directly off the land where they could and governments barbaric with the word ‘inhumane’ not a word which was understood. Bar terrorists and international gangs and regions of the world today which stand out as areas of extreme poverty, there has been growth to some degree. All the same, while poverty was more widespread, it was less severe, probably, because as said people could attempt to live off the land and dating back even only a few hundred years ago, all the Kings and Queens and their acquaintances would have been eating sparrows and deer and having to hunt for it the same as everyone else (though they would have had unlimited hunting rights). There would have been a greater chance for survival if you were poorer in those days than today, terrible conditions attributed to the Industrial Revolution onwards, e.g. Five Points, The Great Depression and Edwardian and Victorian London and major cities…and etcetera). And of course, in the more developed centuries, being homeless and especially in the West would in the modern age still be a nightmare because of the unforgiving living conditions of…what is the ‘concrete jungle’.
There would have been tornados and tsunamis and avalanches and rock-slides and volcano eruptions, the same as in today’s world. There was an ice age and unprecedented cold winters, in regions of the world which is not normally the case. Are today’s natural events really any worse than one-thousand years ago?
Healthcare is better today, for the most part. If you had a bad tooth a couple of hundred years ago, there would have been no anaesthetic apart from a bottle of rum. No cures to illnesses, apart from leeches being put all over you. A dentistry practice in our town is entitled, ‘Tudor Clinic’ - I wonder whether they get any business.
There are improvements, there are consequences which make the world slightly worse off, but there are also major differences that make world domination more likely and this is technological arms combined with influence and business financing it.
Scripture speaks of a time when natural disasters will be very often. We know that this is the case, now, yet is even what we see on the news currently anything like how exaggerated it will be when the end times are here. If we had the media like it is in contemporary times, a few hundred years ago, you could make comparisons. So, we don’t know.
Another member here mentioned the increasing popularity of what I consider to be a cemetery of half-dead souls on social-media with profiteering and manipulation and lies put before us without a care. Is that enough, combined with other discussed topics, to herald the end of time as we know it. Or, are we simply reacting to doomsaying across YouTube?
The only way to tell, will be when someone rises up who causes terror to the nations and this is not an era to be looking forward to. Let’s just hope that when Christ returns, that He does so fairly early on into The Beast’s arrival.
I would say that from this era onward, it is possible that the End Times are upon us - from now until a few hundred years. Could be anytime. We would be talking about a global dystopian horizon. I would say this is going to be an image of something along the lines of The Terminator, with cyborgs programmed to annihilate those opposed to the bourgeoisie as initiated by a pool of a few very evil individuals (along with a monster at the helm).