Comic Strips

This is certainly not what is currently happening in Europe.

Defusion of the Cold War with minimal armed conflicts. German reunification and the pioneering of the EU as a continent-wide collective project. The cementing of NATO as a hemisphere-wide security force, functionally ending the cross-border conflicts that had plagued the continent for centuries. Multiple national health care services with commensurate campaigns to eradicate horrifying diseases, culminating in perhaps the fastest and most successful response to an epidemic in history with the roll out of COVID vaccinations. Virtually no instances of famine across the continent in a century, despite this being commonplace in earlier eras. Near universal literacy. Each decade gives us a higher rate of college attendance.

You want to stack that up against any given decade in the 17th or 18th century?

Unless you define “current era” as “everything post WW2 until now”

You could start at the end of the Cold War, if thats your jam. But "The Age of Enlightment" spanned roughly from the publishing of Descartes' 1637 philosophy of Cogito, ergo sum until the Napoleonic Wars began in 1804.

We're quite literally living in The Space Age. I can't image any other civilization that might have sent probes into interstellar territory would be classified as dumb-dumbs.