As I’ve mentioned before there are 7 points at which this age pretty much maps over onto the early 1500′s.

1.) The internet is as revolutionary as the gutenberg press.
2.) The missions to Mars and beyond are just as impressive as columbus’s, de gama’s & magellan’s voyages.
3.) the search for gold among the aztecs 1519 and the incas 1532 mapped over onto the current age are still more than a decade and two away but the opening rounds of the quest for H3 on the moon may wind up being very similiar 10 and 20 years from now.
4.)The overturn of the roman era earth centered universe of Ptolemy by the copernican sun centered universe is about par with the big bang.
5.) We have not seen a luther put The Ninety-Five Theses on the door at worms as he did 1517. But that’s still a decade away. In the meantime its clear that the glory days of atheism from the fall of the bastille to the fall of the berlin wall–have passed. What’s left is an atheistic medieval ediface (psychology,socialogy,political science)much simliar to the catholic church of the middle ages. It makes for a lot of signs and symbols that amount to noise.
6.)Ferdinand and Isabella’s capture of the libraries of the Moors in cities like Cadiz brought the ancient greeks back to europe. today hardly a year goes by when some library or inscription of the ancient egyptians,babylonians,persians,sumerians,syrians,macedonians, romans,phoenicins etc doesn’t turn up some reference to an old/new testament character or place.
7.) the high point of islam in the 1500′s was the siege of vienna in 1532. that’s still another 25 years away. but islam is an old empire religion. and we are moving from old empire to new empire. (I’m defining here empire in the way churchill defined it–as “empires of the future will be empires of the mind”..)Then as now, Islam was a consumer of science and technology and not a producer.