Historians of the medieval era hate the term "dark ages", even in relation to Europe. The whole notion that the Roman Empire went poof one day and then everything sucked for 1000 years is just cartoonishly wrong.
I once heard in some history tv show that it's called "dark ages" not because of the bad living conditions, but because we know so few things about it, compared to other history periods.
Keeping in mind that a single axis for progress is reductive: also, don't forget that there have been and will be backslides. For example, European colonialism set back a lot of progressive / alternative cultures, genociding them or converting them to something that better-served the interests of empire (e.g., race rules).
Did you know that "to google something" is the proprietary version of "to search something"? See!!! Proprietary software has integrated into conversational phrases! *It's time to stop!*
I envy you because I don't know how to use Inkscape properly (it looks very complicated). I don't really need/use it, so yeah.
Enough is enough. It's time to make this year the year of Linux. /s
I mean, I mostly enjoy my FOSS (there are some issues). At least I don't have to pay thousands of dollars or pirate it (and hiding it) only to find out that it's Linux incompatible.
We may look back at these days - you know, where not all diseases kill you, and in fact were super easily handled, barely an inconvenience!:-P - and wish to have such things as "antibiotics" again, before bacteria all became immune to them.
Or maybe the world will rally together, and start funding research into alternatives quickly enough for it to matter? Just like climate change too...
It's a good thing that people aren't anti-science now, bc that surely would be a problem if we want to reach that bright shiny happy future we keep hoping for. :-|
Our existing antibiotics would be perfectly fine, if they were used responsibly instead of mass breeding resistant bacteria to mass breed animals under terrible conditions because capitalism.
In the same wake climate change would be much easier to deal with if the economic system wasnt designed around infinite growth of production and consumption.
It is very naive to think that the collective endgoal of humanity is to have super health when right now the only goal is which super power will dominate over the others, killing everyone who stands on their way
If you want to be "accurate" middle age and now would be the same line (because the last millennia is about 0.33...% of homo sapien's history) and bright future would be pretty fucking long because there's at least a billion years ahead of us for life on Earth, probably more...
That's just humans though, plenty of life will go on living and they will probably be better off without a global apex predator in their way. That will be the true bright future for life on Earth. Maybe we'll eventually manage to better ourselves and solve the climate problems we're facing too, time will tell.
One thing though, some sections of the planet will become uninhabitable for humans, not all though. People have been living in the scorching heat of the desert for thousands of years, if the average summer temperature closer to the poles increases to 27 instead of 22, people will manage to survive there, worst case they'll adopt a nomadic lifestyle again.