Mankind has seen progress since day 1 probably. since then we have come a very long way. From being just hunters to where we are now it’s a huge leap of progress. What is interesting to understand is the time frame for such a progress. We took nearly 4000+ years for the progress. A deeper study shows that mankind has made more progress in the past 3 centuries than the combined progress of times before. Same is the case with past 3 decades having a better comparison to the past 3 centuries. in general the pace of innovation, development and progress is ever increasing exponentially.
Lets keep progress aside for a few secs and look at how black holes are formed, there a quite a lot ways by which they are formed, out which high energy collisions are one of the ways in which they could be created. In principle, black holes could be formed in high-energy collisions that achieve sufficient density. Just for a second imagine if we are the high energy particles, the pace at which innovation, growth and progress is happening we would be achieving the sufficient density in a few more years if not by Dec 12 ;).
We had a safer and greener earth 300 years ago, population was in control, progress, innovation was sufficient. Today progress and innovation happens every second, with out even we being sure if its progress that we are making. The time that we all living now is constantly changing, so volatile that we never know when things reach the critical point and the earth just unplugs and restarts due to overload. It is certain that, mankind will exist only till the time they don’t push the limits beyond earth’s threshold, and looking at the world now, we are very close to that threshold, probably just minutes or seconds away (if decades were minutes in a thousand years)