A big source of the perceived slowdown partially comes from the grant-oriented, near-sighted, and incredibly toxic environment that today's researchers have to

A big source of the perceived slowdown partially comes from the grant-oriented, near-sighted, and incredibly toxic environment that today's researchers have to deal with. Making something faster, cheaper, or smaller is incremental progress with immediate payouts. It's easy to sell that as a research project. But some newfangled warp drive? Flying cars? Self sustaining space stations? None of those things have any sort of short term payout, and so they don't get dollars. Or at least, a lot fewer than they probably deserve. And so we get incremental progress on existing technology instead. If we want more new, then we need to finance it. And that means making investments with 0 return for 20 years. That means financing people who are coming around at things they don't understand with no certainty of financial return.