I don't know if I agree that the 70s through SpaceX landing weren't inventive. It seems possible that we got all the low-hanging inventive fruit from "physics"

I don't know if I agree that the 70s through SpaceX landing weren't inventive. It seems possible that we got all the low-hanging inventive fruit from "physics" by the 1970s. Through the 90s and 00s technological invention just wasn't of the physics variety. I'd consider software/AI/sans-human information synthesis--manifestly self-driving cars--as inventive. I'd also consider DNA manipulation, both construction and editing, inventive capabilities. In this regard it's more a matter of timing, and which fields are primed for inventive leaps at certain points in history.