You are wasting your time. It seems quite apparent the person you are arguing with has a rather poor grasp of the history of science and technology and has als

You are wasting your time. It seems quite apparent the person you are arguing with has a rather poor grasp of the history of science and technology and has also bought in big-time to the 'great man' theory of history. Reality is much messier. It is going 1000 different directions all at once, mostly composed of regular people each working on a small thing and most of those small things are useless, and no one knows 99.9999% of what happened or is actually happening now. In the same way that 5 years from now is going to mostly be like today and 25 years from now will be almost unrecognizable for most people, if people cherry pick bits of the past they can imagine almost no progress with current practices but they also imagine themselves to be in the 0.1% in the past who might have had access to this proto-technology but today it costs less than a days labour.