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> Nothing discovered since the 70s compares to the advances in science and technology made in the first half of the twentieth century. Not buying that in the s

• tsimionescu 4y ago
  None of these technologies fundamentally improve anyone's life, and they are all incremental. Reusable rocket boosters are nice, but they're not making anyone's life better (they barely even reduce the costs of space flight). Battery tech is important, but again, it is a minor addition; the improvements so far don't even help with a renewable grid, as they are reliant on a very scarce resource - Lithium. International money transfer has existed since the 1600s, technology has really only sped things up; if anything, the main advances were legal, not techical; not to mention, there are good arguments to be made that the ease of directly owning factories and dev centers in other countries has been an overall negative for local businesses, replacing global trade and competition with behemoths doing global financing. And yes, everything in tech from the 2000s onwards is nice, but incremental and not any sort of leap for mankind, outisde of some medical technologies. And much of this is obvious. In the first half of the twentieth century, we went from steam locomotives to rockets capable of reaching the moon. In the second half, we were able to make some parts of those rockets reusbale. How can you claim with a straight face that the latter is a bigger advancement than the former?
  • powerhour 4y ago
    Since creating rockets capable of reaching the moon we've sent rovers to Mars and launched space telescopes capable of analyzing other galaxies billions of LY away. How can you claim with a straight face that the latter is a smaller advancement than the former?
    • ryan93 4y ago
      What economic value comes from that stuff? reusable rocket boosters are a rounding error on the American economy.
      • powerhour 4y ago
        I absolutely reject the premise that the we should only consider inventions that single-handedly revolutionize the world. A lot of these so-called incremental rounding errors add up to significant sums.
        • tsimionescu 4y ago
          No one is saying that the last 50 years have not been good for progress, or that these discoveries do not have value. But to claim that they amount to more progress than all of the rest of human history combined is objectively wrong, especially given the amazing advances of the 50-70 years preceding them (1900-1969), which did fundamentally revolutionize human knowledge and form the scientific advances that all subsequent progress is based on, from planes to rockets and from QM to fusion reactors today.
        • ryan93 4y ago
          Sorry i was specifically referring to the reusable boosters and astronomy.
    • tsimionescu 4y ago
      Landing on Mars is fundamentally similar to landing on the Moon - slightly easier in some ways (no humans, some atmosphere), slightly harder in others (much farther away, so need more energy; much slower comms, so impossible to manually correct anything). Launching a space telescope is easier than either, as you don't have to land. The robotics wasn't there to create the rover, so the mission wouldn't have made sense, but the technology that allowed NASA to land on the moon wpuld have allowed them to land something on Mars as well. Honestly, a better counter would have been the gravitational wave detector, the kind of precision we have achieved in measurement is awe-inspiring. On the other hand, the Michelson-Morley experiment was also quite impressive for its time, though a good few orders of magnitude less precise.
• mongol 4y ago
  Reusable rocket boosters are cool but if you compare their impact with for example manned flight and the invention of airplanes, I think you will find that the latter have been more important for human progress.