I 100% agree that academia is flawed. But I think the reason we're not making grand fundamental discoveries is that the "low-hanging fruit" was already done. W

I 100% agree that academia is flawed. But I think the reason we're not making grand fundamental discoveries is that the "low-hanging fruit" was already done. We definitely haven't discovered everything, and we're actually making way more discoveries much faster than people back then. But the things which are easy or even "not super hard" to discover have already been discovered. Most of the discoveries require background knowledge or are more "niche" things, because discoveries which are really big and affect everyone are easy to find and going to have everyone searching for them. In fact we could maybe discover a new continent. But it would have to be tiny or underwater or camouflaged or otherwise have some reason that despite having a map of the whole Earth and satellites everywhere, we haven't discovered it yet. When Columbus "discovered" America there weren't nearly as many ships floating around as there are boats/planes/satellites today.