1) The source, "Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery" is obviously biased towards older innovations. It's difficult to judge a priori the impact of curr

1) The source, "Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery" is obviously biased towards older innovations. It's difficult to judge a priori the impact of current innovations. (and it's pretty outdated by now) 2) Breakthroughs are simply very impactful innovations -- of course earlier innovations are going to have an advantage: it's like saying "The total number of descendents per capta has been dwindling since the dawn of ages. We're doomed!". Claiming the rate of breakthroughs should remain constant is ridiculous. 3) Additionally, inventions are information. They're cumulative and knowledge instensive. We can't expect them to occur at a constant rate simply because it will get harder and harder to learn eveything required to invent some really new technology/scientific discovery. I like to think of human knowledge as a chunk of information that we compress and pass along. There's only so much we can compress, and our brain hasn't really changed significantly to accomodate and absorb more information faster. The result of course is specialization, and again specialized innovations by definition have limited scope. 4) To claim we had no specialized breakthroughs recently is even more ridiculous. Take the computing aspect of engineering alone (and math) and you probably get more small breakthroughs than there were inventions at all in the 18th century. Telecommunications also developed completely in the last few decades.