Progress in physical things hasn't slowed since the 1970s, we just don't have the same low hanging fruit, especially in the realm of going from nothing to somet

Progress in physical things hasn't slowed since the 1970s, we just don't have the same low hanging fruit, especially in the realm of going from nothing to something. The automobile has changed as much in the last 20 years as in the previous 100. Ubiquitous embedded computing has transformed essentially everything, especially manufacturing. Hell, there's even a new flurry of innovation in spaceflight, with a very high chance that we'll see Martian colonies in the next few decades. That alone is nothing to sneeze at. But let me take a moment to drill down on one specific thing: pollution. In the mid-20th century pollution and abuse of the environment in the developed world was becoming a very serious, even existential problem. Ocean dumping was ubiquitous. Millions of deaths per year were occurring due to the sad state of air quality in major cities like LA, Pittsburgh, London, etc. There were disastrous individual events like the great smog of London in 1952. Many people aren't aware that that event killed more people than 9/11, that's how serious it was. It also made over 100k people seriously ill, aside from the impact it had on quality of life for people living in London in general. Since then there has been a massive uptick in the population of Los Angeles, there has been a massive increase in car ownership and total vehicle-miles driven, a massive increase in freight volumes on railroads and trucks. And yet, despite all that there has been an even more massive improvement in air quality, enabled by technological innovation. There are many, many more amazing stories along the same lines, with the cornerstone in every case being technology developed in the late 20th century as an enabling factor. One of the downsides of technology that works so well and so smoothly (which late 20th/early 21st century automobiles would fall in the category of) is that it can be difficult to garner the attention it deserves. Smooth functioning is the absence of problems, so it becomes too easy to simply set the baseline at the point where the technology is working (taking it for granted). But these amazing technologies (automobiles, the internet, etc.) are the product of herculean amounts of effort from an enormous number of incredibly skilled people. It should be amazing that we have handheld computers with wireless internet connectivity at broadband speeds, yet this is just the normal state of being in the developed world these days.