Technology then: the Apollo program and tokamaks

The difference between the early smartphones and the modern ones mostly exists in quantity (of CPU cycles per second, bytes of memory, etc), not in quality. As far as I understand, OP is talking about the latter, not the former.

>he hasn't heard about the Wendelstein Stellarator
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X

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tecnology was not acesseble back then. so only people who wanted to do great things would have the money to spend on it.
today its cheap so anyone can use tecnology for any shit they want

People are 3d printing ears and making superintelligent HIV immune babies in vats while everyone walks around with a device in their pockets that allows live video feeds from anywhere on earth and makes Star Trek look like a documentary about the US navy in the 1970s.

>great men simply vanished
How are great men detected?
Seems to involve a lot of forgetting of second-raters, teebs. Have you considered that we can't see the trees for the forest just yet?

We are living on a dystopia at the very least since the turn of the century.
In a parallel timeline were things didn't go to shit, today it would be news that we discovered FTL or something of the sort, instead of a $1k pc stand with a fruit logo.

You're comparing cutting-edge scientific research projects to mass-market consumerist shit.
There was consumerist shit "then", which nobody remembers because it has no lasting value, the same way nobody will remember Juicero in 10 years.
And there are research projects "now", but you have to go looking for them, because there's no money to be made by shoving them in your face 24/7

Literally the only thing that's improved in the past 10 years. Driven by capitalism and competition.
Wendelstein 7-X is literally just a research tool. It's incredibly impressive, but it's basically useless. Fusion isn't going to happen any time soon because research gets a tiny budget.
That first part is Joe Rogan grade bullshit.

I'm not saying that there isn't research being done.
I'm just saying it's getting massively diminishing returns compared to what the rate of progress was in the early 20th century, and that research is increasingly about attracting grants and VC capital rather than actually doing anything useful or goal-oriented.

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>I'm just saying it's getting massively diminishing returns compared to what the rate of progress was in the early 20th century
Well, of course it is. We already figured out the obvious stuff. If nobody's ever built a particle accelerator before, you don't need a very big one to start making new breakthroughs in physics. And I hope you're not surprised to hear that a particle accelerator 4 inches in diameter is a whole lot cheaper and easier to build than one that's 17 miles long.

Diminishing returns? Complexity?

The difference is there are no more big firsts.
The last big thing in engineering was modern semiconductors 60 years ago.
The last big scientific paradigm shift was probably CMBR and the Big Bang again in the 60s.
Meanwhile in 19th and early 20th century not a decade went by without some major paradigm shift in natural sciences.

I'd rather believe that we've simply lost the social technology to organize productive forces into big civilizational projects than that we've just reached the end of the tech tree.

The renaissance kicked off the scientific revolution, which led to the industrial revolution, but we're now at the tail end of it; our production capability isn't going to increase like it did in the past. We've gotten to the point where it's difficult to continue scaling up. There's hardly any rivers we haven't already dammed, our cities are fuckhuge labyrinthine disasters, our infrastructure is aging and everyone hides their heads in the sand whenever it's brought up or denies the problem.

The path forward is more efficient use of resources (recycling, less waste, banning use of scarce shit like helium for RETARDED PURPOSES, etc.), and super projects like planned cities, floating oceanic superstructures, global scale desalination, orbital elevators, lunar factories, etc. But no one will actually do any of that. Because there are too many stupid people.

So here's what's REALLY going to happen:
-Arctic melts
-Conflicts over undersea resources between Russia, Europe, Canada, and the US
-Overpopulation leads to water and food shortages
-Countries stop exporting food
-Wars start over food
-Some idiot country accidentally attacks a satellite
-Debris from the explosion creates more debris, Kessler Syndrome begins
-All our satellites are destroyed by the debris cascade
-Can't use GPS or any other satellite based tech anymore; humans are now stranded on the Earth unless they figure out how to clear the debris field
-War recovery pushes us over the edge; we've finally run out of sand suitable for construction purposes and can no longer make cheap cement. Building costs skyrocket

CRISPR is gonna be the biggest fucking thing ever if we don't get rekt by climate.

The Western ruling classes will sooner drown the world in nuclear fire than admit eugenics into mainstream discourse.

Maybe we'd even reached a point where idiots don't believe that FTL is possible.

Science is at a standstill because retards are wasting time on bullshit like string theory and dark matter/energy, which are total nonsense and have no relevance to reality. Some of our greatest minds are running on hamster wheels instead of exploring new ground.

The "social technology to organize productive forces into big projects" still exists. It's called "money". It sounds to me like what you're really arguing is that governments aren't spending enough money on scientific research, and/or aren't spending their research funding wisely.

Which, actually, I totally agree with the former part of that, at least. I don't know enough about funding agency internals to really have an informed opinion on the latter.

We discovered gravitons you motherfucker. We laid out the entire standard model. Dark matter. Dark energy. Not our fault that you're uneducated.

>dark energy is bullshit.

There's literally no evidence to that statement and plenty against it. I agree that string theory gets too much funding though.

Same was true of abortions 100 years ago.

>which are total nonsense and have no relevance to reality
What? No, they're as relevant as Newton and buddies trying to explain Gravity. In the end this got us somewhere. And it's not nearly everyone that studies these questions anyhow.

What is wasted is most of the effort put into social sciences

Dark Matter and Dark Energy don't exist. There's a hole in the theory and they haven't figured out why, so they invented a convenient McGuffin to fit there and explain it. There is not a single piece of direct evidence pointing to the existence of dark matter or dark energy. Nothing but smoke and mirrors. It's like there's a piece of a puzzle missing, you just say to yourself "Eh, fuck it" and just cut up a piece of cardboard that roughly fits the proper shape and draw on it so it blends in nicely.

Science is about doing reproducible experiments and collecting hard evidence. Too many people seemed to have forgotten the basics.

that's a pretty stupid statement. Einstein's equations had a 'hole' which predicted something that hadn't yet been observed at the time (black holes).

And then Africa rises from the ashes to claim technological superiority

Silicon Valley used to be made up of pioneers at the cutting edge of tech, now it's just investors literally rolling the dice and guys looking to flip businesses or jump from ship to ship while building the best resume before landing at a 6/7 figure do-nothing gig.

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And we uncovered direct evidence of those black holes through observation and experimentation, that was good, hard science.

If someone ACTUALLY discovers this shit, I'll eat my words and apologize. Let's be real here, it's been a long fucking time since dark matter/energy was theorized, and a lot of technological progress has been made, yet we're no closer than we were originally. It's simply a wild guess that sounds like it makes sense. I don't buy it. I'm more inclined to believe that the forces we've already discovered at at play in ways we haven't thought of yet, likely due to us not thinking on large enough scales.

is this guy right? is this guy wrong? Im a total brainlet but I would like to know more

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we'll just CRISPRer our way into surviving in the new, unforgiving wasteland

Technology then: the Apollo program and tokamaks
Technology now: the ISS, photography of a black hole

dark matter/energy theory is literally the science version of 'We don't understand what's happening, it must be magic'. Can't be proven, can't be explained, can't be observed. They were probably too embarrassed to admit that they were being unable to explain what's causing this that they just made this dark shit up on the fly, and every science babby just rolled with it. So yeah, that user is probably right.

ISS hasn't been Technology of the Now for a long time

imagine being a complete fucking retard like this guy

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve

There's literally a Mars colony ship prototype being built in a field in Texas. Rockets now fly back and land themselves, and unlike the Shuttle it's actually cost effective. ITER is still slowly chugging towards completion, while half a dozen private companies are building fusion reactors of their own.

You retarded nigger.
Eugenics was literally practiced 100 years ago, including in America

>There's literally a Mars colony ship prototype being built in a field in Texas. Rockets now fly back and land themselves, and unlike the Shuttle it's actually cost effective. ITER is still slowly chugging towards completion, while half a dozen private companies are building fusion reactors of their own.
60s lostech slowly being recovered is not progress.

There are several alternative theories to dark matter which are no less valid, but everyone has a hard-on for dark matter, so they get ignored. Even if those theories make sense, they'll still get shot down because "they aren't as good as the dark matter theory" despite the fact that dark matter is just as outlandish a theory. Dark matter/energy is essentially science's "god" that everyone just assumes must exist, because if it didn't exist, nothing would make sense anymore. So we'll pretend it exists, even though there is no evidence that it does.

I'd highly recommend sitting this discussion out if you have zero comprehension of what's being discussed, user.

This, but unironically.
Dark matter is an ad hoc parameter created so the theory keeps working.
It's the new aether