[philovivero]

> 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 slightest.

Reusable rocket boosters? Battery tech? International money movement? Everything in tech from 2000 to present?

Sure, if you just define "everything since the 70's doesn't spark my imagination" then you win this round of nihilism, but the last 50 years have been amazing.

[tsimionescu]

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]

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?

[mongol]

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.