[trudler]

I don't get you guys...

The geniuses can still make very valuable contributions to humanity. It's just that the general public will have a hard time understanding a new achievement. We already see this everywhere. "Higgs Teilchen" and so on. The media showed it, nobody cared and everyone was confused (found at the CERN in geneva). It only makes sense.

We still make immense progress, but in very detaily branches often, that people just want to use but not having to know about, because of the sheer complexity.

I wonder where the borders of humans will be. :) We might not be far from them anymore. Nowadays, to get into unknows territory, you need to do scientific research for decades often and an exceptional brain. Because you need to get the basics first, to which others created the paths.

The next real innovation I see will be affordable space travelling and populating other planets. Other than that, some minor stuff will be implemented like nuclear fusion reactors and the like.

The hardest thing will be to define "individuals" who contributed some of that stuff alone, as it used to be in the past (more or less).

[lordnacho]

> We still make immense progress, but in very detaily branches often

That's what the idea is. Once someone has figured out the basics eg energy conservation, relativity, etc, what's the next guy going to do? Put a small wrinkle on it at best. So the detaily thing is actually not immense progress, it's some small modification or application to a niche area.

[substation13]

Of course, but those contributions are more often to the edge of our knowledge and done by a large professional research team, as opposed to a smart aristocrat in their spare time. That's the difference.

The closest equivalent I can think of these days is Satoshi Nakamoto - assuming it's one person. But even their discovery is in a subfield of a subfield.