Is There a Stagnation in Our Science and Technology?
I have a friend who would ask the local people the following question every time he travels to a foreign country:
Compared with the quality of life in your local area twenty years ago, has your life now improved or deteriorated?
This is quite an interesting question because from the answer we can see changes both in personal life and changes in a region, even a country.
In this story, I want to discuss a big question that is somehow connected to all the human being on earth:
Is There a Stagnation in Our Science and Technology?
My answer is “Yes, there is”, and I want to explain this statement briefly:
Human scientific and technological progress has stagnated for about fifty years.
This seems quite absurd because the difference between our lives now and fifty years ago are quite significant, especially with the big changes brought by information technology.
However, I want to discuss it at a lager scale: the level of human civilization, not only people’s daily life. It is quite hard to cover such a huge topic, but I can give a basic conclusion:
The lower bound of human civilization has been constantly improving, but in recent 50 years, the upper limit of human civilization has not changed.
You may wonder if I say that something has greatly changed human civilization almost in all aspects, what am I referring to?
Industrial revolution.
In the book A Farewell to Alms, the economist Gregory Clark illustrated that
There is really only one thing that happened in human history, the industrial revolution that started around 1800. There is only a distinction between the world before the industrial revolution and the world after it. Other details of human history are interesting, but not so important.
What makes the industrial revolution such a special landmark event?
The answer is very simple:
It provides better controllable energy with high energy density for human being.
In fact, there are several other landmark events in history when human mastered the use of new energy, and we can name them as different industrial revolutions:
- The “Zeroth” Industrial Revolution: Utilization of fire, which marked the first chapter in human’s energy technology history. From purposeful use of fire onwards, humans started a separate path from other ancestral life forms.
- The First Industrial Revolution: Utilization of solid fossil fuels, represented by the steam engine. It also includes developments in mechanics and related disciplines.
- The Second Industrial Revolution: Utilization of petroleum-related energy, represented by the internal combustion engine. It also includes the development of electrical technology, as well as advancements in thermodynamics and electrical and electronic technology.
- The Third Industrial Revolution (potential): Utilization of nuclear energy, including developments in nuclear physics and high-energy physics.
As you can see, information technology is just an extremely niche development within electrical technology, and it is not qualified to be compared with the other mentioned advancements.
Let’s think about this question:
If a small asteroid with a diameter of 100 km were to strike Earth, how different would the survival rate of humans in 2024 be compared to 1969?
I chose the year 1969 because that’s when humans firstly landed on the moon, but since then, humans have not been able to reach further in space for fifty years. The answer to this question would be simply as:
There is no difference!
This is a very frustrating and surprising answer because many people subconsciously think that we have many promising new technologies emerging, especially those related to artificial intelligence, which will greatly change the world. However, artificial intelligence is less important as you might believe it to be.
Suppose the asteroid were to strike Earth ten years from now. Which one do you think would lead a better chance of survival for human being:
Developing artificial intelligence or advancing the space and aviation industry?
Honestly, I don’t believe our current level of civilization is much higher than fifty years ago. We have been stagnant for quite a while: our current civilization still relies on four types of energy sources: fossil fuels, nuclear fission, solar energy (quite limited), and planetary energy (geothermal, tidal, etc.), but the related technologies were mostly matured in the last century.
We still cannot fully utilize all the resources and energy of our home planet, our ability to use the energy provided by the sun has hardly changed (relative to the total power output of the sun), and we still cannot settle to somewhere beyond Earth on a notable scale.
Let’s come back to the back to the question raised in the beginning：
Is There a Stagnation in Our Science and Technology?
My negative answer may disappoint you, but I am not a pessimist. I just analyzed history objectively. In fact, in the millions of years of human evolution, there have been only a handful of landmark breakthroughs in science and technology, and most of the time there were periods of stagnation.
“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
― Carl Sagan
Thanks for reading!
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