The teenagers whose essays I read think we live in a phenomenally innovative time. Smartphones. Computers. The internet.
Yes, this all happened in the last 50 years.
In the 50 years before that we landed on the moon, split the atom, came up with the bomb, made cars and film widely available and saved countless lives with penicillin.
A millennial's musings 
Yeah, but their world, aka their smart phone, gets app updates almost daily, so there must be innovation, no? And that phone gets replaced by a much cooler one every year or so, so …
Can you spell planned obsolescence, boys and girls?
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Very important point! They probably don’t know because they’ve never seen anything different. My mam still has a Japanese vacuum cleaner bought in the 1980s that works…
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The 20th Century (or the 120th if you start from the beginning of the Holocene) most likely will never be repeated in regards to the impacts of the discoveries made then. Instead, progress (technological progress – society? Not so much), will probably come in much tinier skips. But many more of them, scientists standing on the shoulders of scientists, in an inverted pyramid kind of thing.
So, the rate of innovation, yeah, is increasing, but the distance traveled? A fraction of the prior century.
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Do you think that the rate of decline between these 2 points is representative of the general rate of decline in innovation? (Probably need to be a history expert to answer this – I certainly don’t know.) If so, it’s massive!
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There’s one feature of the 20th Century which stands above all the rest — energy. I’ve spoken to this before, (and you subscribe to the topic of medicine being in the top 10 — with which I agree), but without nearly free energy (NFE) there just wouldn’t have been the number of humans born, fed and prospered as there were. Fewer humans, fewer ideas.
That teamed with NFE for mining, construction, industry, exploration — the 20th century had everything going for it, even despite war and disease.
The exploitation of crude oil is the single greatest factor to why the 20th can probably never again be repeated (barring Mr. Fusion in every car and home).
A new NFE? Then we’ll once again see an explosion of amazing tech advances. Without it — meh, prolly not.
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I just popped over to 625points. These appear to be a compendium of your personal school notes — hundreds of individual papers and subjects. Yes? Is this a thing? Take essentially “publishable” notes, first off, and then compile them and make them available for browsing and reference? I could have never created such a resource. Never. I marvel at your accomplishment.
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Well at least I didn’t have to write a novel 😉
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Perhaps, they are still too young to appreciate that the innovations of today are built upon the innovations of past generations.
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I think so many of us have this idea that we live in a time that’s qualitatively different from what came before, which is kind of exaggerated and stops us from comparing it to other times meaningfully – and learning from it
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