Is it increasingly harder to make new discoveries...

Is it increasingly harder to make new discoveries? 400 years ago you could poke rocks to deduce laws of motion and revolutionize science. Today it's not so simple, and I'm not saying science in the past was simple to discover - not by a long shot.
But it seems like we haven't made any significant progress in art or science in the last 100 years which makes me think humanity has already peaked. The best paintings, compositions and quantum mechanics were made at least 100 years ago. Today, if you want to revolutionize science, you have to study membranes in the 11th dimension and shit I can't even imagine well enough to type here. It's getting too abstract for a 3-dimensional, temporal being that eats and poops and is constantly tricked by their hormones.

On the other hand, with the Internet and all, all of human kind is now connected like a worldwide superbrain that is no longer wondering about these questions alone. We're a single organism and currently using our collective processing power to solve mysteries.
Still, huge breakthroughs don't happen anymore. Why?
There is a downside to the Internet phenomenon, too. Having instant access to _everything_ in existence has made less and less people want to become scholars. Your brain thinks it's more rewarding to receive dopamine through porn and Youtube vids than studying. Every generation of new humans seems to have a shorter attention span than the previous.

All in all, it seems that as the number of possible discoveries approaches zero, the number of qualified scientists to do this approaches zero as well. All of this leads to a situation where the probability of a human solving the hardest problem of all, is basically zero.

You're right in that;
1. The "low hanging" fruit has been picked. but
2. We have better tools now.
But the number of possible discoveries isn't approaching zero. Not even close.
Lord Kelvin, at the beginning of the 20th century, famously said physics was finished; nothing remained except for measuring everything to more decimal places.
There were only "two small clouds" left unexplained. Those turned out to be the first hints of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
The point is you never know until AFTERWARDS what'll be important.

Even if you despair of physics (ignoring gravitational radiation, dark matter, and dark energy, as well as quantum gravity) there's still vast unexplored terrain in Biology.

Lord Kelvin is famous. I can't recall who, late in the 19th century, called for closing down the Patent Office because "everything had already been invented."

I'm from the future and it's awful in there.
At first we had cyborgs but no synthetic material could replace biological tissue - except actual biological tissue itself.

The sex doll business has developed to a point where they grow actual biological fetuses into fully human sex dolls. Yes, they come from fertilized eggs. The process works so that they delete the consciousness of the fetus before it gets to the point where it's a new human individual, so people consider this moral. They're just organically growing the biological shell of a human being.
They upload a fake consciousness into its brain so it can move and behave like a human but is completely programmable and has no "soul".

The army uses this technology as well.

In the future you distinguish these "soul-less" humans from actual humans by their red hair and freckles.

...

>EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!
>t. well paid-autist that produces literally nothing

what sort of incoherent baiting shitpost is this. delete this steaming pile of crap immediately.

This post started out fine and then just turned into pseud non sense with no evidence to support your wild opinions.

not OP but
>literally every academically developed country working on how to solve the Riemann hypothesis for 160 years and no answer yet

>delete this steaming pile of crap immediately.

nah

I can tell you're not an R&D type then. The truth is that inventions and discoveries are happening so fucking fast and so fucking constantly that everyone kinda takes them for granted. This is most obvious in medical research fields, but is also obvious in technical fields like computers and pure math.

The difference now is that individual researchers no longer get the credit for a new invention or idea. They are almost always created by teams of researchers, or by researchers building on the work of other researchers building on the work of other researchers. As a result you have fewer Einstein style a-ha moments in science. But the results are just as profound, if not more profound.

>They are almost always created by teams of researchers

I hate this. I'm not the teamworking type and I have no particular love for helping humanity either.

As a random for example, go take a look at all the modern medicines that can be used in treatment for multiple sclerosis. Now in 1990, the ONLY possible treatment for MS was corticosteroids to reduce some of the inflammation temporarily. Since 1990, there are like a dozen drugs that apparently CURE MS for a significant percentage of people. You didn't hear about it because this kind of shit is happening all the time now.

They're really just fine tuning the technical shit. The theories have been around forever.

These aren't "scientific advances", no matter how much you get paid.

Go look at the Minimed 670G. It is basically an artificial pancreas for type 1 diabetes. Go look at Opdivo, it's a drug that causes cancer patients who typically died in a year, to be alive in 5 years.

>You didn't hear about it because this kind of shit is happening all the time now.

Actually I didnt hear about it because whether it actually works or not is questionable.

No, they are not fine tuning technical shit, and yes these are huge technical advances if your life depends on them. You need to get over that misanthropy if you wanna change the world, all this work was done by people who actually want to make the world a better place.

"make the world a better place"

lol. Ive heard that before...

>makes the world a better place for himself
>by making the world a shithole for the vast majority

then don't opine on whether science is "over" yet. If you don't have the technical ability to determine whether a scientific improvement is significant, and you have no desire to learn, then your opinion is irrelevant in every possible way, no?

>all this work was done by people who actually want to make the world a better place

more like all this work was done by people who got themselves lucrative contracts to play hero.

If you only knew who you were talking to...

I'm studying to become a scientist yet I seriously question technological development.

The Internet and social media was a horrible mistake and you have to admit it. Our generation is a bunch of lazy F5 mashing idiots whose brain has been hardwired to demand constant entertainment and attention.

we've made great strides in materials science in the last 100 years

people have been saying the same thing about people who watch TV for 50 years, before that it was radio or magazines

With the current zeitgeist it is.

Huh it turns out history is cyclical and the concerns then are valid now. Also, normalfag status quo zombies are fucking retarded in every age.

Wow, user, you're a fag. Do your parents know?

Indeed I cannot waiteth for the days of jousting to returneth

Next year.

I'm not saying the status quo will or should continue forever, just that we're not backsliding

Oh we are and you're retarded if you haven't noticed.

dude I'm 29 and other than some economic messiness and isolated events like 9/11 it's only gotten better for as long as I can remember
if you're talking century time-scales then I can't really make a statement there

Well, you're a fucking idiot because I'm older than you and it's gotten worse. And it's about to get a lot fucking worse.

anecdotal.

I can do that too.

More people asking for change than there used to be

>More people asking for change than there used to be

way WAY more, in fact...

Underrated post. Every generation thinks the next one is lazier because they have it easier. Though having it easier is up for debate

Again, you're wrong and stupid. History moves in cycles. Some generations really are worse than others. The boomers were cancer, X was okay, and the newest generations are worse than the boomers. Pretty much anything born after the 80s should be genocided.

We have a lot better tools so there isn't an excuse. 100 years ago you had to be a math autist to be a capable scientist. Now, with computers, a lot more people, especially those who can think abstractly, can participate in science and mathematics. Thank you, computers.

>being this blue-pilled on basic history

Yeah, everything's just getting better because of Elon Musk's flying cars fantasy, you enormous faggot.

Also, did you know there are less wars??

*holds up iPhone*

again, people have been saying that for ages, and I've personally seen Veeky Forums says that for years, there has not been shit one so far
we live in a democratic bureaucratic capitalist society, one of the most stable human arrangements known to exist, all of those things are great for ensuring nothing really good or really bad will happen
your claim is just as anecdotal

There are two things every generation has claimed:

1) We've reached the peak of human understanding.

2) The end of the world is nigh.

How often have they been right?

We're in a position where our cosmology demands that the bulk of the universe be made up of stuff we've never managed to detect with properties unlike any sort of matter or energy we've ever seen. Where we've flipped our model of the universe on its head four times in the last century alone. We were, less than two decades ago, absolutely astonished to discover a fundamental fact about the nature of the universe that defied every expectation, namely that its expansion is accelerating. We're still using silicon chips with binary stacks despite having a dozen, magnitudes better, solutions on drawing boards and experimental scales for decades, yet we find outselves claiming we're nearing our maximum computing potential. We still don't have proper fusion, we still don't truly understand some of the core mechanics of our sun, we still don't have a handle on, well, nearly anything you can name, really - every single field of science is full of unsolved mysteries and conundrums, and every time we find a solution for one, it merely opens the door to a dozen more. ...and fucking CRISPR is on the table, just waiting to fundamentally change mankind itself.

Science, as we know it, has been around a handful of centuries. It's still in its infancy. It would take Carl Sagan to count all the billions and billions of miles we are away from reaching the end of that particular road...

Provided, of course, the second constant claim of every generation doesn't come true before then.

Hmm, that quote actually makes sense though. If he is in charge of patents then he probably noticed how fewer and fewer patents were being registered year after year. So yeah, everything that can be invented has been invented [therefore, science needs to advance in some way in order for us to be able to invent new things].

>again, people have been saying that for ages
Yes, and they've been right. For ages. What part of this are you not grasping, you stupid son of a bitch.

We've had more patents registered in the past year than that guy saw in a lifetime.

>2) The end of the world is nigh.
Fucking status quo zombies don't grasp anything. Humans have been saying the end of the world is nigh because it ALWAYS HAS BEEN. A few thousand years is NOTHING. And humans have always been working industriously on destroying themselves and the biosphere. Congratulations, you proved the ancients right by being fucking stupid.

>How often have they been right?
FUCKING ALWAYS.

I'm not grasping the fucking EVIDENCE

Yeah... but it made sense for his time.
A monkey can show more reading comprehension in a year than you in a lifetime.

How about you exist? If that isn't the proof of thousands of years of human existence ending in catastrophe, I don't fucking know what is.

The general claim has been that the current generation will see the end of the world. Granted, it's been mostly Christian fundamentalists making that claim, since Constantine, if not before.

Granted, now we got Stephen Hawking saying it, and making Veeky Forums snigger accordingly.

This is the end of the world, stupid. Economic systems, societies, cultures, the biosphere - they're all in freefall. Not NEAR, NOW. The end is not coming. It's fucking here. You're living it. You're all just too god damned brain-rotted to notice. You're no more capable of distinguishing a good setting from a bad one than a pig is to realize slop is filthy. This age designed your fallen kind as you continue to design it.

that's not relevant to a conversation about things recently going south
>id's habbening
shouldn't you be elsewhere?

They're all in flux, but they'll all be here, in one form or another, for the remainder of the generation, and probably the next. Things will get worse in some ways and better in others... Even if, while not quite the alarmist you are, I do sometimes find it hard to see those bits that are going to get better myself. (Especially with Star Wars, the Internet, and any hope for the US to ever come to peace with anyone in the Middle East it can't buy, all being destroyed in the same month.)

>We have a lot better tools so there isn't an excuse. 100 years ago you had to be a math autist to be a capable scientist. Now, with computers, a lot more people, especially those who can think abstractly, can participate in science and mathematics. Thank you, computers.

Once AI is useful and friendly man and machine will accomplish more than ever thought possible.

most things are seen from one perspective, having extinguished the others, and those routes to new discoveries destroyed

so, revive the extinguished routes

Your brain does not believe it to be more rewarding, if you were to complete an exam and believe you did well on it, then you would feel really good for you achieved something which was challenging and actually helped you. Porn is just a no risk low reward which comes instantly and stops instantly until you do it again.

That image just made me mad.

The ignorance of being a follower.

you know Ken M is a notorious troll, right?

>400 years ago you could poke rocks to deduce laws of motion and revolutionize science

It's too easy to say that when you have all the work of great minds compiled and digested on books. You are just reading content.

>If you only knew who you were talking to...

a retard