Comment by TomSwirly
3 years ago
> but in the long run it is much faster than anyone expects
I saw the first Moon landing.
At the time, everyone, the experts, the public, everyone, expected us to colonize the Solar System within a few decades. We expected that fusion power would be too cheap to meter and that burning fossil fuels would be a thing of the past. We expected human life expectancy would soon rise to over a century in developed countries.
Serious, respected scientists said all these things, and everyone took them for granted.
None of these things did in fact come to pass.
Humans have not ventured in person even as far as the Moon in fifty years.
Our first atomic "pile" was 80 years ago in a few months, and we still don't have a fusion reactor. The tokamak was the big fusion design 50 years ago, and it still is, and we are better at them, but we still are nowhere near actually producing real power.
Life expectancy increases stalled quite fast, and then life expectancies started to regress. Americans have lost about two years of their life, basically because of their group mistrust of medical science.
It is simply diminishing returns on the amazing discovery that is the scientific method - it is unavoidable.
> Americans have lost about two years of their life, basically because of their group mistrust of medical science.
I don't think that's the actual reason for the decline, it's more likely another effect of the real cause. While I'm not American, it's the same story all over the world: our diet keeps getting worse, there is plastic everywhere which breaks down into micro plastics which end up in the water we drink etc. We're preparing our food with carcinogenic utensils (everything "non stick") and all of our western societies went from a healthy worker/academic career choice into mostly just getting exploited by the established players.
There have been a lot of societal changes since the post WW2 times, and summing that up into "losing trust in medical science" is a very confusing take, especially if you consider all the medical professionals that spread outright lies to profit. (The person that started the antivax movement was a doctor as a notorious example)
And drug companies that sold bad medicines (knowingly!) As they judged the cost of liability to be lower then the cost of not selling the drug.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that any of these things are causing this decline either. Our societies have just changed too much since to make any confident claims about their impact.