Does it? We visited the moon and created the internet in the span of one generation. We are arguably in the most innovative scientific period in our history.
Nope. Our most important achievement has been to create a system where smart people spend their life trying to get people to click on ads, using morally dubious dark-patterns.
The climate change issue is mostly a political problem, as sustainable ways of modern living have been known for decades, created by society and politicians not caring about the global impacts of local decisions. The almost-dystopian socialmedia/pervasive-ads/misinformation/compromised-democracy internet landscape is mostly a technological problem, an outcome of computer scientists and engineers just building things without thinking of the ethics of their technology. Nobody campaigned to build facebook, like they campaigned to build another coal power plant or another highway. The nerds and politicians alike are on their way to destroy the world - one compromising our minds, the other poisoning our air.
The failure of our times has been just this. Not realizing that when what you are doing has global impact you need to think hard about its effects and be crystal clear on the ethics of it all. Perhaps the original sin was not pushing for more hands-on ethics training for every child and college student.
To be fair I think the severity of climate change has only come into mainstream focus in the past 5-10 years. Just as one data point, when I was shopping for a car in 2012, I did not even consider CO2 emissions. Now, climate change is top of mind for me. I now own an electric car, stopped eating beef, mostly eliminated travel, etc... I'm not saying this will make a difference overall, but I imagine others feel similarly, and a lot of young people will hopefully be in a position to work on solving some of these problems.
Thanks to fossil fuel companies like Exxon spending billions to confuse the general public, bribe politicians and do everything else needed to spread lies so they could keep their profits up. Exxons own research already confirmed climate change was caused by fossil fuels in the 1970s, yet they sat on it doing nothing.
The Kyoto Protocol was in 1997, but the US didn’t ratify it because the API managed to influence US politicians enough to cast doubt on the problem.
The first powered aircraft flew in the 1900s, and by the 1940s we had jet aircraft. The Boeing 747 was introduced in the 1960s, and in the 1970s we had supersonic flight. The pace of innovation has stalled since.
Concorde was testing by 1969, but didn't carry passengers until 1976.
The USSR's Tu-144 actually beat Concorde on both dates -- 1968 and 1975. Though it also beat Concorde, by 25 years, on retirement from passenger service: 1978.
Interesting though you cite mainly engineering achievements, I had a similar feeling that we are in a phase of engineering/materials advancements, particularly sub-microscale in the post-WW2 period. But having said that, technological advances of this kind tend to end up as historical footnotes, no matter how amazing they seem at the time.
I think vaccines and antibiotics are probably our era’s truly great technological advance that kids will still learn about post 26th century. But quantum mechanics and relativity are really our Pythagoras’ theorem equivalents, and will stay in textbooks for a very, very long time.
