People have been saying we are reaching the end of improvements to battery chemistry for decades, and yet every year we keep pumping out small improvements and we double production capacity. PV solar continues to get cheaper as we increase capacity and apply the previous generation of chip technology to the production process. None of this is 'breakthrough' technology, just the slow and constant grind of iterative improvement.
The technological progress of the next hundred years will make the previous hundred look like we were all standing still. In the 20th century GPS was a bulky device, wireless comm was power hungry and slow, and any sort of real computing required an expensive lump at least the size of a small book -- two decades into the 21st century and I have a device in my pocket that is magic and for $10 I can put a SoC into an existing device (or something new) that has good GPS, fast cellular data, and sips power to give it “smarts” that would have been unprecedented in the late 20th.
The 20th century may have seen big changes in aerospace as we first learned how to master the field, but it was the dark ages when it comes to computing, materials sciences, biology, and solid-state physics -- every one of those fields will deliver results over the next 50 years that will make the 20th century look like the 18th century in terms of technological advancement.
The technological progress of the next hundred years will make the previous hundred look like we were all standing still. In the 20th century GPS was a bulky device, wireless comm was power hungry and slow, and any sort of real computing required an expensive lump at least the size of a small book -- two decades into the 21st century and I have a device in my pocket that is magic and for $10 I can put a SoC into an existing device (or something new) that has good GPS, fast cellular data, and sips power to give it “smarts” that would have been unprecedented in the late 20th.
The 20th century may have seen big changes in aerospace as we first learned how to master the field, but it was the dark ages when it comes to computing, materials sciences, biology, and solid-state physics -- every one of those fields will deliver results over the next 50 years that will make the 20th century look like the 18th century in terms of technological advancement.