I suggest these as things that have happened since the 1980s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectromechanical_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STED_microscopy

MEMs have become huge in the past couple of years and are very exciting. Think about everything that has an accelerometer in it these days!

STED means you can image way beyond the diffraction limit if you can use fluorescent dyes in your experiment. In some cases you can get to effectively Angstrom resolutions, which is insane.

The fact is simply that on the one hand, you don’t have enough distance from what is happening today to be able to objectively judge it, and on the other hand, you simply don’t hear about cool new stuff being developed today because that’s too specialized. How many people really knew about transistors in 1970? Not too many, I’d wager, outside certain professional and enthusiast circles.

The amount of stuff going on in biotechnology is just crazy. I’m not in that field, but let me just say that the stories I hear regularly from there give me this nice “Wow, I’m living in the future” feeling. Genetic engineering is an everyday technology, for example.

In my own field, amazing breakthroughs have been achieved in the last 20 years and are continually developed, although being a mathematician, this is of course mostly unapplied stuff. Anyway, there’s no reason to be a pessimist.

It’s been 40 years since a human reached the moon, what happened in that field since? Nothing. (all those conspiracy theories about the moon landing almost start to make sense).

Energy production, transportation, medicine, politics, are all frozen. Big monopolies are probably responsible for most of this, just the nature of the beast. Who knows.

The only area where I can seen some real breakthrough is telecommunications. The internet is by far the most important innovation ever, IMHO.

But on the other hand, when you get the chance to corner a smart person, through experience I have found most don’t have anything to offer other than the basics. If you want a general understanding of a concept, and it can’t be delivered in a few hours, the person explaining probably doesn’t understand it all that well to begin with.

Some people could take 5 years to explain a concept that Richard Feynman could explain in 5 minutes, it’s all about the presentation I suppose. I also don’t want to portray that in a few hours anything but a general understanding could be achieved, ie I don’t believe all problems are solvable in that time frame. For example, I can understand the general idea of video encoding in a few hours, but it might take years to actually create an mplayer equivalent.

You said :
“I highly doubt we are pressing the limits of human comprehension, as even the most skilled / difficult fields are very simple once a few hours in understanding are applied.”

Ok, either you are extremely/inhumanely smart (but then, you should be aware that not everyone is like you), or you have no idea what a cutting-edge field is like.

For example, I think it would take 2 or 3 years to a mathematician (with a PhD) to get up to date in another mathematical area (for example, from algebra to topology). And I am probably generous. So, for a non-mathematician (like yourself?), you would need at least 5 years of full time work to learn enough about a given field to be able to pretend you know it.

So, do you agree with me, or do you seriously believe you can learn a given field (let’s say, algebraic topology) in a few hours?

The computer has been invented (revolution), everything since is just a logical progression, get over it.

Man developed the airplane, now, where is that “Beam Me Up Scottie”?

Also, Man figured how to stack rocks to build shelter, now when can I “grow” my house a la the Tok’ra, or Superman (Christopher Reeve)?

Better yet, I really want to vacation on Risa, where is F-T-L?

But yes, certain segments of our life have stagnated mainly due to reasons already stated – risk avoidance – “I want my profit NOW’1

Innovation is constantly happening, revolution only happens by accident. If you live long enough, who knows, you maybe lucky enough to see it happen.

How much of that existed even TWO years ago?! Yeah, that’s what I thought. Go back 20 years and the people making Star Trek couldn’t even IMAGINE such a device.