That's not expected at all, because we simply cannot say. Logistic curves look temptingly like exponential curves when you're only half way up. And some researchers have implied that perhaps we're already more than half way up, and we've started to level off. For example, it has been said that the scientific advances we've been making in the last few decades have been less impactful than in the half-century before that. E.g.:
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Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
Michael Park ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8373-54801, Erin Leahey2 & Russell J. Funk ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6670-49811
Nature volume 613, pages 138–144 (2023)
Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes1,2, wherein previous accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton's words, 'stand on the shoulders of giants'3,4,5,6,7. Recent decades have witnessed exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, thereby creating conditions that should be ripe for major advances8,9. Yet contrary to this view, studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields10,11. Here, we analyse these claims at scale across six decades, using data on 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents from six large-scale datasets, together with a new quantitative metric—the CD index12—that characterizes how papers and patents change networks of citations in science and technology. We find that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. This pattern holds universally across fields and is robust across multiple different citation- and text-based metrics1,13,14,15,16,17. Subsequently, we link this decline in disruptiveness to a narrowing in the use of previous knowledge, allowing us to reconcile the patterns we observe with the 'shoulders of giants' view. We find that the observed declines are unlikely to be driven by changes in the quality of published science, citation practices or field-specific factors. Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x
Other scientists have questioned their analysis, but one particularly critical counter to it, Macher et al., Research Policy 52 (2024) /Is there a secular decline in disruptive patents? Correcting for measurement bias/ found a methodological error, redrew the curves, and concluded the opposite. However, it's possible to interpret the new graphs as still showing a decline. The debate still continues - there's plenty of opportunity to publish papers on this subject!
Of course, a truly disruptive advance might exist that could kickstart a whole new run of innovative research and technology, but there's no reason for one to exist. There were far better reasons for the previous advances we made to exist, as there were glaring inexplainables staring us right in the face. Giving us sunburn. We didn't know that the sun was mostly hydrogen until Cecilia Payne proposed that in 1925, and due to the state of science at the time, we still didn't know it after she'd discovered it, we had to wait for a man to discover it:
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Payne was able to accurately relate the spectral classes of stars to their actual temperatures by applying Indian physicist Meghnad Saha's ionization theory. She showed that the great variation in stellar absorption lines was due to differing amounts of ionization at different temperatures, not to different amounts of elements. She found that silicon, carbon, and other common metals seen in the Sun's spectrum were present in about the same relative amounts as on Earth, in agreement with the accepted belief of the time, which held that the stars had approximately the same elemental composition as the Earth. However, she found that helium and particularly hydrogen were vastly more abundant (for hydrogen, by a factor of about one million).[13] Her thesis concluded that hydrogen was the overwhelming constituent of stars, making it the most abundant element in the Universe.[14]
However, when Payne's dissertation was reviewed, astronomer Henry Norris Russell, who stood by the theories of American physicist Henry Rowland, dissuaded her from concluding that the composition of the Sun was predominantly hydrogen because it would contradict the scientific consensus of the time that the elemental composition of the Sun and the Earth were similar.[15] In 1914, he had written in an academic article:
The agreement of the solar and terrestrial lists is such as to confirm very strongly Rowland's opinion that, if the Earth's crust should be raised to the temperature of the Sun's atmosphere, it would give a very similar absorption spectrum. The spectra of the Sun and other stars were similar, so it appeared that the relative abundance of elements in the universe was like that in Earth's crust.[16]
Payne consequently described her results as "spurious".[12]: 186 [14] A few years later, astronomer Otto Struve described her work as "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy".[17] Russell also realized she was correct when he derived the same results by different means. In 1929, he published his findings in a paper that briefly acknowledged Payne's earlier work and discovery, including the mention that "[t]he most important previous determination of the abundance of the elements by astrophysical means is that by Miss Payne [...]".[18] Nevertheless, he was generally credited for the conclusions she had reached four years prior.[19][20][21]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-Gaposchkin
It seems absurd now that something that behaves in such an un-earthlike way as the sun was considered as just a very hot very large earth. We already knew it was highly energetic and active - flinging out vast plumes of helium, whose spectral lines do stand out against the background black body spectrum. What made the very large earth so very hot? We knew from the gas giants that mere size is not enough to prevent you cooling down over countless millennia[*]. The prevailing theories, containing no endogenous heat generation, were thoroughly inadequate to explain what we saw every day. We knew there was a gap to fill.
What's our current gap?
- The muon's anomalous g-2, aμ = 0.00116592059(22) is 5.1 sigma from standard model predictions? What kind of solution to that enigma would be a source of energy or propulsion?
- dark matter and sterile neutrinos don't fit in the standard ? How would fitting them in enable us to store or harness the energy they posess - the whole point of them is that they don't interact with us except gravitationally.
- our positive vacuum energy might be only a local minimum, so potentially there's zero point energy available? No, as such a drop would trip the rest of the universe into the lower energy state at the speed of light; it's not harnessable at all, it's basically the end of the universe as we know it.
- name your gap, I'll see if I can address it. (Unless it's "what if particles with property X exist?", because those aren't gaps that need explaining, that's just science fiction you wish to be true.)
None of the gaps we currently have - and there are of course hundreds of them - point to being able to solve the real world problems that would be needed to make interstellar travel practical, or even useful.
[* Pointless linguistic aside: I so wanted to use the word "billennia", but it's more cute than meaningful; it's not actually following a sensible pattern, if anything, it's breaking one.]
Point taken!
