Modern civilization IS ignorant

Part of that is that in schools, they no longer teach students how to think (critical thinking) but what to think.

Accept what we indoctrinate you as “our truth” (ignore the FACTS and what you see with your own eyes).

Take your NPC programming and reject science, empirical data, common sense, etc.

They can’t accept anything that goes against their “programming”.

You can’t debate as facts are ignored when your irrational feelings refuses to accept them.

An ignorant population is more easily controlled than an actual Educated one.

That is why every newly formed authoritarian, dictatorship, communists/marxists, etc regimes terminates the educated and the useful idiots firsts.

When the communists Soviet Union fell, they had to throw out ALL the history tests/textbooks because of this falsehood being taught.

Yet today they want to rewrite history to support their ideology, even if it is factually wrong.  Instead of learning from history, they want to biased judgment on the past based on todays dogma.  Actively making people racists by forcing racism on our youth.

We are literally seeing a lost generation getting screwed by this attack on reality.

And when people start to speak up, they are shouted down as -ists and -phobes and name calling, shaming, etc.

This is gonna be the legacy of the liberal world, the “modern civilization”, where it was so corrupted from within, if we cannot reverse this trend we are doomed… Ancient Rome waiting for the barbarians to come in and finish the job the degenerates started.

An inevitable problem with scientific advancement is that we live in a universe governed by diminishing returns. While early scientific research in any particular field could be done out of a garage, each successive layer of advancement adds cost.

We are now at the stage where scientific research is expensive enough that politics, the human method of allocating resources, has become inextricably involved in deciding what gets researched, and thus the inevitable corruption of politics has infected science.

A corollary to the above is that as the scientific knowledge required to approach the bleeding edge of a field increases, the difficulty also increases to train any young person in all that knowledge, in order to make them scientifically useful in advancing the field. Politics aside, I suspect this is a natural variable promoting memorization over true understanding.

A similar problem is what I think of as the cherry-picking trap: the ability of Earth’s scientists (as a whole) to gather and store data has far exceeded our ability to analyze the data. Couple that with political control of scientific funding, and I am half-convinced that alone may be reason enough for the Fermi Paradox. :)

Finally, those in power have historically feared technological advancements that empowered ordinary people (consider, for example, the crossbow). Most elites not only have positive greed (the desire for more power), but also negative greed (the desire to eliminate competition and preserve their power delta), and thus they would much rather keep the technological pie of the human race small than expand it.

I suspect we are long past the time when technological advancement could liberate ordinary people from the elites. Elon Musk may prove me wrong, however. :)

@Vknid Oh, I agree: we’ll never run out of new things to find in the universe. :) It will just get harder (consider how expensive a tool the James Webb telescope is!).

As to hubris, I agree there too, and I think of it as “Urban Hubris”. Big cities have a way of immersing those whose live in them in human construction: skyscrapers tower around you, the greenspaces exist at the behest of people, and streets may even be laid out to fit the rising of the sun. Whenever I’m in a city, I feel a persistent background message, the Babylon Effect, if you will: “I am, and none else beside me”.

That atmosphere makes it easy to believe the lie that people are bigger than Nature, and that human imagination can be greater than reality. True scientific and technological progress can only occur, however, through great respect for the laws of the universe (one does not walk on the Moon through wishful thinking).

If people forget that they are not greater than those laws, we may expect scientific progress to collapse.

That’s one reason I find the modern worship of “science” to be dangerous: it glorifies humans over the universe. Science is not special: rather, the universe is so diversity dense it takes an army of specialists to begin to describe it. Yet we name discoveries after humans, as if we somehow invented the universe, and its mechanics didn’t exist until we noticed them.

Again, I suspect the above of being a reasonable explanation for the Fermi Paradox. :)