Technological Advancement since the 1940's

[Grumpy]

An interesting trend occurred to me when I found this timeline of technological advancement since the 1940's:
https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/technological-advancements-from-1940s-to-date

We have the internet, cell phones, and kidney dialysis, but most vehicles still use fossil fuels and space travel is with rockets.

Smallpox was certified as eradicated in 1979.

The human genome project was completed in 2003.

Computers have advanced by leaps and bounds.

We should have bases on the moon, deep-space stations in orbit, and colonies on Mars by now.

My impression is that we are being deliberately held to a limited technological level in the fields of energy and propulsion. 

Physics and astronomy have become grossly over-complicated to point that no one understands anything.
I believe that advances were made, and subsequently suppressed, forcing these fields of science into a perpetual
cycle of theorizing, never knowing that many things said to be incorrect, actually are correct.

[Verpies]

Yes, not many advances have been qualitative since then.
...they just seem mostly quantitative - such as the advancement from a transistor to a CPU.

[ion]

I totally agree Science seems to have hit a wall in a few important areas, which makes me very suspicious. (antigravity and alternate energy).

In the US, low friction rail transportation of goods was done away with by the Rockefellers and Standard Oil in favor of high friction rubber tired transportation of goods across the country. It uses much more oil!

NASA is part of the military industrial complex, and those huge rocket lifters make a lot of money for Thiokol Chemical (the old name) each time one blasts off, so I imagine this will not change until people wake up and grow weary of a large  phallus attempting to penetrate space. We should be much further along than this, and probably are, but it is all probably behind "the show".

[Farmhand]

I don't understand why people even want to leave this planet.

The endeavour to do stuff in space and so forth wastes so much money that it must surely cause the hastened demise of this planet. If we spent all that money and effort to simply create a cleaner planet Earth then we would all be better off. The space exploration expenditure does nothing for me, it just seems like a big waste.

I am all for progress but in my opinion our place is here on this planet. How dare we begin to pollute other planets and space when we cannot even live here in a responsible and peaceful way. Makes no sense to me. In my opinion an enormous amount of government research funding for many different things should be stopped in favour of tax cuts and cleaning up the filth on this planet.

..

[Grumpy]

If half of the people on this planet left for space, then we would cut pollution by half.

Our pollution problem is exacerbated by our technological plateau. 
I believe our current technological level has been artificially slowed by an unwillingness to share technology.
There may be practical reasons for this, such as national security, or capitalism. 
It may stem from our selfish nature as human beings.