A big source of the perceived slowdown partially comes from the grant-oriented, near-sighted, and incredibly toxic environment that today&#x27;s researchers have to deal with.<p>Making something faster, cheaper, or smaller is incremental progress with immediate payouts. It&#x27;s easy to sell that as a research project. But some newfangled warp drive? Flying cars? Self sustaining space stations? None of those things have any sort of short term payout, and so they don&#x27;t get dollars. Or at least, a lot fewer than they probably deserve.<p>And so we get incremental progress on existing technology instead. If we want more <i>new</i>, then we need to finance it. And that means making investments with 0 return for 20 years. That means financing people who are coming around at things they don&#x27;t understand with no certainty of financial return.