Problems that have proven incredibly difficult over decades of people working on them are unlikely to be suddenly resolved by a single breakthrough. But, I mean, there has been so much being discovered about the universe around us, it’s honestly hard to pick. The last decade gave us the first detection of gravity waves, pictures of a black hole, new fossils that give us ideas about not just evolution but even colors and ecology of ancient life, an entire world of hidden microbes opening up to view. Even saying there’s been no progress on cancer isn’t true. It just…tends not to look like this, where all of a sudden everything is solved all at once.
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I don’t disagree, but I’m not a scientist so my exposure to all that is limited. I get hints of it here and there- in particular, all the findings about trees communicating through mycelium and such is pretty astounding and huge. Rationally, I know science is figuring stuff out… but without dramatic solutions to the ever-increasing number of existential threats facing the planet, it sometimes feels like we’re learning amazing things about species that are just going to be extinct in 10 years, or making great strides in knowledge that will be useless because civilization will collapse into chaos or humanity will be mostly extinct within the next century. I realize even this isn’t necessarily rational- maybe solutions will come from unexpected places. Humanity just is in dire, dire need of hope right now and the breakthroughs that would bring it are nowhere to be found.
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… it blew my mind that they have mapped the whole region around the Center of the Galaxy and now we can look at 3D models of individual stars’ orbits around the Hole 
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Alas, all the serious threats we face right now are not scientific challenges but political ones. I mean, sure, working fusion would help with climate change…but it’s not like we’re still burning fossil fuels because we haven’t known what else to do for the last half century. Covid was as you said a great scientific success, where vaccines were found quickly and we actually knew exactly what to do in the meantime, and it killed millions anyway because people just didn’t want to.
What we need is for society to stop devoting all its resources into making a handful of people richer by grinding everything on earth into whatever type of paperclips they like. I don’t think we can discover any way around that. 
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Who says humanity will mostly be extinct within the next century?
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Whoa there. That’s a big leap from not being able to reproduce the results to assuming they were faked. It’s entirely possible they observed measurements indicating superconductivity but that it was due to in instrument error, experimental setup error, or even that it was true but inconsistent. Heck, it might still be reproduced, though that is looking less likely.
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One word - Gardasil
Yes, it’s just one type of cancer, but it’s now basically preventable if we can just get the fundies to grow the fuck up
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… “mostly extinct” not really being a thing
Terms like “existential threat” get thrown around a lot because apparently “global warming really really sucks” isn’t enough of an emergency 
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Arguably, we can. It’s not easy, but if you look back at Pharaoh worship, or the Divine Right of Kings, or Landed Gentry / nobility, it appears that the relationship between the powerful people and everyone else has shifted pretty substantially over the years.
Can we do it fast enough? Well… 
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Luckily AI will save us from that. What’s that you say? The billionaires controlled the AIs and set their priorities?
Oh, dear.
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… the only thing that stops a bad A.I. turning everything into paperclips is a 
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Government with the will to regulate?
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Cancer’s not just one disease it’s a huge range of them. I am currently undergoing treatment for stage 4 bowel cancer; it’s metastased to my liver and when I was diagnosed the tumours in my liver were too large to operate on. Without treatment I had 12-24 months to live.
After six rounds of a combination of chemotherapy and monoclonal antibody (MAB) treatment my tumours have shrunk dramatically, to the point where surgery is now possible. Cetuximab, the MAB therapy I received, was only approved by the FDA in 2004; at least 15 others have been approved since or are in phase II or III trials.
Thing is, unless you’re a specialist in the field or at the pointy end as I’ve been, you probably wouldn’t have heard about developments like this because they’re incremental. Cetuximab improves survival for one particular type of cancer compared to chemotherapy alone, but it’s not a magic bullet even for colorectal cancer.
That seems to be largely how medical science goes now. For every dramatic development like mRNA vaccines there are dozens of small ones prolonging and improving people’s lives a little at a time.
It’s not that the quest to treat cancer hasn’t advanced “an inch”, more that it advances an inch at a time for each type of cancer and that rarely makes headlines.
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Nah, there was WAY too much wrong with their rush to publish and their over the top claims within their very paper (revolutionary!). They weren’t acting like scientists, and I fully expect (in my cynicism so take it for what it’s worth) we’ll hear at least one of them claiming “big energy is burying this.”
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[image of the levitation demonstration captioned with “i want to believe”]
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Called it at the time on this very site. But nice to see The Scientific Method actually being heeded for once.
