20 years ago. 8/10/2001. There were no smart phones. 9/11 hadn't happened, so no endless wars in the ME or patriot act stuff. No social networks (friendster? maybe? Lipstick and Cigarettes?) Ray tracing a 640x480 scene with a few thousand polygons and some reflections on a home computer took half a day or so.<p>We've gotten a bit better at generating renewable energy, and a lot better at energy storage, data storage, processing power, but those are just annual, incremental changes. Whereas post-WWII there was tons of amazing tech from the war that entered civilian life (passenger jets, general purpose computers, nuclear energy and medicine, space exploration), all the new breakthrough tech in the "war on terror" period of the last 20 years has been from the realm of surveillance and population control. There's a lot of promising new tech out there, but very little I've seen since 2001 that's genuinely new. I guess CRISPR would be the biggest and most promising actual breakthrough (and I'd put mRNA vaccines in that category). But in some ways it's clear we reached our creative peak when we landed on the moon. Most new ideas now are just rehashes of old ideas, serving as vehicles to raise investment and sell garbage faster and more efficiently, retreaded to be a little faster and more efficient as if that alone was enough to "disrupt" something.