Arguing for a lack of progress today in comparison to half a century ago is simply a matter of not paying attention. Progress today in the fields I pay attention to, e.g. biotechnology and related materials science, is stupendous and accelerating.<p>As late as the 1940s it might have been argued that we lived in a world in the process of an exponential growth in power: storage, transmission, application, availability, falling costs. At the same time few people then saw the information revolution ahead. The high power/low computation path expected was an E.E. 'Doc' Smith future of slide rules and hand calculators contemporary with fantastical applications of raw power generation. But it turned out to be much harder than envisaged to keep that trend going for a variety of reasons good and bad.<p>If we'd got the power future instead of the computation future we'd all have a life expectancy much the same as it was in the 1940s, but be living in a transhuman world where $100 buys you the output of a pair of today's power stations that can be cached in your clothing. It is somewhat interesting to speculate just what would be done with that level of power in relation to practical, day-to-day concerns, but getting into orbit and about across the solar system is the least of it.<p>Anyway, we got the computational future because it turns out that making that happen is much easier - and probably for the best given that computation drives medicine, not power.