The East (East Asia, India both) are mature civilizations. They're piggybacking on the mindsets of Western science. Once the scientific & technical potentials of the West's unique cultural perspective are exhausted, innovation in both the Orient and Occident will wind down.drmike wrote:I think the East is going to mix things up a bit. The West may have hit a wall, but the East is starting to stir. Again. It will keep "innovation" moving along in different ways.
Certainly many questions will remain unanswered. But once our civilization hits "exhaustion," our descendants will not bother to ask them. They will be satisfied with a less or more effective "final" model of science, the odd unsolved problems being written off. Note how Classical astronomy simply kept adding more and more epicycles to their models instead of asking the truly fundamental questions, or how they were satisfied with self-obviously flawed models of ballistics.drmike wrote:There's just too much we still don't know, and have yet to ask "why" about. I can't see that changing for another 1000 years at least.
The unanswered questions are for the next civilization.
Duane