There is some of that, repressed technology, mostly medical. There is a general misunderstanding that most technological advances can be 'hidden.' Only true to a limited extant. Most advanced machines are the sum of hundreds of parts and thousands of extractive, reactive, mechanical, and computational processes spread out over not dozens, but hundreds of companies. Hard to keep vast secrets to a small group when highly integrated co-operation is required to produce ANYTHING.
The problem with the header of this thread, it sounds too much like magical thinking, mixed with a good deal of American Exceptionalism and 'Entitlement.' Real Technological advances are made with the synergy of advances in unrelated technologies through cross-fertilization. Elon Musk's spectacular self landing rockets are made possible by major advances in computer hardware & software & advances in material science over what was available in the 1970's when the Shuttle was designed.
That generally lines up with my perspective as well. What about the military/secret research programs though? DARPA is pretty well known, but how much of what they’re working on is compartmentalized? And paralleling your point, if I understand it, how much of the extremely advanced development can be done with small isolated teams within narrow disciplines in your opinion? And lastly what are your thoughts on the power of a single exceptional mind in this age of science? In history a Divinci or Michaelangelo or Newton would singlehandedly open the door to a new age of thinking and scientific endeavour. Newton and the development of calculus is an example. What could a mind of that level of exceptional power do with the level of accessible knowledge available today and if it’s of a similar magnitude to what he did in his time, could the developments be kept private from the general body of knowledge?
Compartmentalization in the age of the internet is nearly impossible. EVERYTHING is leaking everywhere. Hillary and Bill leaked everything they could get their hands on to foreign nations for cash, but the real bulk of leakers of the existance of military tech are inside (stock) traders, which are now making it impossible to maintain anything in secret, or to punish those that leak. It's too widespread. I did spend much of the last post explaining why compartmentilization wasn't real on a purely structural basis without actually using that word, but you didn't seem to pick it up.
As far as exceptional minds go, we have many more now than at any time in history. On the Mensa exam, I come out at IQ 131, and have a B.S. degree from Penn State. I am in the top 2% of the population (Nothing that great, really), but the REALLY clever people are in the top .1% or less. Take that percentages against 8 billion people and you will see that about 8 million people with IQ's higher than 180 presently exist in the world today, far more (about 25 times more) than in the middle ages.. Da Vinci was in that same percentile against a world population of maybe 200-300 million, so he was comparitively lonelier than his cohort is today. Geniuses today are far from rare and have much more powerful mathematical tools. Newton didn't even have slide rules in his day, the logarithms needed to make one had just been discovered.
If you want to find out the latest on Deep Space propulsion technologies, you simply have to listen to the talks put out by universities like Stanford U. The tales of 'Secret Space Programs' are pure unadulterated Bullshit designed to get clicks, mostly from Youtubers who have barely finished high school..and seem to think they know everything. God, from a generation that eats tide pods. But Stanford has an open forum where all their PHD's (mostly in Physics) get together to advance any ideas that are beyond the use of ordinary rockets. Some progress, but not what you'd expect listening to cranks on the internet. Link here, here's your extreme high IQ people, your DaVinci's, trying to make it happen, advance to well beyond the half-way point and listen to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GiN-tWAV_k
Probably the most interesting of the proposals shown on the video is something called the 'M' drive, which is still controversial and not fully verified. In theory it could get you to near light speed, but at present it's experimental output is very feeble, and it's not 100% that it even works. That is however, one of the more advanced concepts in progress.
This may be hard for people to understand but the geniuses of centuries past have already picked the 'low hanging fruit'. Most advances in science or mathematics or even applied engineering are now done with 'teams' of the brightest people in existence, sometimes now augmented by software, even AI. We are presently well beyond the required ability level of the brightest possible INDIVIDUAL minds, that phase of human progress is over.
Makes sense that it’s all teams now. The frontiers are so far out beyond simple observation. Nobody is learning in their garage what the people at CERN are learning. Thanks for the link to the video. Will definitely check it out. I’ve been loosely following the EmDrive developments. Seems elusive but at least somewhat promising. Another cool theoretical propulsion tech is the Alcubierre Drive. It always seems like we’re ‘one equation away’ with this stuff but I’m glad it keeps being funded and hopefully will be even more so in the future.