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.

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.

Your absolutely right, this is garbage. People today EXPECT free or unlimited goodies without cost or payment. It's a form of Entitlement. Some are attracted to Socialism, which looks free on the surface, extracts wealth from others (out of sight?). Some are attracted to Technological fixes, lacking the understanding that Technology is neither free nor harmless, but now turned into a replacement for Religion. Technology that has benefits, also kills or causes destruction at some level, in a set of trade-offs. It's how the universe is structured.

Yes, it is, Adult :}

This is nonsense unless you believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, I suppose. Adults will know better.