In December 2011, I wrote an article for the eighth anniversary of this blog. It was a rather melancholy piece. I lamented that since 2003, nothing truly groundbreaking had happened in science and technology. Off the top of my head, I could only name the rise of flat and touchscreen displays, which felt more like industrialization of already known ideas than a genuine revolution. I was waiting for the mass adoption of carbon nanotubes, for revolutionary materials… and nothing came.
I ended that article with a question: “Did I sleep through something, or are we entering a phase of human development where nothing revolutionary happens anymore, and we’re merely learning to use the full potential of existing technologies?”
Today, in 2026, I have a clear answer. Yes, I slept through it. And quite possibly, so did a large part of the public. While I had the feeling back then that science was somewhat boredly treading water, it was actually standing on the threshold of probably the most explosive era of discovery in modern human history.
So where did my judgment go wrong? Why does the “nothing is happening” perspective differ so dramatically from today’s reality, where every morning we open the news feeling like we’re living in a sci-fi novel? Several factors contributed to this optical illusion:
- Above all, I simply wasn’t following science and technology, as one reader correctly pointed out in the comments. If I tried to recall something off the top of my head now, I’d probably only remember the rise of AI.
- The time of sowing and the time of harvest can be decades apart. The Cassini probe’s exploration of Saturn continued until 2017, even though Cassini launched in 1997, the mission was approved in 1990, and the first proposal for it dates back to 1982. You cannot judge how much science is advancing today solely by how many findings and achievements we’re harvesting right now.
- The clash of marketing hype with the positive boiled frog syndrome — Scientific discoveries are often extrapolated to extremes in the media, promising revolution practically overnight. When the miracle doesn’t materialize by the next day, disappointment sets in. Real progress, however, happens stealthily, one small step at a time. It’s like boiling a frog in a positive sense — by living the change day by day, we get used to it before we have time to appreciate it. But if someone had teleported me from 2011 straight into today’s world of AI and space probes, I would undoubtedly have been struck speechless with amazement.
Today I can say with a clear conscience that we live in an absolutely fascinating era. Stagnation was merely an illusion; perhaps the calm before the storm, or I simply missed the storm that was already raging. We still don’t have a space elevator made of carbon nanotubes in every household, but we’ve managed to rewrite the code of life itself, we’ve peered at the edge of the solar system, and we’ve created machines that can fluidly converse with us and solve complex tasks.
Science is running at a pace that’s hard to keep up with, but it’s worth trying. That’s also why it’s time to revive this blog.
Appendix: What Actually Happened (And Why It’s Revolutionary)
If you don’t believe my optimism today, I’ve prepared a brief overview of the most important things that actually happened between 2012 and today. Consider it a factual footnote and proof that we need to strike the word “stagnation” from our vocabulary.
1. The Golden Age of Space Exploration and Understanding the Solar System
- Curiosity (2012) and Perseverance (2021) on Mars: The landing of the one-ton Curiosity rover using a “sky crane” showed that engineering knows no limits. The probe confirmed that Mars once had conditions suitable for life. Its successor, the Perseverance rover, raised the bar even higher — not only is it actively collecting samples for future return to Earth, but it also brought along the Ingenuity helicopter, the first human-made machine to achieve powered flight in the atmosphere of another planet.
- MESSENGER and Dawn probes (2015): Exploration of the outer reaches of our system. MESSENGER completely mapped Mercury and surprisingly found water ice in permanently shadowed craters on this hellish planet. The Dawn probe became the first spacecraft to orbit two different celestial bodies (Vesta and Ceres), confirming that even the asteroid belt hides fascinating water worlds.
- New Horizons at Pluto (2015): An absolutely groundbreaking mission. The first human probe to fly past Pluto. In just a few hours, it transformed a blurry dot from telescopes into a fascinating world with icy mountains, a blue atmosphere, and a giant heart-shaped glacier.
- Juno at Jupiter (2016): The Juno probe showed us the largest planet in our solar system in an entirely new light. It peered deep beneath its dense clouds, mapped its complex magnetic field and giant cyclones at the poles, and in recent years has brought us detailed images of fascinating moons such as Europa, Ganymede, and volcanic Io.
- Cassini’s Grand Finale (2017): As I mentioned in the introduction, the Saturn mission began much earlier, but its breathtaking conclusion came in 2017. The probe deliberately burned up in Saturn’s atmosphere, but not before revealing that beneath the icy crust of the moon Enceladus lies a global ocean with hydrothermal vents — one of the most promising places to search for extraterrestrial life.
- Astrophysics and optics: In 2015, the detection of gravitational waves allowed us to “hear” the collision of black holes for the first time in history, confirming Einstein’s century-old prediction. The deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2021 enabled us to peer deeper into the past of the universe and analyze the composition of atmospheres on planets beyond our solar system.
2. Artificial Intelligence (From Analysis to Creation)
- The Rise of Deep Learning: The breakthrough came in 2012, when the neural network AlexNet decisively outperformed the competition in image recognition. Since then, AI has developed at breakneck speed, whether it was defeating the world champion in Go (AlphaGo, 2016) or the recent overwhelming surge of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Artificial intelligence stopped being a theoretical concept and became an everyday tool for programmers, scientists, and ordinary users alike.
3. Biology and Medicine (Revolution at the Molecular Level)
- CRISPR-Cas9 (2012): The year 2012 was truly pivotal for science. The discovery of precise “genetic scissors” that allow cheap and accurate DNA editing was published. The technology has long since left the laboratories — at the end of 2023, the first real therapy was approved that uses CRISPR to permanently cure previously incurable sickle cell anemia.
- AlphaFold (2020): An AI system by DeepMind managed to solve one of the biggest biological problems of the last 50 years — predicting the 3D folding of proteins. The fusion of software and biology here dramatically shortens the time needed to develop new drugs.
- mRNA vaccines: A technology that had been quietly refined for years saved the world during the coronavirus pandemic. Even more importantly, it opened the door to developing personalized vaccines against various types of cancer.
4. Physics and Energy
- Fusion with net energy gain (2022): Scientists at the American LLNL laboratory succeeded for the first time in obtaining more energy from nuclear fusion than they put into it using lasers. While decades of work still lie ahead before we light the first light bulb with fusion, for the first time in human history we confirmed that the holy grail of clean energy on Earth physically works.
- Higgs boson (2012): CERN confirmed the existence of the particle that gives mass to other particles, thereby successfully completing the Standard Model of particle physics. The Large Hadron Collider was built in 2008, and the accelerator project was approved as early as 1994.