Wouldn't the burden of evidence here be on someone saying the opposite (that technological progress will stop)? Technology has continually progressed across human history, exponentially so in the very recent past. Do you think it will stop?
This is the so-called "Whig view of history", and while it looks superficially true it ignores those cases where technologies have been lost, abandoned, become uneconomic to maintain, or given up for political reasons (e.g. China abandoning its exploration fleets).
How do you account for the European "dark ages", for example?
Collapse is possible: supply chains may be extremely vulnerable to certain risks, such as a war in Korea or an earthquake in Silicon valley. Decline is also possible: life expectancy is starting to fall in the US, as it did in Russia in the post-Communist period.
And this: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/climate-change-alr...
And: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003043870...
And: http://time.com/4024210/climate-change-migrants/
... https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/09/analysts-warn...
https://thinkprogress.org/yemen-humanitarian-crisis-water-54...
The lack of a printing press? From what I have read, the creation of the printing press is what helped lift Europe out of the dark ages and presumably prevented it from ever returning to another one.
The eastern mediterranean basin. AFAIK Assyria wasn't directly affected, the polities directly affected were Mycenaean Greece (collapsed), the Hittite empire of Anatolia (collapsed) and the Kingdom of Egypt (which repelled the Sea People but likely at high cost).
The Assyrian Empire contracted at a later date, possibly as an indirect consequence of the collapse.
> If we regressed again, it could take a very long time to recover, because of the exponential growth you mention.
An other issue is the ability to access resources. As a civilisation progresses it consumes easily accessible non-renewable resources, the more it progresses the more difficult to access the resources it consumes entirely.
A civilisation following the collapse of the current globalist one would have a very, very hard time accessing non-renewable resources to fuel its growth.
If you’re familiar with the LBA collapse, you’ll enjoy the read.
Recently, apart from CS and genetics, we are stagnant.
On top, progress is trickling down pretty badly. We are wasting lots of resources on conflicts, essentially to ensure that the one percenters keep their possessions, including means of production (so that capital can further concentrate).
We will probably lay the planet to waste, by wars and resource exploitation, much sooner than technology will advance enough to save us.
The ingeniuty of the human race is not its predominant feature.
Are we? And also, the developments in CS (and computational science, in general) seem to speed-up discovery in other fields more and more.
That seems a pretty weird argument to make. "Apart from all the people with black hair, nobody has black hair" These two fields alone are wide ranging enough that they can touch almost everything on earth. Furthermore, fields like material science have progressed an incredible amount due to widespread availability of computing power. So have agriculture, logistics, manufacturing, mining, medicine and education. We may yet destroy ourselves before we attain utopia, but it won't be because our technology is too stagnant.
The Wright brothers, working in a bicycle shop, invented fixed wing flight in 1903 and it took less than 100 years for western civilization to develop jumbo jets and space planes.
Sometimes we explicitly agree on a position, as with the US's "innocent until proven guilty."
Therefore, the burden of proof is usually assigned, fairly objectively, to the argument that makes a positive claim, e.g., that something will happen or something is true, etc.
In this case, the claims are: 1) I believe space faring technology will advance enough to the point that humans will be able to leave our planet permanently, and 2) I am skeptical of 1.
Two is like the null hypothesis. This cannot be proven; it is the default until #1 is proven. Therefore, #1 should objectively have the burden of proof.
Kind of like how financial disclaimers will include something like "past performance is not proof of future results".
It's not that the claim that "technology will continue to progress forward" is wrong. I think it's a reasonable belief. But that is not itself proof that it will continue on. Reasonableness of a claim is not proof of its truth. Intuition is not very good evidence.
Even if we assume that technological progress will be effectively infinite, that doesn't mean that any specific technology will come to exist.