Roughly around the end of the Napoleonic era, call it 1815, 9/10ths of humans lives in what we would call abject poverty. today it is reversed and only 1/10th does. (This is still a travesty, but it is objectively better)
In that period we have seen incredible technological, political and economic improvements. But it's not clear if we will continue to see them "we might have invented everything" is a fairly common refrain (if not on HN!)
So can we say anything about where we are in this period of chnage - near the end? Well with no other information we can only plump for "in the middle". Which roughly speaking means we expect to see change on the scale of 19th and 20th Century well into the 2200s.
And part of my monkey brain just recoils at this ... optimism. My monkey brain does not trust the numbers.
But articles like this help me quieten my monkey. We look up into the night sky with powerful telescopes and find events millennia old, light years away and they confirm how we think galaxies are made. We look into the night sky and find Dark matter that we do not even know what it is made of - and I ask my monkey brain, at some point we did not know what was over the oceans, but we predicted new lands, we did not know what the land was made of and they were made of ores and minerals.
I am by nature a skeptical optimist, but the awesomeness of astronomy, it's generally leading place in science, still impresses me.
It looks like a good two centuries to come.
Just sayin'
Bibliography: I am probably stealing from people cleverer than i whom I cannot remember to reference or am too dumb to reference
Edit: I need to write more clearly. I am not arguing that we have invented everything, just that it can feel "where can the next thing possibly come from?". And Astronomy does things like point out "We can see 13 billion years in every direction, and most of it we don't even know what it is made of. Some of it might be useful :-)"