>Who knows what things will look like in 1 more lifetime.
The usual prediction I see is that the rate of discovery will continue and in another 2 lifetimes everything we think we know now will seem just as silly and naive as what people believed 2 lifetimes before us.
I don't think that's the case. It's a question of whether we're on a (near) infinite exponential curve of discovery, or on the rapid upward stretch of an S curve. I'm in the S curve camp, and I suspect we're at least half way up it on most topics.
Just look at relativity, quantum mechanics and cosmology. Most of the great discoveries in these fields were actually quite a while ago. Relativity and Quantum mechanics are over 100 years old and most of the advances were made in the early decades. Progress has not stopped but massively slowed down.
In cosmology it's been slower progress, but we've charted time back to milliseconds after T=0 of the big bang, detected thousands of exoplanets, analysed the gravitational waves from black hole collisions and mapped the cosmic microwave background. There's more to learn about dark matter and dark energy for sure, some serious mysteries there, but how much difference will those answers actually make? The Higgs boson discovery was cool, but really just a cherry on top of the standard model rather than a revolutionary discovery that upended science. I'm not sure there are any of those still to come.
The closing chapter on the big questions in science still has to be written, but I think the chances it will force us to completely rewrite, rather than simply revise and update the previous chapters, seems slight IMHO. I'm expecting the GUT to simply update or reframe relativity and quantum mechanics to make them compatible, not throw them out completely.
It truly is astonishing to be alive at this nexus in human development, whatever our individual take on it might be.