Could the speed of progress be accelerated? Could mankind have reached the moon by the year 1800, given a 300 year head start? It would have taken a very strange crisis.
During those centuries humanity could have worked out the math and the engineering, but progress is a function of economic growth, not an expression of will.
Strange crises are coming, as the list of possible catastrophes grows longer.
They will take unprecedented effort to solve, or something much harder: bypasing seemingly invincible power cartels like the legal or medical establishment.
What if:
Global warming gets real
The Ross ice shelf is developing massive cracks. As ice floes start to slide into the sea, sea levels could rise meters per decade.
The USA would lose its most valuable real estate. Manhattan would be surrounded by dams and retaining walls. All the best agricultural lands would be threatened. Even more migrants would struggle to escape the Third World, throngs of (mostly) Muslim men swarming into the West. For those left behind, brutal ethnic cleansing.
All this would be obvious years in advance, causing an economic depression before the big die-offs. Political upheavals could be worse than the displacements.
Nuclear war next month
For example between India and Pakistan, China and Taiwan, terrorism in Russia, Israel vs. the Middle East, or the USA and the Middle East (after nuclear terrorism).
The casualties could be much higher than World War Two. My theory is that the 2001 terrorist attacks delayed history. There might have been a cold war between China and the USA.
Aircraft carriers and most existing weapon systems are vulnerable to all kinds of flying robots
The next time the US faces a real opponent like China, ten thousand sailors will die on the first day. But it's the Second Drone War that will really tally up the kills, as Mosquitobots, Mini-mines, and Needle-missiles sterilize cities in days.
The greatest problem of the twenty-first century is something still unimaginable, or the stuff of dim nightmares. In the coming years futurists may finally prove their worth. They should give up all pretensions to respectability first.
The best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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