>>512321850
Stagnation is already close.
The massive reduction in white people among academia already led to an impressive corruption of it, with the *majority* of paper being utter bullshit using statistical trickery to shit results from nothing and keep the grant train rolling.
At some point actual progress will be completely drowned.

And that's without considering that we might be close to the end of science.
Yes, I know that was what Newton's contemporaries claimed and they were fucking wrong, doesn't change the fact that the universe won't have an infinite Matryoshka of "actually, if you look harder it's completely different".
Us being only one or two steps away from the terminus of Science might also explain the Fermi paradox, maybe we don't see cool galactic FtL space civilizations simply because the universe is lame and doesn't allow it, no matter if you have 500 IQ and spent a few billions years trying to get the most basic colony ship to work for anything but very, very nearby stars.