The best thing we can do for humanity is give it time. Germ theory is a hundred years old. All the advances we’ve made in medical science have been since then. What could a thousand years of medical science give us? Before the myth of miasma was abandoned we were just spinning our wheels for centuries.

Science itself, the way we differentiate fantasy from reality is a couple hundred. What more can we accomplish at the given rate if we survive another hundred or thousand years? (Which we won’t do if we destroy our ability to live in the only hospitable place in the known universe, and certainly the only place our technology allows us to survive)

Advances in Materials science over the last hundred years have been fantastic. Imagine what we can accomplish in another hundred years. (We currently can’t live on the moon due to limitations in material science. The dust eats through the rubber seals we need to contain our atmosphere — material science improvements might fix that and they progress but need time)

We can do everything if we have time. We would have time if we can stop doing some of our most destructive reflexive behaviors.

If you want to advance our civilization solve the thing that’s killing us all (over exploiting every natural system to and past the breaking point, poisoning ourselves by knowingly corrupting our air, water, food. Example: Leaded gasoline caused a measurable drop in intelligence and increased in violence over the whole population. The science was suppressed from the beginning. We literally knew better and did it to ourselves anyway. Why? Short term profits for a small elite minority)

We don’t even have to solve that structural problem, just mitigate it enough to buy time.

Our civilization is like an addict who can’t think ahead past the next (growth and profit) fix. If we can just mitigate the harm enough for the astonishing rate of progress to catch up to some of our most pressing problems we’ll make it. We’re well on our way to being an interstellar civilization with high technology and great capabilities. The thousand small advances will come in the order of hundreds of years if we can just slow our insatiable desire for self-destruction.

But given recent regressions I don’t have a lot of hope.