>Despite doubling their expected livespan
This is incredible but it's mostly down to germ theory, antibiotics, and to a much smaller extent vaccines; things that really help infants make it to childhood is a lot of the lifespan increase. Science hasn't been able to enlarge the max human lifespan, and there's still plenty of diseases that the treatment is lacking for, so I could see being disappointed in that. And lets be real, the fact that science was responsible for many of these gains in the past means nothing about how funding is spent in the future, nor does it speak to fields relatively far removed from what's being debated- "Semmelweis being correct when everyone else wasn't" is pretty far from string theory.
>they'll never have to worry about starving to death
Also strangely mostly down to a relatively few discoveries. And I'd pair this with the ability to access a lot more energy, as making a very large difference between modern life and most of human existence.
But one of the main points brought up by the article is string theory, and string theory had an era where it was almost exclusively considered the most respected academic darling, but many string theories got discarded when the colliders reached good enough energies that a lot of scientists expected to see something. Of course, none of this was ever going to block off string theory as a group, it just eliminated a set of them. Check this >10 year old article:
https://profmattstrassler.com/...
And you'll see that, theoretically, string theory is still perfectly healthy. But the article really smooths over what did get eliminated, which was lowkey what a lot of people were hyped about- a solution to the hierarchy problem ("natural supersymmetry" in that article), and string theory isn't helping with that, and high energy collisions have eliminated the types of string theories that would (not entirely, but like, to a degree).
While you'll find no shortage of physicists defending this, and pointing out *technically string theory never promised this*- including this wall street journal one which tries to politicize it by implying that the critics are conspiracy theorists- the simple fact is that the reason string theory got so much interest and funding wasn't because of the barely-falsifiable high-flying stuff, but because it implied that we were gonna get something better and more explanatory than the standard model, something that, once we had seen a few real pieces of, could have experimental results plugged in that would then yield even more insights into reality. That isn't happening, but that's why string theory captured so much for so long.
Isn't it fair to criticize a system that appears to have gotten kinda lost in the wrong caves, for about two generations of scientists? Even if just the magnitude of resources allocated, men and money.