According to the article, the $2.75 million is to covers the real estate (including county, city and school-related) tax back-pay for 300 seniors and cover any tax increase over the next 20 years for another 100 seniors (all of whom live on fixed incomes).

Do you remember a few years back when MIT Engineers made headlines by flying a small plane that had no moving parts?

Imagine what you could do with that if you had a constant, uninterrupted power supply coming from orbit.

Also, it would be neat to have a sort of "emergency power" system where small planes, boats or stranded persons can get a small, uninterrupted supply of electricity that could be of critical use in dangerous situations.

eh, we'd have satellites in geosynchronous orbit remaining there for many thousands to even millions of years still intact, you could even be able to spot them in the night sky. Thats actually one way you'd be able to know Earth previously had an advanced civilization: those satellites would appear as bright spots in the sky, but unlike all the other stars and planets, they would never move from their position.

On one hand, perhaps theres an upper limit we're reaching to how far we can really get with what we've got. Sure, we could probably build a ton of nuclear rockets to go off in every different direction from Venus to Alpha Centauri, but we'd be destroying our own biosphere (or irrepairably damaging it), which is what ultimately sustains us, and we'd be thus dooming ourselves to extinction (which is what we're doing anyway on the path we're on).

On the other hand, something probably more disturbing than a slowdown in technological innovation is cultural backlash towards it. Social Media for instance has made many peoples lives worse, and has fueled conspiracy theories and skepticism/resentment of science across a broad spectrum, the worst recent instance was the response to COVID.

Its obvious to everyone at this point that technology evolved much slower and more disappointingly than what many people used to expect, but the culture that was once supportive of said innovation is turning more and more against it, especially as we live in the age where the honeymoon period of many technologies is far behind us in the past and we live with the very real drawbacks and consequences of its continued use.

We also have to consider that maybe more technology isnt going to dig us out of the hole we've put ourselves in and maybe we really do need to change the way we think instead of continuing down a disposable consumerist black hole.