Black swans in a boring age

In their yearly special on ideas that "will change the world", one recent article in Time was actually advocating the reverse principle (that ideas are NOT changing our world):
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1971133_1971110_1971120,00.html
Reinterpreting Bob Dylan "The times they aren't a-changin'", the author argues that in spite of all scientific and technological 'breakthroughs', we have made suprisingly little progress overall. With the latest vulcanic crisis in mind (no offense Mr Spock), I tend to agree:

How is it possible that we are able to land unmanned satellites on comets in order to take samples for a better understanding of the first seconds of our Universe, and that we are dramatically unable to measure the nature and exact whereabouts of a vulcanic cloud 10 km above our heads ? Not to mention that we cannot adopt our commercial navigation systems to temporarily cater other air corridors ?

I think Nassim Nicholas Taleb is having a good laugh right now. Another text book example of a Black Swan.