How large is human race making?

In my previous blog, I scribbled on how large is your large. There I concluded that our canvas is just too big and we need to think hard about how can we do something meaningful. While I ponder on what this meaningful could be, I would like to share my thoughts on what we consider meaningful things in this world as it stands today, with the following questions -

• What are by and large the achievements of human race in the last 1-2 centuries?
• Are these achievements really "achievements" in our big canvas (time x distance x yet_unknown_dimensions). 
• Does human race have a direction and all efforts aligned towards that direction?
• Who are the people responsible for these achievements? What are rest of the folks doing?

I read various articles on Google on achievements human race has accomplished and these articles mostly talked about achievements in astrophysics (e.g. Mars mission), physics (e.g. quantum physics), medical science, architectural marvels, musical wonders, etc. So let us set these as ceilings or highest bar for human race achievements till now. On further thought, I realized that these have helped us gain more knowledge about our surroundings and our self. By that logic activities that expand our knowledge horizon (meaningfully) have by far been our achievements.

How do we score ourselves with these achievements? Are these big enough? Did we do well?

I won't score us high - firstly I don't know what is this knowledge going to achieve - I don't know our goal or purpose for which we are learning. What will happen after we have learnt everything?
Secondly, we don't know how large is the scope to learn and given the speed at with which we are going how many generations will it take to reach the epitome. Since we don't know what the epitome will be, it is fairly obvious that there is no guarantee that we will reach epitome. We might completely miss a dimension just because we lack the sense of perceiving it. Sadly in given scheme of things, in my lifetime, at best I will be a stepping stone in the learning process.

"Reality, including our own existence, is so much more complex than objective scientific materialism allows" - Dalai Lama 

Lastly, if we are living in matrix kind of a world where reality is different from what we perceive, then all this knowledge is distorted and we have made no progress. Current scientific measures relies on empirical evidences and physical world - which is what we perceive and may not be the reality. Also consider the case when we lose the knowledge as we create it. There had been various advanced civilizations in the past (Mesopotamia, Harappan, etc) that existed 1000s of years back. These civilizations (including ours) didn't carry forward the existing knowledge but started learning from almost scratch. So in the end the knowledge our civilization is creating may just be washed away with our civilization in the next 1000s of years.

Why are we not learning fast enough? What are we doing wrong?

Whatever these achievement are, the few people who are responsible for these are at least striving to make a difference. But these are definitely less than 1%-2% of the world population?

I would create following categories of people:

1. Involved in learning & exploration to propel human race
2. Involved in creating a conducive environment for above category. These people enable education, efficient ways to explore current knowledge, solving commute, food, etc.
3. Rest of human race who are not doing anything

A major problem is that these communities might not see their roles in the big picture and act for money or some sort of self fulfillment. This actually inhibits them from doing things optimally to propel human race. Had they known their roles and aligned to propel human race in a more synchronized manner, we would have been moving much faster.

Why? - People are self obsessed, they put themselves at the origin of the big picture and then define their roles. Our society has created systems to live with self obsessed people, without providing a direction to human race and aligning everyone's role in it.

I would conclude my blog with:

• I don't know what is the big purpose for which we are striving to gain knowledge. May be we will know the big purpose as we learn more
• With the above premise, the best I can do is to learn in a way that I can guarantee the epitome. Not the sub-optimal way in which our human race is currently learning. How to do that? - next blog :)

Would like to know your view point in comments. Till then, make it large!