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"That's pretty much the way my teachers talked fourty years ago. Science was about to run out of stuff to do. Just my opinion, but I am not holding my breath."

Neither am I. I never gave a time frame for any of that. First of all, assuming the GUT is sufficiently developed within the next hundred years to be even mildly useful, it's still going to take a long, long time before we can get off this rock we're gravitationally stuck to so we can go out in search of new things. GUT could take a thousand years to perfect, or it may be impossible to perfect. If we were handed a complete GUT tomorrow, it'd be dozens or perhaps even hundreds of years before it could be fully understood. Once it's understood, it becomes a very useful tool to understand how things work and to engineer new things to work. The GUT is a massive accelerator to the growth of our knowledge, but I seriously doubt that human beings will run out of things to explore prior to our sun exploding. By that time, I doubt the human race will be anywhere near this planet, and I doubt they'll even vaguely resemble the race we have here today.

I do pity the poor folks who grow up in a period of time where discovery is a very rare and difficult thing to find. We're really in a golden age right now. We have barely scratched the surface of the natural world, and we're just now getting the tools necessary to dig in deep.

"We cannot predict the properties of complex things from the properties of their components."

Sure we can; just in a less than ideal way. How do you think new substances are created? (like the stuff they just created that's harder than diamond)

I do pity the poor folks who grow up in a period of time where discovery is a very rare and difficult thing to find.

In one of my meaner moments I asked my children how it felt to grow up with space travel in the past instead of the future. Looking back, I suspect that was a kind of child abuse, even if I intended it as a joke.

I honestly think your worries are misplaced. It sounds to me like an artist thinkng everything has been painted because all the paint colors have been invented.

There is a descriptive side to science and an inventive side. When all the pebbles have been counted, you can still make things with them.