Waiting for the lights to go out
POSTED BY: citizen
UPDATED: Monday, May 27, 2024 15:33
VIEWED: 2329
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There are lots of developments just very few that have consumer application. Autonomous robots are being developed, but for space exploration not "rosie the maid" biotech will be big, nanotech could be depending on how it's managed.
The biggest problem is that the cost of developing new things went up. The Wright brothers built the first plane in a bicycle factory for around $20,000 in modern money, there is no way you could build a spacecraft for that today. The aircraft industry in the US between the wars was often small time small scale. Scaled Composites is probably the interlectual grandson of Douglas aviation but it needed Paul Allen's Microsoft Billions to back it.
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TWG:
Trust you to bring beds into this 
Lowering the tone citizenisall
also, imitating the greats, citizenisall...
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you Beeeer Milkshakes!
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Citizen,
By the same argument, the wheel hasn't changed since Og the Caveman, so there's been no evolution of transportation.
The chip is done. The languages are done. There is no need to change them. But every program written is an innovation.
Fletch,
Agreed. I'm glad someone brought up Burt Rutan. That's who I meant when I said spaceships.
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I thought about it a little more and I think it needs to be pointed out that what we are talking about is "enabling technology" technologies that apart from being inventions in their own right fundementally change the technological base that follows. I think part of the problem today is that enabling technologies offten just let you do something better even though the basis on which they work is different.
Look at steam engines. You use fuel to boil water and use the steam produced to drive a piston to make mechanical power. That was an enabling invention, it made locomotives mechanical diggers, steam cranes, and steamships happen. In concert with the dynamo it gave us electric power and made "industrial age V1.0" possible. Much later someone had the bright idea of burning the fuel directly in the cylinder to make power and the internal combustion engine was born and that became an enabling invention in it's own right.
Now look at the Parson's steam turbine. Unlike the IC it owes nothing to the steam engines that preceeded it and after a while it replaced piston driven steam engines completely. It had it's own internal combustion child in the form of the gas turbine and that in turn gave us the jet engine.
The point is thatif you encounter a modern steam powered device today -- say in a power plant or a nuclear powered ship you are not looking at a decendent of Watt's piston driven steam engine but of Parson's turbine. Two radically different technologies doing similar jobs but offering different innovative children and offering different enabling tecnologies.
The transistor isn't a better vacuum tube, the enabling tech that lets you make transistors lets you make photocells LED's, solid state lasers and a whole range of other things. The microchip is not just a smaller ENIAC, it lets you do things you couldn't otherwise do --- like fly by wire aviation controls. There is no real way of knowing just where the tech we already have will enable us to go.
There's the promise of engineered materials. At the moment we have relatively few engineered materials -- composites like carbon fibre and plywood are classed of engineered material but on a much bigger scale than we might achieve. In nature almost everything is engineered --- bird bones have fantastic strength to weight characteristics because they are mainly hollow. Ivory, the tooth enamel, insect wings -- all have fantastic engineering properties and exist because at a microscopic level they have been assembled by organic cells into complex micro scale structures.
Imagine what materials like that, constructed to order, could do? A 747 sized plane that weighed the same as a cesna and could fly for 1000's of miles on relatively tiny amounts of fuel, solar sails giving you free access to the solar system, the base technology for teraforming....
It's being worked on..... who knows wht we can do with it.
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I agree.
Often the technological niche is filled, and is being replaced by something else.
The other day I was driving through the utter wilderness here, far from civilization and powerlines. I came across a house, which itself is unusual because we sometimes have deadly cold winters. The house had a giant American flag out front, dead cars strewn about the lawn and random wooden structures. And solar cells. The solar cell isn't a recent innovation, but recent innovations in long life batteries make it a lot more useful. I know this doesn't excactly, but I thought that the whole idea would be kind of interesting to the firefly set, a new extreme of independence.
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Advancement is slow! Science needs energy!
Sorry. Been tinkering with SimEarth lately. . .
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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Dreamtrove:
By the same argument, the wheel hasn't changed since Og the Caveman, so there's been no evolution of transportation.
Well, pretty much yeah. A car is pretty much the same thing as a horse draw cart, only tweaked and modified; the real difference is in the power plant.
Therefore the Tyres on your car are just a refined version of the logs the Ancients threw under stones to move them, not an innovation.
Quote:
The chip is done. The languages are done. There is no need to change them. But every program written is an innovation.
The chip is done? The current PC is exactly the same as the IBM of 1980, the architecture, the chips everything, the modern PC's of today are not an innovation, just a refinement, which was the main point.
As for languages the OO Paradigm was the last major overhaul, there's prologue and a few other fifth generation languages but they really haven't been picked up.
The major innovations in programming are algorithms, not programs, look at the code of Windows 95 and it's a refinement and retooling largely of OS2-Warp.
It may seem like programming has changed massively, but the actually algorithms used have been around mostly since the 70's, at the latest. Now with modern hardware they can just be employed in different areas.
My basic point is:
Seriously every program is not an innovation.
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you Beeeer Milkshakes!
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I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 19,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons.
- Popular Mechanics, March 1949
But what ... is it good for?
- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
There is no need for any individual to have a computer in their home.
- Ken Olson, 1977, President, Digital Equipment Corp.
" They don't like it when you shoot at 'em. I worked that out myself. "
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Except all of those innovations are too do with micro electronics, not computers per-se, Computer design hasn't changed since Turing.
IBM PC architecture hasn't changed since 1980.
Same for Apple Mac.
Also nothing has been innovated in micro electronics in forty years.
Where are the quantum or biological computers?
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you Beeeer Milkshakes!
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Nothing useful or contradictory to add....just wanted to say 'Go science! Go tech! Go inventors! Go theorists! Go users! Go developers! Go humans! Yay!'
Oh and I like the solar sails and drive by wire stuff. yeah.
*climbs back onto the craft-matic adjustable bed*
www.thatweirdgirl.com
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"...turn right at the corner then skip two blocks...no, SKIP, the hopping-like thing kids do...Why? Why not?"
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