You are unimpressed by the integrated circuit?
Are you really saying the last new invention was back in the 1880s?
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But, but⊠thatâs only a combination of semiconductors and conventional photolithography, nothing new, nothing breakthrough, nothing deserving much attentionâŠ?
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And since THAT dates to the 1820s (NiĂ©pce, building upon work from at least 2000 years before), I think itâs safe to say the Golden Age of Science and Invention is long since gone, leaving us poor children to scrabble in the dust surrounding the works of the Ancients.
Itâs deep inside a comment thread
I am amused to note that the ineluctable logic of this discussion suggests that if we end up using generation ships, the optimal colonist profile will be lesbian Maoists.-- Charles Stross.
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well, for one thing, she would be leaving her husband behind. but he must be on board with this at least on some level for her to have gotten this far.
Not that it wasnât a huge milestone, but essentially just a refinement of the semi-conductor and used in the same role.
These are not replicators, home-hobby 3-d printers are no closer to replicators than conventional machining is. Conventional machining is actually closer because they can alter a large variety of materials were a 3-d printer is made for a limited scope of plastics or a certain sintered metal (where a whole machine has to be built -just- to make that single part).
Itâs almost like people are trying to miss my original point of the pinnacle we crossed from the age of muscle-power to the age of industrial/mechanical-power was unprecedented, and the scale of such change is not exponential going into the future. Steam, combustion, electromagnetism, nuclear fusion⊠these are the types on inventions I am talking about, not a novel new toy.
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An invention is not revolutionary until it gets into widescale deployment. A fantastic whatever that rots on a lab shelf is of less value than a 3D printer on every desktop.
Bringing the cost down to affordable-for-everyone level can be more a breakthrough than an invention itself.
Also, what would you suggest to be the Next Big Thing that would satisfy your criteria?
Any additive process is closer to âreplicatorsâ than machining away bits of material.
Perhaps they donât think itâs relevant to the discussion at hand? The last AI thread was similarly derailed by people discussing whether or not the curve was exponential. It just isnât an interesting angle to me. You can graph nearly anything onto a curve of some kind.
That would be quite a feat, since the things you listed are not inventions, but ways of getting energy from changing states of matter. Theyâre basically properties of the universe.
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Semi-conductors took about 100 years from âdiscoveryâ to useful. If you think 3d printers wonât change manufacturing then frankly you donât understand how techonology works; however that is already obvious from your discussion above.
Claims that an invention isnât new if it simply combines previous inventions (no matter how utterly revolutionary it is cough internet cough) pretty much eliminates every invention that isnât reliant on finding a new method of using a raw material. Itâs an absurd argument, one that fundamentally ignores the huge changes that have been caused across the globe from technologies that are âsimply refined or optimisedâ (to paraphrase you).
Then again, perhaps the internet is just a novel new toy and has barely had any real impactâŠ
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Intriguing stuff, funny characters but you canât deny their bravery. And it almost sounds like the premise of a sci-fi/horror movieâŠ
If you like check out my silly parody of this video:
Iâm not even ashamed to admit that I would pay for that. Not on subscription, but yeah, I would actually shell out money to see some zero-G human docking procedure.
Because at the end of the day, you have to admit itâs the one thing that everyone is curious about. That website would get more traffic than Google.
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The thing is, and I think people are forgetting, that it doesnât need to be self-sustaining. They have a supply line. Itâs an expensive 10 month wait, so the more self-sufficient they are the more comfortable theyâll be, but itâs not like they will starve if the greenhouse isnât at 100% peak efficiency.
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Iâm a firm believer that boots on the ground solve problems faster than seats in chairs. Advance planning is certainly important, but the people who are there doing the thing will be better equipped to understand just what needs to be done than the people who are here thinking about the thing.
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Pair that with a slow but dependable supply line, and bugs get hammered out fast. A year in, supply shipments are the only thing keeping people alive. Five years in, theyâre providing enough of a buffer that the colonists can undertake bigger projects. 10 years in, theyâre for luxuries and morale boosts.
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I have to say that although I doubt this project will be able to get off the ground, the ambition and vision shared by Mars One and the potential crew members is inspiring. Even if this project doesnât work out, the fact that people are talking about it and moving in that direction is a good sign that it will happen in the not too distant future. As far as the risks to the crew are concerned, people have accepted greater risks for reasons that have none of the significance that this would have.
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Even nanotech is just âcombining really old things in a new wayâ all refinement is refinement of technique, and every invention stands on the shoulders of the incremental development before it. Your message isnât wrong, but the confidence in your âvoiceâ suggests substance to what youâre saying that i feel isnât there. The line between something truly new and an upgrade of the old is a long, grey continuum.
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The thing is, that progress is usually less about technology than economics. Rail technology practically stopped as automobile technology leaped forward. The internet didnât catch on until early versions of ebay and Amazon started making money and filling market niches. If we discovered resources on Antarctica that were worth more than the cost to retrieve them, I guarantee you weâd have a small city there within two years.
The day somebody mines and retrieves a metric ton of gold from an asteroid is the day we dump roughly 1/4 of the worldâs GDP into space travel, and over the next 10 years weâll see space technology explode the way computer technology has.
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Itâs about time. Letâs mine the crap out of the rocks and get the prices of metals crash through the floor. I want thick gold plating on connectors, I want affordable platinum crucibles (and catalysts), and I want cheap high-nickel alloys.
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It really isnât though. Anyone calling them anything close to a replicator really doesnât understand what they do and how basic they are. Focusing on this is sidetracking my point.
Someone made they claim that technology would continue to grow like it did in the last century. I made the claim that what happened in the last century was unprecedented
It has more potential, being code, but that is not what I am discussing either.
But those are the powers of nature that in the last century we did gain some mastery over, and what accounted for the unprecedented growth in technology. We may be still refining them, but until we gain some mastery over other forces of nature, the curve will not continue in exponential growth. And no, I am not trying to diminish those refinements, it is about scale.
Cold fusion, anti-grav, synthetic photosynthesis, something along those line that would change the game completely, again.
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Rail to automobile was the natural progression of steam/internal combustion.
What did stop when that entered the scene was horse and work animal technology, because they changed the game completely.
You paraphrased me wrong, and I feel like you are going to continue to gaslight me, and purposely miss my point.
