Read an book on space/aerospace engineering from the 1980s and look at how many things happened. Supersonic was a huge bust. (The Concorde is closer in time to wooden biplanes than to today. Routine supersonic travel still nowhere on the horizon.) Energy technology has been a huge disappointment. When I grew up, we were going to have nuclear fusion, expanding the scope of what society can do. Today we’re back to windmills and we’re told to put on a sweater. AI was of course a huge bust once.
With the caveat: for commercial travel. And even then it’s partly due to noise restrictions. It’s not like the technology for supersonic flight isn’t widespread.
Windmills' technology has improved dramatically, like also nuclear fusion's.
We are not "back" to windmills that give 3 MegaWatts of power because they never existed in the first place, like affordable solar panels with 20-40% efficiency.
Progress is not automatic. It is millions of times harder to create or improve a technology than imagine it. And also takes lots of money.
We have nuclear tech because Manhattan project, because WWII(and because they were scientists coming from Europe that were scare of Hitler). It took a tremendous amount of money and sacrifice to get there.
We have nuclear tech because Manhattan project, because WWII(and because they were scientists coming from Europe that were scare of Hitler). It took a tremendous amount of money and sacrifice to get there.
No, Manhattan project took trivial amount of money by today's standard. It costed less than the rounding error in typically given federal budget figures for past few decades.
Yes, and that's smaller than a rounding error in our current $4.7T budget. Hell, the $100B (today's dollars) Apollo program would also be smaller than the rounding error, since it was spread over a decade. The R&D costs on F-35 were almost triple the whole costs of Manhattan project.
Truly, we are easily able to afford projects like Manhattan and Apollo today, it's just we aren't able to pull them off anymore.
