School kids kept advance slabs of glass in their pockets in 1989. Pockets were bigger then and the cpu was a Z80.
Rubber condoms began large scale manufacturing in the 1930s.
Flu immunization the 1950s. Very recently upgraded with modern science, but heavily practiced as it was.
The algorithm you revere as knowing yourself only ever gets trained to learn where it can get you to spend money. Which it does in an ad supported manner.
Point you on programming bacteria. Go bio.
Transplants and health have gotten better. But healthcare in general is also less accessible and more costly.
Space is no longer pioneered by nations, it's pioneered by people making money.
I agree we're amazing, but glamorous long-shot works are fading from the world and in my consideration we are settling in for a long stretch of capitalist coasting on marginal incremental improvements. We would do well to rally against settling and re-envision ways to breath life into possibility-exploration. The inflection point for progress was two decades ago.
Are you kidding? SpaceX built a tiny but cost effective rocket engine and rocket for significantly under a quarter billion. Most of the engineering was done under the initial $100m from Musk. They borrowed from well known engine designs that were simple, uncomplex, controllable, and safe, that had only been used on a small scale (they now use 9 of them). They used the cheapest, well-known weld technique, friction stir welding for the rocket.
X33, the last great "try some crazy shit" we pulled, was cancelled after $922m from NASA and $357m from Lockheed Martin. (Leave it to congress to kill the interesting/tricky/useful stuff! Revive this project!)
X33 was 1/10th the weight of the VentureStar craft it was a demonstrator for. It was to pioneer radical new high efficiency high-control thrust vectoring engines burning the most gravometrically dense element, innovative cryonics, sstol, lighweight composite construction techniques, lifting body aerodynamics, metallic thermal protection, and unmanned flight controls. Any one of these things could produce massive massive spinoff technologies in it's wake, and would be incredibly important technologies to be able to point to, and set a new bar for progress.
It's not that private industry is bad (oh, it is), it's that private industry is boring, safe, incremental, and the only massive innovations this world have ever seen have jumped up from the shadows and stolen existing big buisnesses lunch in the split second it took business to blink. Business is the living antithesis of what is most interesting and uniquely human: the radical.
Exactly. I may not gain an iota out of it, but I will trade an Elon Musk over a Prince Charles any day. We are gradually moving towards a society where inheritance may not be illegal, but hopefully it will be irrelevant. To me this sounds like the greatest achievement of human race...
How are private companies entrance into the rocket design market innovative? Changing the market model for rocket design is hardly innovation, SpaceX getting gov't and private contracts for things done previously, I don't think, is true innovation.
Sure the glass slab from 1989 may have 50x or 70x bigger "wires" in it's microchips, and it may have bigger pixels, but I see more in common with the $100 1989 device and the modern glass slab than I see difference and change. Sure, certainly the extra miniaturization both chip- and product- scale is good incremental change, but the componentry is the same and rate of progress has tapered massively.
Wireless is certainly one place we've been radically helped, and that's hugely attributable to DSP processing, which is great. But see above tapering.
How's this for some bounding? Let's go back to 2000. AMD has just dropped a 1.4GHz Athlon, and is 3 years from Athlon 64. Intel, in November drops Netburst, 1.5-2GHz. Intel says are going to take NetBurst to 10GHz by 2005.
What I'd point out is that all these advances you cite have inflection points, something that took available technology that was on the shelf and under developed and mused over, into being radically ragingly important in a very short time. And then we milk that system heavily, get huge gains, and then... and then... cross our fingers hold our butts and wait for the next thing to jump up and remake the world. This "rocket" moves in fits and starts.
It's easy and convenient to point to historical context as you do, and to convince ourselves of progress. Rather than take hold of these mix of points and see amazement, I see very small case studies in a larger world that loses the radical element, the dynamics, and creeps towards stasis. The number of things left on the shelf to develop, to fully industrialize into, is not unboundedly infinite. It's up to us to dream hard, dream big, to fight the creeping in of stasis and assert our status as homo sapien, the shaper of the world about, and we need to find big enough dreams to fuel that. To do that, we need to keep everyone dreaming and potentiated, not just the Musks of today.
Most of your post is lost on me. I am sorry, I'm not a native English speaker...neither am I particularly good at deciphering stuff written by people smarter than me...my problem, I know...sorry...
However, I would like to say that I do know the importance of shoulders of the giants our current world stands on. If there were no Intel in 1961, then most likely there would be no iPhone in 2006, if there was no DNA model in early sixties then there will be no stem cell advances now. The point I was trying to make was that the fact standing on the shoulders of theses giants gives us a better shot at the kind of problems our predecessors couldn't even dream about. So the only time better than now, will be in future....when I am long gone up in smoke....I have absolutely no reason to complain...
Rubber condoms began large scale manufacturing in the 1930s.
Flu immunization the 1950s. Very recently upgraded with modern science, but heavily practiced as it was.
The algorithm you revere as knowing yourself only ever gets trained to learn where it can get you to spend money. Which it does in an ad supported manner.
Point you on programming bacteria. Go bio.
Transplants and health have gotten better. But healthcare in general is also less accessible and more costly.
Space is no longer pioneered by nations, it's pioneered by people making money.
I agree we're amazing, but glamorous long-shot works are fading from the world and in my consideration we are settling in for a long stretch of capitalist coasting on marginal incremental improvements. We would do well to rally against settling and re-envision ways to breath life into possibility-exploration. The inflection point for progress was two decades ago.