Old sci-fi assumed progress in the physical world, of endless progress in speed or materials.
Instead we got near endless progress in the processing of information while we live in houses made of trees, drive cars on rubber tires, and eat animals. Much like before. Sure, we have jets, but even they work pretty much the same way as 50 years ago. Incremental progress, sure, but no warp drive, eh?
I wish our houses were made of trees, our tires made of rubber, our food made out of living things. Instead our houses and tires release micro plastics and our food is increasingly synthetic.
We’ve had amazing advances in material sciences that in hindsight have been harmful.
Well I agree that there have been great advances in materials. But nothing like sci-fi materials like “plasteel” or dilithium or various magical materials.
The periodic table of elements is it. There’s nothing else. Electromagnetic forces and electron orbitals. That’s it.
For example, re-reading some Larry Niven ARM stories, one of the police officers works in the asteroid belt in some hollowed out large asteroid. Various magical technologies like fusion drives are just assumed to be simple and easy, and there are so many people mining asteroids they’re starting their own civilization.
In the meantime there’s one computer handling the police files and it’s in the basement, as the police talk to each other on analog radios I guess.
In the rah-rah 1960s Space Age, it was assumed that the whole horse->car->airplane->rocket->Moon chain of events that had just happened was going to keep going. Instead it very much stopped and something else kept getting better.
In other words, we can’t keep going up on the energy scale. It stopped with kerosene in jet engines and uranium in nuclear reactors.
Information, however, requires a trivial amount of energy to manipulate, and our entire progress in the last 50 years was about going DOWN on the energy scale by shrinking transistors by factors of millions.
And of course, the math that goes with being able to make sense of the structures that you can make with millions and billions of transistors on a single chip.
In conclusion, no one is going anywhere, and space is a dead, radiation-blasted hell with nothing in it. No space colonies, no Moon bases, no asteroid mining. The future is here, on this planet.
Old sci-fi assumed progress in the physical world, of endless progress in speed or materials.
Instead we got near endless progress in the processing of information while we live in houses made of trees, drive cars on rubber tires, and eat animals. Much like before. Sure, we have jets, but even they work pretty much the same way as 50 years ago. Incremental progress, sure, but no warp drive, eh?
I wish our houses were made of trees, our tires made of rubber, our food made out of living things. Instead our houses and tires release micro plastics and our food is increasingly synthetic.
We’ve had amazing advances in material sciences that in hindsight have been harmful.
Well I agree that there have been great advances in materials. But nothing like sci-fi materials like “plasteel” or dilithium or various magical materials.
The periodic table of elements is it. There’s nothing else. Electromagnetic forces and electron orbitals. That’s it.
For example, re-reading some Larry Niven ARM stories, one of the police officers works in the asteroid belt in some hollowed out large asteroid. Various magical technologies like fusion drives are just assumed to be simple and easy, and there are so many people mining asteroids they’re starting their own civilization.
In the meantime there’s one computer handling the police files and it’s in the basement, as the police talk to each other on analog radios I guess.
In the rah-rah 1960s Space Age, it was assumed that the whole horse->car->airplane->rocket->Moon chain of events that had just happened was going to keep going. Instead it very much stopped and something else kept getting better.
Why? It’s quite simple, it’s about energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle
In other words, we can’t keep going up on the energy scale. It stopped with kerosene in jet engines and uranium in nuclear reactors.
Information, however, requires a trivial amount of energy to manipulate, and our entire progress in the last 50 years was about going DOWN on the energy scale by shrinking transistors by factors of millions.
And of course, the math that goes with being able to make sense of the structures that you can make with millions and billions of transistors on a single chip.
In conclusion, no one is going anywhere, and space is a dead, radiation-blasted hell with nothing in it. No space colonies, no Moon bases, no asteroid mining. The future is here, on this planet.
Thank you for your attention to this vital topic.