# Does technological progress have natural limits?



## Justin Swanton (Oct 7, 2017)

Duplicating a post from SFF World:

It's some thing I've been thinking about a lot lately: the fact that there appear to be natural walls that eventually bring all lines of technological development to a cloying halt.

Take a look at macrotechnology, in particular power and transport. All forms of generating power to drive a techno-industrial complex were developed by the 1950's: oil, coal, gas, hydroelectricity, solar panels, wind, nuclear fission. Absolutely nothing new since then.

As regards transport it's ditto. Cars were developed in the late 1800's but have not significantly changed in performance since about the 1950's, though they've had a few refinements added that make them more economical on fuel along with some microtechnological additions like inbuilt computers.

Air travel was invented in 1903, made commercial in the 1920's with big closed-cabin biplanes then monoplanes, got fast in the 1950's with commercial jets - and has remained with commercial jets ever since. The Concorde, an attempt at supersonic jet travel, just wasn't economical enough. Big jets like the Airbus A380 are also not working financially and we are settling back to smaller, subsonic, twin-engine jets like the A320 which are, in big terms, hardly different from the Boeing jets of the 1960's (also still in use).

Look at the time scale:

*1903 *- first successful aeroplane flight

_16 years later:_

*1919 *- first closed-cabin commercial flights using Handley Page aircraft

_33 years later:_

*1952* - First commercial jet flight in a Comet

_65 years later:_

*2017 - No change!*

Microtechnology also seems to be getting stuck in the mud. Moore's Law - that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years - has nearly reached its sell-by date, and the computing power of PCs is not longer increasing as rapidly as it used to, and will stop increasing altogether by about the year 2025. This is a problem, as a military simulation programmer told me, since computer programmes constantly increase in size and complexity and it is now beginning to become an issue finding affordable PCs to run them.

But my main point is space travel. The Soyuz-FG that boosts Soyuz TMA-02M ships into orbit (the ones that supply the ISS) is basically the same design as the R-7 Semyorka that put Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961. The US Shuttle - which was supposed to be the next leap beyond disposable launchers - was a technological and financial failure, and nothing has replaced it. Space X are trying to develop reusable launchers, but they are not as reusable as all that, even if they land successfully. A single rocket launch costs between $100 million and $260 million. Space X, claims to the contrary, does not actually succeed in bringing that price down.

And then the Mars mission story. NASA has admitted it can't afford it. Elon Musk has tacitly admitted he can't either, not unless a lot of people come on board. And all this is _*nearly 50 years*_ since man stepped on the Moon. Mars One of course is a joke. 

Bottom line - we have already made the big strides and are now at the point where all we can do is cross the t's and dot the i's, improving a bit what we have but without developing anything dramatically new, dramatic enough, say, to enable someone to buy a return ticket to Mars like he would buy one to Majorca.

And now let me dive for cover...


----------



## Harpo (Oct 7, 2017)

The number of space stations is increasing, and will continue to do so


----------



## Serendipity (Oct 7, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> Duplicating a post from SFF World:
> 
> It's some thing I've been thinking about a lot lately: the fact that there appear to be natural walls that eventually bring all lines of technological development to a cloying halt.
> 
> ...



Me thinks there be small matter of Concorde - which flew from 1976 until 2003 - its closest rival was Tupolev 144 (which didn't really have much in the way of commercial flights in comparison). It was taken out of Service because it was no longer commercially viable - in effect 9/11 saw to that, by frightening passengers away.

Talking of supersonic passenger flights, there are a few big airplane manufacturers that have got designs for small luxury passenger supersonic planes on the drawing board, where the aircraft shapes have been designed to push the supersonic boom out of normal human hearing range. 

There is also the Skylon space plane - one of the key technologies is the engine, which is being actively developed as we speak. It is a true reusable spaceplane, taking off from an airfield and landing on an airfield. The key to its potential success was that its engine took oxygen from the air to help fuel the engines until it reached Mach 5, when it would turn into rocket burners. Unfortunately, a study from Bristol University has shown it is less economic than the reusable rockets currently being tested. However, the designers have also got Lapcat - their supersonic liner design. Not sure what's happened to that.

At the end of the day the main limiting factor to the introduction of technology is whether it is economically viable in the market place. As a rule of thumb, the new product being introduced has to be 10% cheaper or 10% more effective. 

After all, remember the Romans could have had a steam engine if they'd put their minds to it.


----------



## Harpo (Oct 7, 2017)

After the ISS is decommissioned (2020s or so) some of its modules will be used for OPSEK, which will be for constructing spacecraft in space, rather than having to launch them from Earth.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 7, 2017)

Harpo said:


> The number of space stations is increasing, and will continue to do so
> 
> View attachment 40019



The Tiangong 1 is decommissioned and will burn up in Earth's atmosphere some time between December 2017 and March 2018.

The Tiangong 2 is tiny - less than half the length of the old Skylab and nothing like the ISS in size. It can support 2 astronauts for 30 days.

Genesis 1 is less than half the size of Tiangong 2 and is unmanned. It's effectively a satellite.

Genesis 2 is the same size as Genesis 1, is unmanned and is decommissioned.

That leaves the ISS. It can support a maximum of 6 astronauts and costs $3 billion a year to maintain. This is about 15% of NASA's entire annual budget. No, space stations are a dead end.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 7, 2017)

Serendipity said:


> Me thinks there be small matter of Concorde - which flew from 1976 until 2003 - its closest rival was Tupolev 144 (which didn't really have much in the way of commercial flights in comparison). It was taken out of Service because it was no longer commercially viable - in effect 9/11 saw to that, by frightening passengers away.



Bingo. The Concorde and Tupolev were on the very edge of commercially viable transport technology, i.e. it wasn't really profitable to carry fare-paying passengers at supersonic speeds but it wasn't ruinous either. Which means it becomes unprofitable if something upsets the turnover of passengers even to a fairly slight degree.



Serendipity said:


> Talking of supersonic passenger flights, there are a few big airplane manufacturers that have got designs for small luxury passenger supersonic planes on the drawing board, where the aircraft shapes have been designed to push the supersonic boom out of normal human hearing range.



I notice the word "small". I don't know anything about the subject but I suspect this will be a niche service for a richer clientele, rather than a technological leap that enables regular voyagers to travel at supersonic speeds.



Serendipity said:


> There is also the Skylon space plane - one of the key technologies is the engine, which is being actively developed as we speak. It is a true reusable spaceplane, taking off from an airfield and landing on an airfield. The key to its potential success was that its engine took oxygen from the air to help fuel the engines until it reached Mach 5, when it would turn into rocket burners. Unfortunately, a study from Bristol University has shown it is less economic than the reusable rockets currently being tested. However, the designers have also got Lapcat - their supersonic liner design. Not sure what's happened to that.



The Skylon cargo pod can carry a maximum of 30 passengers, with the rest of the ship filled up with fuel tanks. That would be even more of a niche commercial service than small supersonic jets and I somehow doubt it could pay its way - even less likely if Skylons are not economical.



Serendipity said:


> At the end of the day the main limiting factor to the introduction of technology is whether it is economically viable in the market place. As a rule of thumb, the new product being introduced has to be 10% cheaper or 10% more effective



Which is the whole problem. New technology has to be relatively cheap to be a real breakthrough, otherwise it's just a white elephant. We have the technology to create antimatter but it can create only a few thousand antihydrogen atoms at a time. A curiosity but of no practical use. Eventually someone will pull the plug on the technology as it spends money to no purpose.



Serendipity said:


> After all, remember the Romans could have had a steam engine if they'd put their minds to it.



They invented it after all.


----------



## hej (Oct 7, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> Take a look at macrotechnology, in particular power and transport. All forms of generating power to drive a techno-industrial complex were developed by the 1950's: oil, coal, gas, hydroelectricity, solar panels, wind, nuclear fission. Absolutely nothing new since then.



We do have this
Lockheed Martin Compact Fusion Reactor - Wikipedia

So far Lockheed has nothing in production afaik.

Too, Tesla has semi-autonomous cars. I think we should expect trucks to follow within the next few years.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 7, 2017)

hej said:


> We do have this
> Lockheed Martin Compact Fusion Reactor - Wikipedia
> 
> So far Lockheed has nothing in production afaik.



Nuclear fusion: the bottom line seems to be that there is no easy and straightforward way of confining the deuterium and tritium plasma enough to maintain temperature and density. It can be done, but can it be done economically? And fine, even if scientists crack the problem, there is no conceivable next step after that. Antimatter cannot be produced cheaply enough and in sufficient quantities to become a viable fuel.

There appears to be a law about this: the more radically humans try to modify matter, the more difficult it becomes.

Using the laws of physics - which govern how objects interact with each other without actually changing those objects - is easy enough: I take a stick, find something to use as a fulcrum, and lever up a weight I couldn't lift on my own.

Chemical reactions need a bit more care. Fire is relatively straightforward but using controlled explosions requires ingenuity and labour. One man can lever a rock or make a fire, but one man cannot make a motor car (including finding and refining the oil to power it).

Nuclear fission is an entirely different ball game. It requires a lot of ingenuity, labour and money to work. One man is never going to build a nuclear reactor.

Fusion is one step above fusion and after decades thinking and trying it still can't be harnessed.

Antimatter is a whole new order. It is possible to create a few thousand atoms of antihydrogen but there is no conceivable way of mass producing and safely confining it.

The stock reply is that future scientists will figure out how to do all this and more. It's just a question of some smart individual getting a eureka moment. But there's a basic error in this assumption. Applied scientific progress went hand-in-hand with advances in scientific theory or the understanding of the nature of matter. Scientists were able to create an atom bomb once they understood how an atomic nucleus works. Problem is that for decades now our understanding of matter has far outstripped our ability to make practical use of that understanding. We can manipulate atomic nuclei, but we cannot manipulate antimatter in any way that is of use to us. Further understanding doesn't help. We know what quarks are (more or less) but we can do nothing useful with that knowledge. An increase in knowledge just means a better understanding of the more fundamental components and forces of the universe that are even more out of our practical reach. It becomes understanding for understanding's sake.

The second stock response to the lack of technological progress is that we don't have the motivation of a cold or hot war to drive technological development. But that's eyewash. NASA has called it quits on Mars, not because it lacks the backing of popular support that underlay the moon missions, but because Mars quite simply is way, way more difficult, and fifty years of research have done little to lessen that difficulty. It just is and always will be far more expensive to land on Mars than on the Moon.

The motivation for technological progress is *huge*. Our entire civilisation is built on the assumption that the future, thanks to technology, will get better. We will improve and refine our techno-industrial complex to remove its problems and create a better world for humanity. It is this optimism that motivates us into keeping the current system going despite the burden it puts on us (stress, anyone?). That motivation, however, needs real results. The people who sign the cheques have begun to realise that the Dan Dare vision of space travel is a pipe dream, and are reluctant to fork out enormous amounts of money for showcase ventures like a manned Mars mission that don't actually accomplish anything towards getting humanity off the Earth.


----------



## Dave (Oct 7, 2017)

I disagree with the underlying idea. History shows incremental improvements upon designs, followed by blown out of the water, revolutionary moves forward that nobody had predicted. Just because we don't yet know the next revolutionary invention does not mean that it won't come soon. I can't tell you if Gribnos Power or the Jbosne Drive will be invented tomorrow, because I can't see the future. As you have pointed out, it does however, require a pressing need and an economic imperative for something to be invented - "necessity is the mother of invention." It also usually requires a vast amount of time, money and energy to be thrown at the problems. That is easy during wartime or prosperity, much less in times of austerity.


----------



## hej (Oct 7, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> The motivation for technological progress is *huge*. Our entire civilisation is built on the assumption that the future, thanks to technology, will get better. We will improve and refine our techno-industrial complex to remove its problems and create a better world for humanity. It is this optimism that motivates us into keeping the current system going despite the burden it puts on us (stress, anyone?). That motivation, however, needs real results. The people who sign the cheques have begun to realise that the Dan Dare vision of space travel is a pipe dream, and are reluctant to fork out enormous amounts of money for showcase ventures like a manned Mars mission that don't actually accomplish anything towards getting humanity off the Earth.



Nice post, but I'll focus on the advance of technology.

At its very foundation, science is _endless_ puzzle-solving. Like religion, it must ask (and explore) or cease to have relevance. Important to note that, at present, only about 13% of scientific grants receive funding, so in a certain sense, we already have science in a moribund state.

As for technology becoming better, I keep in mind that what is good is subjective. Is a world with iPhones better than the world without?

It all depends on your point of view.

Medical advancement is nice, but then, with food chemists' progress in tickling palates, we now have such a global overconsumption of food, that lifespans in developed countries may be (is?) shortening.


----------



## Dave (Oct 7, 2017)

I just remembered the quote (which apparently is not from William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, but from Albert A Michelson) "… it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established … An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals" or, in other words, there is nothing new to be discovered, and all that remains is more precise measurement and refinement. I think this is the gist of what you are saying, and it just isn't true.


----------



## AnyaKimlin (Oct 7, 2017)

I work with cars - they are from stuck in the mud and are constantly moving forward.  I'm looking into Auto Electrics or anything I know now will be obsolete over the next 30 years.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 7, 2017)

AnyaKimlin said:


> I work with cars - they are from stuck in the mud and are constantly moving forward.  I'm looking into Auto Electrics or anything I know now will be obsolete over the next 30 years.



Here's my point: A Model T in 1920 cost $350, a bit less than $4000 in contemporary terms. The ultimately basic, stripped-down car is the Tata Nano at $3000 and it is strictly no-frills. So a basic car costs about as much now as it did then.

The top speed of a Model T was about 72km/h. The top speed of a Nano is about 105km/h. Not a massive difference.

It seems a Model T in today's driving conditions can do 100 000km without major maintenance. The Nano needs servicing more frequently than that.

A Model T can do 40 miles to the gallon. This is comparable to the Nano.

IMHO what becomes obsolete in a car is not its basic performance for price but its refinements. A true technological breakthrough would produce a car that could do much more, much more reliably, for much less.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 7, 2017)

Dave said:


> I just remembered the quote (which apparently is not from William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, but from Albert A Michelson) "… it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established … An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals" or, in other words, there is nothing new to be discovered, and all that remains is more precise measurement and refinement. I think this is the gist of what you are saying, and it just isn't true.



More exactly, I'm saying that the last few decades have demonstrated that we have learned as much about the physical universe as we can make use of. We may discover more sub-atomic particles or come to a better understanding of the more fundamental laws of nature, but we cannot apply that knowledge in any practical way. Do you know how hard it is to make antimatter?


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 7, 2017)

post deleted (duplicate)


----------



## AnyaKimlin (Oct 7, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> IMHO what becomes obsolete in a car is not its basic performance for price but its refinements. A true technological breakthrough would produce a car that could do much more, much more reliably, for much less.



Modern cars are less reliable because they do more.  There is more to go wrong.  In the UK there is talk of removing the MOT for older cars because they don't have on them many of the devices that are now required for the MOT in newer cars.  Until recently the number of deaths on the road has decreased that is in part due to the changes in cars.

One example would be plastic bumpers that reduce the need for panel beating etc Cars can now be mapped using the ECU and that considerably improves performance.  My 2012 Skoda Fabia has the capability of a much flashier car and the miles per gallon is far more economical than most cars.  Plus we are now looking at self-drive, entirely electric and automated cars.  

For basic performance and cutting edge then Formula One cars are where to look at the changes.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 7, 2017)

AnyaKimlin said:


> Modern cars are less reliable because they do more.  There is more to go wrong.  In the UK there is talk of removing the MOT for older cars because they don't have on them many of the devices that are now required for the MOT in newer cars.  Until recently the number of deaths on the road has decreased that is in part due to the changes in cars.
> 
> One example would be plastic bumpers that reduce the need for panel beating etc Cars can now be mapped using the ECU and that considerably improves performance.  My 2012 Skoda Fabia has the capability of a much flashier car and the miles per gallon is far more economical than most cars.  Plus we are now looking at self-drive, entirely electric and automated cars.
> 
> For basic performance and cutting edge then Formula One cars are where to look at the changes.



Without wanting to beat the subject to death, a Skodia Fabia starts at $16,490, i.e. more than four times a Model T. Its petrol consumption is 70.6mpg, i.e. a improvement of 176.5% on the Model T, or about 1 3/4 times more economical. Good, but not spectacular.

Self driving or automated cars are fine, but they don't go any faster and I doubt they'll be any cheaper. In ye olden days the self-driving unit of a car wore a uniform and cap .

Electric cars....they are far more energy-efficient than petrol/diesel cars. Electric motors are old hat - the real progress has to be in the batteries. Switching transport (and everything else) to electricity absolutely depends on the development of cheap super-batteries than can store many more watt hours per kg than contemporary batteries do, can be quickly recharged, can be recharged even if only half-empty without damage, can be recharged many times over without degradation, and are not affected by changes in temperature, humidity, etc. It looks promising.


----------



## Dave (Oct 7, 2017)

You are completely missing my point. Incremental improvements to ground cars are not important. They make no difference. You are not looking to the next discontinuity; the next blow your mind revolutionary improvement. I personally don't believe Transporters (Transfer Booths) will ever be possible, but what if they were invented tomorrow?

Your comments about supersonic flights being uneconomical, completely sidestep the real reason why they are no longer important - i.e. the improvements made in communications, by phone, radio, videophone. There is no longer the necessity to conduct business in person.


----------



## DelActivisto (Oct 7, 2017)

I blame a loss of faith in science, myself. In the past, the general public had great respect for authorities and science and human progress. Now we've got people wallowing in every sort of anti-intellectual cesspool from anti-vaxxers to flat-earthism and outright science denial of every source. Maybe our loss of zest for technological progress is what has stalled us.


----------



## hej (Oct 7, 2017)

One limit to technology is that our present instrument of science does not explain itself. More succinctly, science does not, and can not, explain why things are the way they are and no other way.

Science does not include other realms of thought that precede and/or came before it, e.g. law. We have laws of science, yes, but science does not explain how and why law emerged the way it did and why it _had to_ appear in the way it did.

Moreover, scientists are confined to their boxes of knowledge. Many (most?) are unable to think in other fields -- a necessary requirement for understanding the whole of how science, law, economics, etc. work together and are built on what comes before them.

To wit, an oceanographer explained to me that his field still(!) can not explain the origin of waves. When I told him that they are the result of the flow of electrons (that form the H-O bond) through the countless water molecules, he laughed. I guess he did not recall the wave-particle duality of the electron. He offered no reason why my theory (not a hypothesis) was incorrect. He could not. He lacked the education and experience even to understand it. So, oceanography does not understand the origin of waves, because it can't.

For a more expansive example, science still has not linked gravity and quantum theory.

With these shortcomings of science, I do see a fetter on technology -- but not a halting of progress.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 7, 2017)

Dave said:


> You are completely missing my point. Incremental improvements to ground cars are not important. They make no difference. You are not looking to the next discontinuity; the next blow your mind revolutionary improvement. I personally don't believe Transporters (Transfer Booths) will ever be possible, but what if they were invented tomorrow?



I think I got your point. My point is that the earthshaking technological breakthroughs were built on a theoretical understanding of the laws governing matter and its behaviour. A blow-your-mind revolutionary improvement cannot come out of a scientist's right thumb. It comes out of an ingenious application of theoretical knowledge - and that ingenious application comes pretty soon after the theoretical knowledge is acquired. The problem is that theoretical knowledge has advanced steadily for decades without there being any way of turning it into practical technology - and it's not for lack of trying.



Dave said:


> Your comments about supersonic flights being uneconomical, completely sidestep the real reason why they are no longer important - i.e. the improvements made in communications, by phone, radio, videophone. There is no longer the necessity to conduct business in person.



My comments about supersonic flights are that - unlike subsonic flights - it was impossible to make them cheap enough for average travellers to use them. And despite phones, radio, videophone, etc. commercial air travel has increased and will continue to do so.


----------



## Dave (Oct 7, 2017)

hej said:


> Moreover, scientists are confined to their boxes of knowledge. Many (most?) are unable to think in other fields -- a necessary requirement for understanding the whole of how science, law, economics, etc. work together and are built on what comes before them.


Have you some research that backs this up? I assume you have spoken with more than one oceanographer before coming to this conclusion. An education in science makes one more open than anyone else. The whole idea of an experimental hypothesis, thoroughly tested, and peer reviewed, is designed to question the theory at every stage.


----------



## Dave (Oct 7, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> My comments about supersonic flights are that - unlike subsonic flights - it was impossible to make them cheap enough for average travellers to use them. And despite phones, radio, videophone, etc. commercial air travel has increased and will continue to do so.


How much of that is holiday traffic? Do you need to get to your holiday resort and back in one day? Or, do you want a flight that has balanced speed and cost? Premium travel has always been business related, but the numbers just are not there.


----------



## Dave (Oct 7, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> The problem is that theoretical knowledge has advanced steadily for decades without there being any way of turning it into practical technology - and it's not for lack of trying.


Pure Science can advance for decades without any practical value. You have no way of knowing when it could have practical (but what you really mean is commercial) value. 

I very much doubt we will ever have fusion power myself, but just humour me and let's say that there was a technical breakthrough tomorrow, and it was now possible. Wouldn't everything you have written here about energy and transport be obsolete overnight? Who knows what will be discovered. There are no limits!


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 7, 2017)

Dave said:


> How much of that is holiday traffic? Do you need to get to your holiday resort and back in one day? Or, do you want a flight that has balanced speed and cost? Premium travel has always been business related, but the numbers just are not there.



What every air traveller wants, and what the airlines cannot supply, is a trip by air that is quicker, more comfortable, and cheaper than those supplied by the airlines for the past 60 years. It's painfully obvious a technological ceiling was reached decades ago.


----------



## hej (Oct 7, 2017)

Dave said:


> Have you some research that backs this up? I assume you have spoken with more than one oceanographer before coming to this conclusion. An education in science makes one more open than anyone else. The whole idea of an experimental hypothesis, thoroughly tested, and peer reviewed, is designed to question the theory at every stage.



I had only received that opinion from one oceanographer. Based on my experience with other scientists, I took his statement at face value. If you feel differently, I understand, but please be patient with me, if you would. I have supporting points.

I do not have research. I _do_ have much experience working with and talking to scientists. I have formally studied economics. The ones I have encountered have not. I also have studied (mostly but not wholly on my own) political science. I was pleased to find one, but only one, scientist who had read John Rawls.

Maybe I hung with the wrong crowd? Have other met scientists who are polymaths? Were they typical? I'm genuinely curious. I'd like to be scientific here, if possible. Pun not intended.

My experience in with scientists is at odds with what you say about an education in science. I find that scientists can have a very circumscribed bailiwick that, if entered by someone not in their field, they tenaciously defend -- regardless as to its shortcomings.

A (former) prof I know published a paper, announced by his university, which contained in it an explanation of how a photon relates to an electron -- along with material more in line with his field.

Before its publication, about half of the paper's review board resigned in protest. They were not  'more open than anyone else.' The ones that remained were -- and mainly had a few editorial tweaks.

I have formally studied (though not practiced) the relevant science to comprehend the paper. The graphics illustrating the absorption of photons by electrons are called Jablonski diagrams. They clearly show the resulting emission, e.g. via fluorescence. So, present science has long accepted the photon being contained in the electron. The prof had good reason (and many, many references) to back up his conclusions.

Those references were not good enough for a pair of physicists from his same university. They demanded that the chair of his department (not physics nor chemistry) yank the announcement of the paper. Poof. It was gone.

The paper remains -- along with its hundreds(!) of references. I will not share it out of respect for the former prof's wishes. He is now a persona non grata in science.

This guy has about a dozen papers, many/most in Nature (and perhaps Science). A career should not end because of a controversial paper. Yet, it did.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 7, 2017)

Dave said:


> Pure Science can advance for decades without any practical value. You have no way of knowing when it could have practical (but what you really mean is commercial) value.
> 
> I very much doubt we will ever have fusion power myself, but just humour me and let's say that there was a technical breakthrough tomorrow, and it was now possible. Wouldn't everything you have written here about energy and transport be obsolete overnight? Who knows what will be discovered. There are no limits!



I grant you that fusion power just might become feasible, but I think I can safely put my head on a block and affirm that there is no way we'll ever get antimatter to work as a power source. There certainly are limits. If there weren't, we would have contemporary versions of the one-man inventors of the 1800's (think Edison and Bell). Developing anything resembling new technology today is incredibly difficult and expensive. I'm not going to invent antigravity or a cheap skylon by myself. Even the huge collective efforts that now develop technology are banging their heads against walls. Can they get the skylon to work economically? Who knows?


----------



## hej (Oct 7, 2017)

Dave said:


> Pure Science can advance for decades without any practical value.



That is the only kind I've done. Kind of bums me out sometimes when my mind turns to valuation.

I do concede that a good metaphor for basic science is being in a dark room, feeling about, and not really knowing what you will find -- or even, sometimes, what it is that you are looking for!


----------



## hej (Oct 7, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> I think I can safely put my head on a block and affirm that there is no way we'll ever get antimatter to work as a power source.



You are coming at the issue from the perspective of past and present science. If you look at upheavals in science, what Kuhn called paradigm shifts, you will realize that our present understanding, like past understandings, has gaps.

We look back at the Ultraviolet Catastrophe (a black body radiating more energy that it absorbed when UV shone on it), as a quaint, pre-quantal view of the photon.

We have no way of looking forward with certainty, but I suspect that our science, too, has some concepts that future generations of scientists will consider charmingly backwards.


----------



## Dave (Oct 7, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> What every air traveller wants, and what the airlines cannot supply, is a trip by air that is quicker, more comfortable, and cheaper than those supplied by the airlines for the past 60 years. It's painfully obvious a technological ceiling was reached decades ago.


Well, I disagree. Otherwise, why are people still buying tickets for Ryanair? Despite knowing they could be cancelled without compensation, it is the low price of the flights that attracts. Ditto for Easyjet, who have seen a several hundred per cent increase in bookings this year, despite the lack of comfort, restrictions on luggage and a general low budget flying experience.  

@hej  I have to turn in now. History has many scientists who were persecuted or ostracised because they had views that were not mainstream, but were later proved correct. Somehow, I don't feel that your acquaintance will be recorded as one of them. 

"paradigm shifts" - yes, that was the point I was trying to make here.


----------



## hej (Oct 7, 2017)

@hej  I have to turn in now. History has many scientists who were persecuted or ostracised because they had views that were not mainstream, but were later proved correct. Somehow, I don't feel that your acquaintance will be recorded as one of them.

"paradigm shifts" - yes, that was the point I was trying to make here.[/QUOTE]

Right. Crises in the field help.

Your comment about my acquaintance (actually my friend) I found hilarious.

It made me think, though. Don't you think possible (perhaps even likely) that the preponderance of scientists persecuted or ostracised because of unorthodox -- but correct -- views could have been forgotten? After all, we tend to remember those scientists who have a chain of these ideas -- not one in isolation. The pioneer need not receive any credit -- particularly if, with his being relatively unknown, his concepts were ridiculed instead of published.

The paper I referred to is hard to understand -- but _no one_ has criticised the underlying premises!

The (political and ad hominem) attacks on the paper were so numerous (and poorly made) that the publisher had to make an explicit statement linked to the paper. In sum, it read, if you have a scientific basis for your criticism, then I will publish it.

I checked for a couple of years and found no scientific criticism -- but plenty of scoffing on forum posts about the paper. Very few expressed an interest in its comprehension. Mockery was easier -- and more fun.


----------



## Dave (Oct 8, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> There certainly are limits. If there weren't, we would have contemporary versions of the one-man inventors of the 1800's (think Edison and Bell). Developing anything resembling new technology today is incredibly difficult and expensive.


I understand now where you are coming from. That the equipment and technology required to do research is beyond the financial means of the amateur. I think that is true for the really big engineering projects, or in the material sciences. All I would say is that you too easily dismiss the role of the amateur, now more generally know as a citizen scientist. Fields such as Astronomy, Botany and Zoology have always been lead by the amateur and often still are. There are few government scientists, and with austerity even less, so the chances of finding a new exoplanet with intelligent life, or a fungus with a medicinal cure for cancer, are just as likely to come from someone's spare bedroom as they ever were. It is also citizen scientists who are paving the way on pollution monitoring of the air, and of our rivers, or genetic mapping of human chromosomes, or medical research such as the mapping of 3D retinal neurons, as well as the microbiology of public spaces. Actually, the list of such projects is huge and easily Googled. What is more, citizen science also allows the non-scientist to meaningfully contribute. It isn't a lack of money or equipment that is the barrier in such projects, it is the depth; the detail and the time they require to produce results. 

The other thing I would say is that the next big breakthrough is very unlikely to be because someone working on the cutting edge of science has success in an experiment. It would be from the idea behind that experiment taking place. It is the idea itself that is important, so yes, that idea can come out of a scientists right thumb. Einstein was working as a patent clerk while he wrote his theory of relativity.

The problem with the examples you have used - motor cars, Edison and Bell - is that they have, in my view, a much too short a timescale to prove the point you are making. I agree that motor cars have reached a limit in their development, but put them in the context of the development of vehicles from horse-drawn carriages to the Jetson's aircar. You also have no way of knowing what is coming next to replace them. I think Transporters (Transfer Booths) are fantasy, but if they were invented tomorrow, cars, trains, aeroplanes and boats would become largely redundant overnight. I think a better example of technological advance would be Agriculture, since it has been examined for a lot longer by a lot more people, including Thomas Malthus. The population of the world has never outstripped the supply of food, because there has been a number of technological solutions over time that have allowed the means of subsistence to increase. These were rarely continuous improvements, but were instead, very long periods of stagnation, followed by surprising innovation that changed everything. However, in the very long term, the problem is not a limit on technological innovation, but a limit to our natural resources.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 8, 2017)

Dave said:


> I understand now where you are coming from. That the equipment and technology required to do research is beyond the financial means of the amateur. I think that is true for the really big engineering projects, or in the material sciences. All I would say is that you too easily dismiss the role of the amateur, now more generally know as a citizen scientist.



I don't dismiss the amateur. I just mentioned the fact that single individuals today are incapable of inventing technological breakthroughs on the scale of those achieved in the 19th century. No amateurs today are even trying to invent antigravity, or homemade fusion reactors, or antimatter drives, or anything that would significantly alter the current state of macrotechnology.



Dave said:


> Fields such as Astronomy, Botany and Zoology have always been lead by the amateur and often still are. There are few government scientists, and with austerity even less, so the chances of finding a new exoplanet with intelligent life, or a fungus with a medicinal cure for cancer, are just as likely to come from someone's spare bedroom as they ever were.



To repeat a distinction made earlier, theoretical research is still progressing steadily, but practical application is not. The current state of research technology (which BTW can't be manufactured by individuals but only by collectivities) allows individuals to learn more about the world around them. But generally speaking there's just no way of turning that theoretical knowledge to practical use, with one exception - bioengineering. Bioengineering is in its infancy so we don't yet know how far humans can successfully tinker with genetic DNA coding. We didn't invent the 4-base programming language of DNA and we are far from perfectly understanding it, so fiddling with it is rather like doing brain surgery with a hacksaw.



Dave said:


> It is also citizen scientists who are paving the way on pollution monitoring of the air, and of our rivers, or genetic mapping of human chromosomes, or medical research such as the mapping of 3D retinal neurons, as well as the microbiology of public spaces. Actually, the list of such projects is huge and easily Googled. What is more, citizen science also allows the non-scientist to meaningfully contribute. It isn't a lack of money or equipment that is the barrier in such projects, it is the depth; the detail and the time they require to produce results.



It depends on what is being developed. A major breakthrough that will substantially alter our physical existence, or just another t crossed or i dotted?



Dave said:


> The other thing I would say is that the next big breakthrough is very unlikely to be because someone working on the cutting edge of science has success in an experiment. It would be from the idea behind that experiment taking place. It is the idea itself that is important, so yes, that idea can come out of a scientists right thumb. Einstein was working as a patent clerk while he wrote his theory of relativity.



Relativity is a mathematical theory resting on a mathematical foundation that had been created before Einstein built on it. And Einstein wrote the theory a hundred years ago. So it's not new, it doesn't have a practical application, and he didn't create it out of thin air.

From the beginning of technological inventiveness there has been a direct correlation between a theoretical understanding of the forces of nature and a practical application of that understanding, the practical application following hard on the theoretical understanding. Today it is different - theoretical understanding continues to make strides but it now deals with realities that are too fundamental to be easily manipulated. It has become knowledge for knowledge's sake and this I suspect is the real reason for the falling off of research projects.



Dave said:


> The problem with the examples you have used - motor cars, Edison and Bell - is that they have, in my view, a much too short a timescale to prove the point you are making. I agree that motor cars have reached a limit in their development, but put them in the context of the development of vehicles from horse-drawn carriages to the Jetson's aircar. You also have no way of knowing what is coming next to replace them. I think Transporters (Transfer Booths) are fantasy, but if they were invented tomorrow, cars, trains, aeroplanes and boats would become largely redundant overnight.



Transporters are fantasy because we know enough about physics to realise there are no natural laws that can be manipulated to make them work. And that doesn't change no matter how often one says "What if?"

What came next after the motor car was the aeroplane, and after the aeroplane came the space ship, and each technological step that increased the speed of transport proved more difficult and expensive to implement, eventually levelling out at subsonic flight in cramped airline cabins for the majority of travellers. This video is a good summary of the shortcomings of supersonic commercial flight.



Dave said:


> I think a better example of technological advance would be Agriculture, since it has been examined for a lot longer by a lot more people, including Thomas Malthus. The population of the world has never outstripped the supply of food, because there has been a number of technological solutions over time that have allowed the means of subsistence to increase. These were rarely continuous improvements, but were instead, very long periods of stagnation, followed by surprising innovation that changed everything. However, in the very long term, the problem is not a limit on technological innovation, but a limit to our natural resources.



Food production has increased thanks to carefully regulated factory farming and the introduction of more productive strains of crops plants through selective breeding and genetic enhancement. But those methods, like everything, have limits. We reach a point where we can produce only so much food per hectare.


----------



## Serendipity (Oct 8, 2017)

Are transporters really fantasy? Could they not be developed in the distant future using some laws of physics we don't yet know about? How do we know we have discovered all the laws of physics we can manipulate or use?

I really must get round to writing a chapbook for the philosophy of science for the ordinary person in the street... but the laws of physics are based on the principle that every time you set up an experiment it will give the same result. The laws of physics are but a summary of the patterns we humans observe in nature. And as far as the laws of physics are concerned, humans have picked the low hanging fruit. 

True technology progresses when new laws are 'discovered'. But there is a second mechanism for technology progress. The combinatorial use of the laws of physics. Just think of an aircraft with its aerodynamics to help give it lift, its controls to be able to steer it through the air, its engine to propel it forward at speed and its payload. (Did you people know that they once tried to design an aircraft using a coal-fired steam engine? - Turned out the fuel payload was too heavy for the aircraft to be useful.) I suspect you would agree that combining the laws of physics in a fundamentally different way that results in a significant new capability would be considered a breakthrough technology. Because there's so many ways of combining the laws of physics, I think I can safely say that there are many combinations that have not been 'worked on'. So the combinatorial mechanism is the way I would expect significant technology progress to be made in the near future.


----------



## Dave (Oct 8, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> Food production has increased thanks to carefully regulated factory farming and the introduction of more productive strains of crops plants through selective breeding and genetic enhancement. But those methods, like everything, have limits. We reach a point where we can produce only so much food per hectare.


It was much more than that, and I don't agree that we have reached any limit (from a technological point of view, a resource economic limit possibly.) However, I suspect we will never agree on this subject and will have to agree to disagree.

I do believe that there are engineering solutions to many of today's problems, even climate change, it is merely the economics that limit them, not the technology. Which your earlier examples of space travel and supersonic flight are prime examples.



Serendipity said:


> Because there's so many ways of combining the laws of physics, I think I can safely say that there are many combinations that have not been 'worked on'. So the combinatorial mechanism is the way I would expect significant technology progress to be made in the near future.


Including the cross-fertilisation of ideas between different scientific fields.


hej said:


> Moreover, scientists are confined to their boxes of knowledge. Many (most?) are unable to think in other fields.


I also don't believe this is true. It happens frequently. There are examples but I'd have to go and research them.

My mention of Einstein was merely to show that he wasn't actually employed in that field at the time. Maybe better examples are science fiction writers - satellite communications from Arthur C Clark, or a Freeman Dyson Sphere. I admit, it is one thing to "think" of a fusion reactor, and quite another entirely to make one that works, but in order to attempt to build one, you not only need to have all the theoretical and technological pieces in place, but you also need to have the imagination. The imagination has no limits.


----------



## Venusian Broon (Oct 8, 2017)

I know you are playing devils advocate a bit Justin , but my understanding of what you deem 'progress' I find a little dismal. I mean, is progress merely the ability to get from point A to point B 400% quicker? Or to have a car that is 'radically' different from the one that went before it?

There's other areas of progress. Take cars - we're now talking about phasing out petrol and diesel cars from about 2040 here in the UK - to cut air pollution*, and to move to electric cars. Now will electric cars then be 'better' than the outgoing petrol ones? Probably not, but if it significantly cuts air pollution I'll take that as great progress. I do think we are a little bit more concerned about environment than in previous centuries and this is a big step forward (Could be a lot better of course)

Also, I'm sure we _could_ all have cars that race around at F1 speeds, but they share the road with all sorts of other users - so in fact they are probably at the correct optimum performance for the rest of society.

This opens up the question of environmental, social and society progress which you don't touch upon.

But personally my idea of progress, if you are going to allow me to hook it only into science, is not based on all the stuff we can make from our knowledge, but is how our understanding of the universe and the strange things in it, like pure mathematics, is increasing. That is what the Scientific revolution bequeath us, not a conveyer belt of magical toys getting bigger, brighter and always much better. To my limited view on what's happening in the world today we are making continuing to grow our understanding. We still progress.

What we make of all this increasing knowledge in practical manners is somewhat random (although personally I do think we are still at the start of the Quantum and biological revolutions - there is a lot that can be done that will be quite game changing in genetics, medicine, computing etc...)

As for being dismissive about quarks not having a practical application - give it time. I mean the Greeks discovered static electricity around 600 BCE and it only took about 2400 years to get a practical application from that discovery 

---------------------------------
* Also I suspect that by that time we _may_ have reached over peak oil, hence it would be a good thing to move away from such a fuel, but it's always dangerous thing to speculate when peak oil will occur!


----------



## hej (Oct 8, 2017)

Serendipity said:


> Are transporters really fantasy? Could they not be developed in the distant future using some laws of physics we don't yet know about? How do we know we have discovered all the laws of physics we can manipulate or use?



I do not see how transporters could possibly become real, but then, I don't know the future.

I do know that physics only describes the photon, the electron, and larger particles and items.

Therefore, physics only concerns itself with about four percent(!) of the cosmos.

The 4 Percent Universe - Wikipedia

Right now, dark matter and dark energy we simply gesture at or ignore.

So, we have technology based on a tiny slice of reality!

How do you like dem apples?

I'd say we have plenty of room for progress, and I even have some ideas about how to begin. But. The science I know is unpublished and unpublishable. It is written by a scientist who is not a physicist, it uses neologisms (which, apparently, are not acceptable if one uses them to describe a new field of study), and treads on physicists' sacred ground (can't have that, because physics works -- except for 96% of the time).

Suffice to say, dark matter is embedded in the photon. While this embedding occurs in every other system of matter (electrons absorb photons, water contains electrons, carbohydrate includes water, etc.) for some strange reason, saying that the photon has something within it is _verboten_!

Better to be ignorant, I guess.

Technology can not embrace the remaining 96% of the universe until some silver-tongued scientists persuades his/her colleagues about the nature of dark matter and dark energy.


----------



## hej (Oct 8, 2017)

Dave said:


> I also don't believe this is true. It happens frequently.



I am not saying expansive education never happens, but I have not found it in the numerous scientists I have known and know -- save one.

I hope we can agree to disagree.

I will add that I have read and studied (both formally and not) many fields aside from science.

I know one scientist who is familiar with the following fields: physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, emergence of the senses, linguistics, invention of  writing, discovery of abstract numerals, economics (and what it requires, i.e. numbers in a system), the origin of law (and why writing is essential and 'oral law' is an oxymoron), religion's dependence on and recapitulation of law, and oh, a couple others.

The fields above one needs to understand to trace the origin of life to the foundation of ancient civilizations -- and beyond. Knowledge of just the hard science or just the social studies gives an incomplete picture.

While this particular partial understanding need not hinder technology, it certainly precludes comprehending how systems work as a whole. So, technology comes from science that sees the trees, but not the forest.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 10, 2017)

Venusian Broon said:


> I know you are playing devils advocate a bit Justin , but my understanding of what you deem 'progress' I find a little dismal. I mean, is progress merely the ability to get from point A to point B 400% quicker? Or to have a car that is 'radically' different from the one that went before it?



This thread just looks at _technological_ progress. Deciding what constitutes true progress for humanity is another separate and vast topic in itself.



Venusian Broon said:


> There's other areas of progress. Take cars - we're now talking about phasing out petrol and diesel cars from about 2040 here in the UK - to cut air pollution*, and to move to electric cars. Now will electric cars then be 'better' than the outgoing petrol ones? Probably not, but if it significantly cuts air pollution I'll take that as great progress. I do think we are a little bit more concerned about environment than in previous centuries and this is a big step forward (Could be a lot better of course)



Fine. Point is that electric cars are not significantly faster or cheaper than petrol or diesel ones. The ceiling remains where it is.



Venusian Broon said:


> Also, I'm sure we _could_ all have cars that race around at F1 speeds, but they share the road with all sorts of other users - so in fact they are probably at the correct optimum performance for the rest of society.



Which repeats the point. We can't make cars faster than they are and keep them safe, at least not without enormous expense (special roads) at which point it's no longer technological progress since it must by definition remain affordable across-the-board.



Venusian Broon said:


> This opens up the question of environmental, social and society progress which you don't touch upon.



The environment wasn't the direct subject of the thread, but we can see environment as another limiting factor to technological progress. What nobody looks at when talking electric cars is how is that electricity going to be generated once you dump fossil fuels and uranium? You have only three alternatives: hydroelectric power, wind vanes and solar panels. HEP depends on how many large perennial rivers you have, and in a drought production can drop off drastically. Solar power on an industrial scale needs lots of deserts with minimal cloud cover. Somebody suggested that the Sahara is a perfect place - until you think about which part of the world the Sahara is in. Wind vanes are also erratic. All three together can probably be made to work, but my feeling is that they are more high-maintenance sources of power than fossil fuels, which means a more expensive and hence scaled-back industrial complex.



Venusian Broon said:


> But personally my idea of progress, if you are going to allow me to hook it only into science, is not based on all the stuff we can make from our knowledge, but is how our understanding of the universe and the strange things in it, like pure mathematics, is increasing. That is what the Scientific revolution bequeath us, not a conveyer belt of magical toys getting bigger, brighter and always much better. To my limited view on what's happening in the world today we are making continuing to grow our understanding. We still progress.



Fair enough.



Venusian Broon said:


> What we make of all this increasing knowledge in practical manners is somewhat random (although personally I do think we are still at the start of the Quantum and biological revolutions - there is a lot that can be done that will be quite game changing in genetics, medicine, computing etc...)



I'm not sure what a Quantum revolution is supposed to be. Biological revolution - genetics is a dangerous game since we are not creating technology from the ground up which we can understand and refine, but tinkering with already existing and fantastically complex biological machines that we hardly understand at all. There's an awful lot to blow up.



Venusian Broon said:


> As for being dismissive about quarks not having a practical application - give it time. I mean the Greeks discovered static electricity around 600 BCE and it only took about 2400 years to get a practical application from that discovery



The Greco-roman civilisation got a far as a primitive steam engine and a very sophisticated astronomical clock, but after the collapse of Rome it took another 1200 years before the West reached the same level of sophistication. So actually, we've been at it for the last 350 years or so, starting very slowly and picking up speed - until now.



Venusian Broon said:


> ---------------------------------
> * Also I suspect that by that time we _may_ have reached over peak oil, hence it would be a good thing to move away from such a fuel, but it's always dangerous thing to speculate when peak oil will occur!



It seems we are further away from that than originally assumed. Not in our lifetime anyway.


----------



## Vertigo (Oct 10, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> The environment wasn't the direct subject of the thread, but we can see environment as another limiting factor to technological progress. What nobody looks at when talking electric cars is how is that electricity going to be generated once you dump fossil fuels and uranium? You have only three alternatives: hydroelectric power, wind vanes and solar panels. HEP depends on how many large perennial rivers you have, and in a drought production can drop off drastically. Solar power on an industrial scale needs lots of deserts with minimal cloud cover. Somebody suggested that the Sahara is a perfect place - until you think about which part of the world the Sahara is in. Wind vanes are also erratic. All three together can probably be made to work, but my feeling is that they are more high-maintenance sources of power than fossil fuels, which means a more expensive and hence scaled-back industrial complex.


That's a rather limited list of energy sources: you have omitted tidal and wave power, both of which have huge potential. As well as other 'weird' things like salt water osmosis First osmosis power plant goes on stream in Norway. I watched an interesting documentary a few years ago on that last one. And of course, though we're not there yet, if we do achieve fusion power then that's likely to be a game changer.

I agree that these alternative are not yet in a place to replace fossil but they are moving closer.


----------



## Venusian Broon (Oct 10, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> I'm not sure what a Quantum revolution is supposed to be.



You're typing on one of the fruits of it, as I am with my PC. But I do think there are some game-changing techs and ingenious ideas still to come from manipulation of the micro. It's not just about cramming ever smaller transistors into the same space. I do get your point about the programmer, but again that's one aspect - a result of the overwhelming success of computing to be applied to ever increasingly harder real problems. To some that's limits, to others it's just teething problems 

Anyway, I do think it is dangerous to focus so narrowly on 'progress' on just one aspect, i,e. when in reality something like technology develops because of a broad range of different factors, one of which is sometimes physical limits, but a lot of the time you have to look at societal, environmental, economical and culturally drivers.

The Romans have come up a lot in this discussion for failing to exploit something like the steam engine. But the reason they left it as a novelty was that they _didn't need it_. A large part of their economy was slave driven and they were, for many hundreds of years, very efficient at generating slaves to keep this economy going.

Anyway, I've made progress this morning and I look to make even more this afternoon, adieu good sir.


----------



## Mirannan (Oct 10, 2017)

There are limits, imposed by natural law, on technological progress - but they are very loose limits, in the main. Two examples: The limit of information density is given by the Bekenstein bound (roughly, one bit for each square Planck length) and that is more-than-astronomically higher than we are going to get to for a very long time. And there is approximately 400 yottawatts of power available in the Solar System if we can build collectors - and there is easily enough material.

Secondly, saying that natural law limits technology implies that we already know all of natural law - which we plainly don't.


----------



## Dave (Oct 10, 2017)

Venusian Broon said:


> The Romans have come up a lot in this discussion for failing to exploit something like the steam engine.


I've said this before, but if the Romans were so advanced, how come they didn't invent buttons on clothing?


Justin Swanton said:


> This thread just looks at _technological_ progress. Deciding what constitutes true progress for humanity is another separate and vast topic in itself.


In that case, there is no argument. It is a no brainer of a question. As others have already said, there are natural constraints that limit the top speed, power and fuel-efficiency of machines beyond values which it is neither economical or practical to try further. You have set a very narrow definition of technological progress if merely measured by such factors. That wasn't the question I was arguing against earlier at all.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 11, 2017)

Venusian Broon said:


> The Romans have come up a lot in this discussion for failing to exploit something like the steam engine. But the reason they left it as a novelty was that they _didn't need it_. A large part of their economy was slave driven and they were, for many hundreds of years, very efficient at generating slaves to keep this economy going.



Actually - not quite. Slavery was common in the late Republic and early Empire when Rome was expanding its conquests and picking up a slew of prisoners to put on the slave market. But after that there wasn't much slavery, and it didn't run the economy. The economy was built on agriculture and arable land was organised into huge estates called _latifunda_, farmed by tenants who were free men but obliged to pay a percentage of their produce to their landlord.



Venusian Broon said:


> Anyway, I've made progress this morning and I look to make even more this afternoon, adieu good sir.



Adieu, adieu, a la prochaine!


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 11, 2017)

Dave said:


> I've said this before, but if the Romans were so advanced, how come they didn't invent buttons on clothing?



Because they didn't need them?



Dave said:


> In that case, there is no argument. It is a no brainer of a question. As others have already said, there are natural constraints that limit the top speed, power and fuel-efficiency of machines beyond values which it is neither economical or practical to try further. You have set a very narrow definition of technological progress if merely measured by such factors. That wasn't the question I was arguing against earlier at all.



OK, I'm listening. What are we talking about?


----------



## hej (Oct 11, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> The economy was built on agriculture and arable land was organised into huge estates called _latifunda_, farmed by tenants who were free men but obliged to pay a percentage of their produce to their landlord.



Latifundia

I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'd forgotten my Roman history and had to look up the word. Thanks much for reminding me!

On a different note, I recall that the latifundium did involve slavery. Am I wrong?

Latifundium - Wikipedia

"The latifundia were the closest approximation to industrialized agriculture in Antiquity, and their economics depended upon slavery."

and

"By the 2nd century AD, latifundia had replaced many small and medium-sized farms in some areas of the Roman Empire. As the small farms of the Roman peasantry were bought up by the wealthy and with their vast supply of slaves, the landless peasantry were forced to idle and squat around the city of Rome, relying greatly on handouts. [Ov]erall, the latifundia increased productivity so the moralists complained. The fact is free farmers hadn't disappeared: many had become tenants on estates that were two parts: the part directly controlled by the owner and worked by slaves and the other leased to tenants by legal contract."

So, was it more Archer-Daniels-Midland agribusiness, sharecropping, or pre-US-civil-war slavery?

Seems like a mix of the latter two from what I recall/read -- a blend that would definitely be a brake on technological progress.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 12, 2017)

hej said:


> Latifundia
> 
> I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'd forgotten my Roman history and had to look up the word. Thanks much for reminding me!
> 
> ...



Ta for the correction. 

I'll check up on exactly when slavery dropped off in the Empire. By the late Empire certainly (3rd century onwards) it was pretty much confined to the villa/domus staff of rich families. Tenant farmers were either free men or _coloni_, i.e. not slaves but obliged to stay on and work the land of their landlords, kind of like indentured servants.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 14, 2017)

Somewhat on the subject, a large oil refinery costs between $5 and $15 billion to build, employs about 4000 staff, and produces about 635 trillion (thousand thousand million) Btu (British Thermal Units) of energy a year. The world's largest HEP dam, the Three Gorges dam in China, cost $27.6 billion to build, employs about the same number of staff, and produces about 334 trillion Btu of energy a year. So HEP is less profitable than oil but not dramatically so. But the environmentalists have to commit hara-kiri.


----------



## Mirannan (Oct 14, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> Somewhat on the subject, a large oil refinery costs between $5 and $15 billion to build, employs about 4000 staff, and produces about 635 trillion (thousand thousand million) Btu (British Thermal Units) of energy a year. The world's largest HEP dam, the Three Gorges dam in China, cost $27.6 billion to build, employs about the same number of staff, and produces about 334 trillion Btu of energy a year. So HEP is less profitable than oil but not dramatically so. But the environmentalists have to commit hara-kiri.



On the other hand, as long as maintenance is carried out (including some things often not done, such as removing silt) the dam project will produce energy essentially forever. Without the associated external costs of the products of the refinery; even if you think that AGW is nonsense, there is still air pollution which does have all manner of costs; also the risk of fire and explosion and even the inevitable small and possible major spillages.

It's also notable that the oil refinery doesn't produce any energy at all without the oil wells to send it feedstock, or the tankers and pipelines to transport it. One really ought to add the oil wells, tankers and pipelines to the figures.

Lastly, the finished product has to be transported as well and that isn't free (or risk-free) either.


----------



## Brian G Turner (Oct 14, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> a large oil refinery



That's not a power station feeding into the national grid, though?


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 14, 2017)

Brian G Turner said:


> That's not a power station feeding into the national grid, though?



No, my figures for its energy output is a rough conversion into Bdu of the energy in the petrol, diesel and jet fuels it produces.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 14, 2017)

Mirannan said:


> It's also notable that the oil refinery doesn't produce any energy at all without the oil wells to send it feedstock, or the tankers and pipelines to transport it. One really ought to add the oil wells, tankers and pipelines to the figures.
> 
> Lastly, the finished product has to be transported as well and that isn't free (or risk-free) either.



True. I don't have the figures for that. Can anyone help?


----------



## Mirannan (Oct 14, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> True. I don't have the figures for that. Can anyone help?



The only figure I can find is the one for an offshore oil field (Libra) off the coast of Brazil. This cost is $174 billion; one can assume that onshore fields in reasonable places would cost maybe a tenth of that, but I doubt that there are any of those left.


----------



## LordOfWizards (Oct 14, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> No amateurs today are even trying to invent antigravity, or homemade fusion reactors, or antimatter drives, or anything that would significantly alter the current state of macrotechnology.



Ahem... Why This 14-Year-Old Kid Built a Nuclear Reactor


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 14, 2017)

LordOfWizards said:


> Ahem... Why This 14-Year-Old Kid Built a Nuclear Reactor



I know nothing whatsoever about Taylor Wilson, but I will swear on the graves of my ancestors that he has not built a fusion reactor.


----------



## LordOfWizards (Oct 14, 2017)

Sorry Justin. If you read the article, that's exactly what he did.
From the first paragraph:

"... a boy who had just become the youngest person on Earth to build a working nuclear fusion reactor."


----------



## Mirannan (Oct 15, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> I know nothing whatsoever about Taylor Wilson, but I will swear on the graves of my ancestors that he has not built a fusion reactor.



You would be wrong. "Built a fusion reactor" does not imply that said reactor produced more energy than was put in.

It so happens that the design this kid used (called a Farnworth fusor, I believe) is used fairly widely as a source of high-energy neutrons for various research purposes.


----------



## BAYLOR (Oct 15, 2017)

I can’t imagine a limit on technology.


----------



## Dave (Oct 15, 2017)

BAYLOR said:


> I can’t imagine a limit on technology.


By the very limited and narrow parameters set by question as posed here, there are fundamental limits imposed i.e. the speed of light in a vacuum, the Planck constant, and the gravitational constant. "We canna change the laws of physics, cap'tin!"

My argument was an entirely different one, in that further small refinements of low tech i.e. the life span of a gas light mantel, are made totally obsolete when higher tech is discovered/introduced i.e. electric light bulbs, followed by fluorescent tubes, followed by Ferengi glow globes, or whatever.

The length of time it took a candle to burn was once a fundamental problem that severely limited the amount of work that could be achieved in the evening. In the future, we will pay as much attention to how fast we can make a car go as we now do today to how long a candle will burn.


----------



## Mirannan (Oct 15, 2017)

Dave said:


> By the very limited and narrow parameters set by question as posed here, there are fundamental limits imposed i.e. the speed of light in a vacuum, the Planck constant, and the gravitational constant. "We canna change the laws of physics, cap'tin!"
> 
> My argument was an entirely different one, in that further small refinements of low tech i.e. the life span of a gas light mantel, are made totally obsolete when higher tech is discovered/introduced i.e. electric light bulbs, followed by fluorescent tubes, followed by Ferengi glow globes, or whatever.
> 
> The length of time it took a candle to burn was once a fundamental problem that severely limited the amount of work that could be achieved in the evening. In the future, we will pay as much attention to how fast we can make a car go as we now do today to how long a candle will burn.



But that's a different argument altogether - although what you say is true. And there are other constraints not imposed by limits of the technology itself, as well. I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who said that he had no desire to travel down Oxford Street at the velocity of sound - but he would quite like always to be able to go down that street at the speed of a stagecoach.

A second example is the real soon now (TM) introduction of flying cars - which will probably look like a giant drone. The problem here is imposed by human nature, not the technology. Cars on the ground kill thousands of people per year in the UK, but at least those killed are either in the car or on the road - local to the event, at any rate. Now let's imagine that flying cars become common and are driven in much the same state of repair as cars are now and also by people in the same state of health, sobriety and alertness as current cars. The problem here is that a flying car having an accident 2000 feet up would have rather more drastic effects than a car crash has now.

The same applies, with even more force, to space vehicles. Care to have a drunk driver in charge of an orbital shuttle? You might as well give him a nuke to play with.


----------



## Danny McG (Oct 15, 2017)

My contribution to this debate..
A couple of points have been raised about transportation and energy production going 'greener' to reduce air pollution - why not, in this era of gene tinkering, create a strain of humanity with super resistant lungs who can eat anything?
Then carry on regardless polluting, who cares then? Development of greener issues would become an unimportant little branch of technology that very few would bother about


----------



## Harpo (Oct 15, 2017)

dannymcg said:


> My contribution to this debate..
> A couple of points have been raised about transportation and energy production going 'greener' to reduce air pollution - why not, in this era of gene tinkering, create a strain of humanity with super resistant lungs who can eat anything?
> Then carry on regardless polluting, who cares then? Development of greener issues would become an unimportant little branch of technology that very few would bother about


There are more than a few thousand other species to consider on this planet, this place is not our toy.


----------



## Dave (Oct 15, 2017)

I have thought of a better example of why I think that the question posed in the manner that it is, is an irrelevance. The Longitude Problem - vast amounts of money, time, effort and scientific endeavour were put into making very accurately timekeeping pendulum clocks so that ships at sea, for months on end, in rough, stormy weather, could know the exact time, and therefore their exact position. Those clocks are technologically as good as one can ever make them, but there are limits to that accuracy, and they can never be any more precise. Those clocks are all now in museums. Their technology eventually became irrelevant with atomic clocks and GPS navigation. So, I'm saying, yes, there are limits to technology, but they don't matter within the much bigger picture of technological "progress."


----------



## Danny McG (Oct 15, 2017)

Harpo said:


> There are more than a few thousand other species to consider on this planet, this place is not our toy.


----------



## LordOfWizards (Oct 15, 2017)

A much safer alternative to "flying cars" exists and is in production and testing as we speak. It isn't even brand new technology, it's rather seldom used as it carries a significant initial investment, and high maintenance costs.  Tesla's own Hyperloop pod sets record with 220 mph test run

These maglev (magnetic levitation) trains have been running in Japan since the 1980's.There's one in Birmingham, England that ran from 1984 -1995 cited here. The article states that it was closed due to high maintenance costs, and so all new technologies go through an incubation stage when being perfected. The first Electric vehicles first appeared in the mid-19th century. Our societies are to a great extent what limits the expansion and research into new and better technologies. Simply because money is a factor, and existing mega-corporations tend to fight new technology that competes with their current technology. Think about it: If someone says "That technology would make petrol cars obsolete", the Auto manufacturer executive is going to get nervous and fight the development of such things.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 17, 2017)

LordOfWizards said:


> Sorry Justin. If you read the article, that's exactly what he did.
> From the first paragraph:
> 
> "... a boy who had just become the youngest person on Earth to build a working nuclear fusion reactor."



OK, I get it. Reading quickly around the subject (real life keeps getting in the way) the boy made a device using technology developed in the 60's to create a very small fusion process, but not one that has any practical use. By 'fusion reactor' I was thinking - you know - a reactor that could maintain a stable fusion reaction and generate more energy that it required.


----------



## Mirannan (Oct 17, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> OK, I get it. Reading quickly around the subject (real life keeps getting in the way) the boy made a device using technology developed in the 60's to create a very small fusion process, but not one that has any practical use. By 'fusion reactor' I was thinking - you know - a reactor that could maintain a stable fusion reaction and generate more energy that it required.



That particular design of fusor does have a practical use, although admittedly it isn't power generation. The neutron source it represents is useful for such things as neutron activation analysis and production of medical isotopes; the advantage over a nuclear reactor is portability and its ability to be switched off.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 17, 2017)

Dave said:


> I have thought of a better example of why I think that the question posed in the manner that it is, is an irrelevance. The Longitude Problem - vast amounts of money, time, effort and scientific endeavour were put into making very accurately timekeeping pendulum clocks so that ships at sea, for months on end, in rough, stormy weather, could know the exact time, and therefore their exact position. Those clocks are technologically as good as one can ever make them, but there are limits to that accuracy, and they can never be any more precise. Those clocks are all now in museums. Their technology eventually became irrelevant with atomic clocks and GPS navigation. So, I'm saying, yes, there are limits to technology, but they don't matter within the much bigger picture of technological "progress."



Actually the sea watch was made by one man - John Harrison, in response to a challenge by the Admiralty that offered a £20 000 prize to anyone who could make a clock accurate to enable the calculation of longitude. The Admiralty gave John Harrison a total of £1000 - something like £60 000 in contemporary money - to develop his clocks, culminating in the H4 which did the job.


----------



## Vladd67 (Oct 17, 2017)

If you watch Longitude with Michael Gambon, during the scenes at sea during the first sea trial of Harrison's clock, one of those sailors looking busy pulling ropes etc is in fact your own Vladd. In one exchange I am actually at both ends of the ship at the same time, thanks to the miracle of editing. I can also just about be seen steering the ship with a production assistant lying on the floor out of shot moving the ships wheel so I had something to fight against. The fact we were moored on the Thames near the City airport is neither here nor there.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 17, 2017)

Vladd67 said:


> If you watch Longitude with Michael Gambon, during the scenes at sea during the first sea trial of Harrison's clock, one of those sailors looking busy pulling ropes etc is in fact your own Vladd. In one exchange I am actually at both ends of the ship at the same time, thanks to the miracle of editing. I can also just about be seen steering the ship with a production assistant lying on the floor out of shot moving the ships wheel so I had something to fight against. The fact we were moored on the Thames near the City airport is neither here nor there.



I saw the movie. Loved it. I'll do a rewatch and look out for you.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 17, 2017)

Mirannan said:


> A second example is the real soon now (TM) introduction of flying cars - which will probably look like a giant drone. The problem here is imposed by human nature, not the technology. Cars on the ground kill thousands of people per year in the UK, but at least those killed are either in the car or on the road - local to the event, at any rate. Now let's imagine that flying cars become common and are driven in much the same state of repair as cars are now and also by people in the same state of health, sobriety and alertness as current cars. The problem here is that a flying car having an accident 2000 feet up would have rather more drastic effects than a car crash has now.



The Terrafugia costs $279 000, a price tag that probably won't go down much. Flying cars are unlikely to become generally affordable.



Mirannan said:


> The same applies, with even more force, to space vehicles. Care to have a drunk driver in charge of an orbital shuttle? You might as well give him a nuke to play with.



There is no way a space vehicle could become cheap enough to be a private means of transport such that a commercial astronaut would be able to get drunk whilst driving it.


----------



## LordOfWizards (Oct 17, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> OK, I get it. Reading quickly around the subject (real life keeps getting in the way) the boy made a device using technology developed in the 60's to create a very small fusion process, but not one that has any practical use. By 'fusion reactor' I was thinking - you know - a reactor that could maintain a stable fusion reaction and generate more energy that it required.



Well, if that's what you want, you'll have to wait a little bit longer. It's not finished yet: ITER - the way to new energy


----------



## Dave (Oct 18, 2017)

This might be the place where I suggest that Hollywood films are not the best source of historical facts? 

Also, to say that one man invented the marine chronometer is like saying that Karl Friedrich Benz invented the motorcar, or that James Watt invented the steam engine.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 18, 2017)

Dave said:


> This might be the place where I suggest that Hollywood films are not the best source of historical facts?
> 
> Also, to say that one man invented the marine chronometer is like saying that Karl Friedrich Benz invented the motorcar, or that James Watt invented the steam engine.



if you have another quick squizz at my post you will notice the link in John Harrison's name doesn't go to a movie site. 

There were several individuals working on making an accurate clock during Harrison's time, true, but they were individuals and they weren't massively funded.


----------



## Vladd67 (Oct 18, 2017)

Dave said:


> This might be the place where I suggest that Hollywood films are not the best source of historical facts?
> 
> Also, to say that one man invented the marine chronometer is like saying that Karl Friedrich Benz invented the motorcar, or that James Watt invented the steam engine.


Nobody is saying one man invented the marine chronometer, what was said is one man won the competition to make a clock accurate enough at sea to use in navigation.


----------



## Dave (Oct 18, 2017)

And the relevance of all that to the quote of what I said is? 

I am obviously aware of the competition and that he won, but his clock is still not as accurate as an atomic clock, and despite further refinements that continued to be made, it would never be so. It had indeed reached physical "technological limits." (Not to mention problems with cloud cover.) However, technology in the much wider sense, prevailed and we no longer rely on clocks and the stars to pinpoint our position at sea.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 18, 2017)

Dave said:


> And the relevance of all that to the quote of what I said is?
> 
> I am obviously aware of the competition and that he won, but his clock is still not as accurate as an atomic clock, and despite further refinements that continued to be made, it would never be so. It had indeed reached physical "technological limits." (Not to mention problems with cloud cover.) However, technology in the much wider sense, prevailed and we no longer rely on clocks and the stars to pinpoint our position at sea.



Fine. So mechanical clocks reached a natural limit of accuracy, which limit was surpassed by digital clocks. If I understand you, your point is that any given line of technological development must reach a limit, but further lines will always open up that can do the same job and do it much better. Is that about right?

The problem with this, to go back to my original point, is that lines of technological progress only opened up when an increase in the theoretical understanding of matter and the laws governing it made it possible. It's only when we understood electricity that digital clocks became possible, and the limits of a technological line built on electricity were reached some time ago. We understand better and better the more fundamental aspects of material reality but - and here lies the rub - we cannot make practical use of the knowledge, not for decades now.


----------



## Mirannan (Oct 18, 2017)

Another line of development that reached its limit was propeller-driven aircraft. For various reasons (the tips of propeller blades going supersonic was one of them) it is impossible for a propeller-driven aircraft to go supersonic in level flight. The best that an air-breathing aircraft has done, AFAIK, is around Mach 3.2 so obviously, we got around that. (AFAIK because I don't know about US government black programmes, and if I did I wouldn't be blabbing about them on the Internet.  )

One more: Chemical rockets impose a limit of maybe 15 km/s on spacecraft, and even for that incredibly expensive and wasteful methods have to be used. Therefore, travelling to Mars is always going to take months with chemical propulsion. With ion drives or nuclear rockets we will probably do better.

Against what you said, Justin, it is my contention that we already know the fundamental physics required for better spacecraft propulsion. However, nobody wants to spend enough money on it to get the job done. There might have been a base on one of Saturn's moons by now, if Project Orion had not been killed off.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 18, 2017)

Mirannan said:


> Against what you said, Justin, it is my contention that we already know the fundamental physics required for better spacecraft propulsion. However, nobody wants to spend enough money on it to get the job done. There might have been a base on one of Saturn's moons by now, if Project Orion had not been killed off.



Bingo! Possible but too expensive, hence a white elephant.

Here are my criteria for true technological progress:

1. It must be reasonably cheap to implement and maintain (it doesn't matter how much it cost to research and develop).
2. It must confer a real and new benefit (i.e. not a marginal improvement on already existing technology).
3. It must benefit a significant proportion of humanity (i.e. it must be affordable at least by the middle class).​
That effectively rules out space travel. Space travel has consisted of a limited number of hugely expensive showcase missions funded on the promise that one day condition 3 would be implemented. The promise hasn't been kept and the penny has dropped that it can't be kept. Project Orion is cheaper than chemical rockets but not dramatically so. It doesn't fulfil condition 3.

In my novel _Immortelle_ I made the Mars mission a joint venture between NASA and the ESA, during which the mission commander realises it is a one-off venture, done as a PR exercise to convince Westerners they aren't yet outdone by an economically dominant East (the novel takes place in the mid-21st century). I can conceive there being enough motivation to pay for one Mars mission, but not two, really not.


----------



## Dave (Oct 18, 2017)

So, if I am correct, this is mainly an economic argument against technological progress, not the one where there appears to be "natural walls that eventually bring *all* lines of technological development to a cloying halt." I see these as quite different arguments. I don't dispute the former, I still dispute the latter. 

However, even the economics could change over time to make space exploration profitable. Without a time machine we can't see the future, and this is all speculation. I am merely more optimistic, based upon what happened in the past. If trade in silks, spices and china with the Far East hadn't been profitable (or if it had been more profitable) then Columbus wouldn't have been sent to find a more profitable westerly route, and accidentally found America. If that continent hadn't had Gold, then that is probably as far as further exploration there would have got at that time, and tobacco and cotton plantations would not have occurred so soon to make it any more profitable to do so later.  

The outer planets and their satellites are proving to be very unusual. I would expect something valuable to be eventually found there that would make exploration worthwhile. There are some biological limitations to space travel though. These may be overcome with technology, but by nothing we have available at the moment. Since there is no necessity, and no money to do so, no one is working hard to make it happen. Not yet.


----------



## tinkerdan (Oct 18, 2017)

I think I'd go with the notion that there are endless possibilities that are limited mostly by present demand or desire and limits in knowledge and perception. As soon as we start moving beyond any of those the possibilities begin to open again.

Take for instance computers. The handhelds; we have are pushing some limits and I can't use them effectively. I think it would take something like a computer that has a lens you wear over your eyes to really go beyond what we have and that would require something different for the interface unless its strictly used for streaming uncontrolled data to the user.

Going backwards there are fuel alternatives for energy that have mostly been out of reach because they are prohibitively expensive to produce compared to what is already in place. It has taken something like the threat of global warming to get anyone to seriously consider investing in such an economical albatross.

We live in a time of consumer motivated advancement. We can go to the Moon and likely Mars today if there were a demand; however there is no consumer demand for either and without that there is nothing more than the mandated funds to drive us there. I think an analogy to that might be seen in the new world exploration back in the day of Columbus and other explorers.

We either move out of that paradigm or we have to discover something that will motivate consumers to demand that we get to the Moon and Mars: like yesterday, because they need something: now!.


----------



## Justin Swanton (Oct 20, 2017)

Dave said:


> So, if I am correct, this is mainly an economic argument against technological progress, not the one where there appears to be "natural walls that eventually bring *all* lines of technological development to a cloying halt." I see these as quite different arguments. I don't dispute the former, I still dispute the latter.



The two are linked. The natural walls can be either a sheer impossibility - like making enough antimatter to constitute a practical fuel - or great difficulty = great expense - like developing commercial space travel to carry holidaymakers to private space stations or colonies on Mars or Triton. After a while a point is reached where the technology requires just too many people working for too long to produce too small a result. Natural limit.



Dave said:


> However, even the economics could change over time to make space exploration profitable. Without a time machine we can't see the future, and this is all speculation. I am merely more optimistic, based upon what happened in the past. If trade in silks, spices and china with the Far East hadn't been profitable (or if it had been more profitable) then Columbus wouldn't have been sent to find a more profitable westerly route, and accidentally found America. If that continent hadn't had Gold, then that is probably as far as further exploration there would have got at that time, and tobacco and cotton plantations would not have occurred so soon to make it any more profitable to do so later.



You can't compare the present situation to the past. In the past the technological means existed to reach the Americas long before Colombus got there: cf the Vikings, in fact cf the North and South American Indians for that matter. The only reason Columbus did it and nobody else did is because Columbus make a huge error in calculating the circumference of the world which led him to believe Asia was much nearer than it actually was. The other savants of his time, who knew the real size of the world, correctly calculated that the crew of a ship would die of thirst long before they reached India.



Dave said:


> The outer planets and their satellites are proving to be very unusual. I would expect something valuable to be eventually found there that would make exploration worthwhile. There are some biological limitations to space travel though. These may be overcome with technology, but by nothing we have available at the moment. Since there is no necessity, and no money to do so, no one is working hard to make it happen. Not yet.



Space travel has never been more than a PR exercise by governments (and now billionaires) that spends hundreds of millions of dollars to get a handful of individuals into low Earth orbit for a few days, and billions to keep them there. There is just no reasonably cheap way of getting people into space, necessity or no necessity.


----------



## Serendipity (Oct 20, 2017)

Justin Swanton said:


> ...
> 
> Space travel has never been more than a PR exercise by governments (and now billionaires) that spends hundreds of millions of dollars to get a handful of individuals into low Earth orbit for a few days, and billions to keep them there. There is just no reasonably cheap way of getting people into space, necessity or no necessity.



Space has its commercial uses around Earth - global positioning systems, geostationary communications satellites and monitoring conditions on Earth e.g. weather satellites. Currently scientific probes are being sent out find out how things work and what happened to the Solar System in the past, so as to better predict our future - a first step in mitigating any impending problems. 

In the future I foresee factories around Earth to make new materials that require need near-zero gravity to be manufactured, and I suspect the medical materials will lead the way.

We have already had a scare in accessing rare earth elements (c. 2012) to continue manufacturing things like smart phones and computers. Whilst this has been resolved for now, it will again become a problem in the future. There are currently no obvious replacements for rare earth elements - which means we'll have to mine them from off-Earth places. 

These are the definite predictables. 

Possibilities also exist such as the need for helium three resources if we ever get nuclear fusion working that uses helium three as its basic fuel.  

In the longer term, the issue that will push people to the Moon and Mars is the need for food stuffs. There is only a limited amount of food this Earth can produce - we've already had evidence of soil depletion from heavily farmed land. Yes, we can find alternative resources in the medium term, but there is a limit even taking into account scientific advancement. This is all predicated on the ability to provide sufficient atmosphere for plants to grow or the development of plants that can thrive in airless lower gravity environments. We already have anaerobic plants on Earth. This will not be easy, but it's possible. [If you really are interested in looking into how this kind of thing can start up, see my short story, Guard Cat.]

I think I'd better stop now before this turns into a major thesis...


----------



## Dave (Oct 20, 2017)

I can't argue for without a time machine, as everything is speculation about what might happen, but arguing against has all the advantages of knowing everything that doesn't work at present.


Justin Swanton said:


> There is just no reasonably cheap way of getting people into space, necessity or no necessity.


That is an opinion, based upon present technology. In 200 years, one of us can say I told you so.


Serendipity said:


> In the future I foresee factories around Earth to make new materials that require need near-zero gravity to be manufactured, and I suspect the medical materials will lead the way...  Possibilities also exist such as the need for helium three resources if we ever get nuclear fusion working that uses helium three as its basic fuel... the issue that will push people to the Moon and Mars is the need for food stuffs...


Outside of Earth's gravity well, it is much cheaper to send people into space, but the necessity just is not there yet.


Justin Swanton said:


> You can't compare the present situation to the past. In the past the technological means existed to reach the Americas long before Colombus got there: cf the Vikings.


That is your opinion, but ask why did trade with the Americas end after the Vikings, when there was the technological means to get there? Simply, because there was no necessity. Which is the exact point that I entered into this argument, and I feel we are now going in circles.

I can't tell you where the necessity will come from, it is simply my own opinion that it will come in time, because in the past that has always been the case. As I keep saying, without a time machine, I can only speculate that we might discover something similar to monopoles, or melange 'spice', or 2(5)6 dilithium 2: )l diallosilicate 1:9:1 heptoferranide crystals! Maybe I am too idealistic, and have too wild an imagination, but that comes with reading science fiction. What I do know is that the outer planets and their satellites are far from being barren rocks and inert gas giants, and exploring them must surely find something of value.


----------

