Is technology stagnating?

Great Debates
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You said a number of times things not plentiful and easily extracted and found is not cheap. But there many things manufactured and synthesis in lab that is cheap. Look at plastic and nylon none of this is found in nature and hack many of foods you eat and yet this is dirt cheap.

Go to the store many things have to be made , none of this is found in nature all manufactured.

I can see may be fossil fuels the extraction, refining and distribution is very costly but how can you say new fuel found in nature or made in lab will not be cheaper.May be at first it may be costly to every things in place.
Like I say there are many things manufactured and synthesis in a lab that is very cheap.Your water bottles or oil drum is nothing comparing it to to computer ,ipad or computer desk or HD TV and yet all these things are very cheap when you compare the complexity of it and what it does.

So this is what I don’t understand how can new alternative fuel source not be cheaper or fuel effect? Unless there is some laws of chemistry opposed that there is no denser fuel source than fossil fuels.So any new fuel source will not be any where as fuel effect.

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Many plastics are made from petroleum byproducts.

Also, “cheap”? Really? In the same quantities as gasoline? Maybe you should run the numbers. The equivalent of billions of gallons of plastics is not all that cheap. At least not compared to gasoline.

Did you not see my farming examples? When food gets too cheap, farmers go broke. Making too much food can be as bad for farmers as too little.

Yes, and as I noted, milk is more costly than gasoline. Actually, many of the things in grocery stores are more expensive than gasoline per unit volume.

But we don’t consume 10 gallons of milk a week. Or bread. Or whatever. Maybe we spend more on gas, but we use a hell of a lot more on it than other things.

If I use 10 gallons of gas a week, comparing that cost directly to the amount of milk, meat, fruit, etc that I eat in the same week is ludicrous. Unit volume or unit weight costs are a fairer comparison and there, gasoline compares favorably, cost-wise, to food.

So, no, food is not really cheaper.

A billion gallons of HDTVs is NOT cheap compared to a billion gallons of gas. Quite the contrary, actually.

They might be. They might not be. We don’t have them yet. We can’t just assume we can create them if we try hard enough.

You are assuming we can come up with one with comparatively little effort. There’s no evidence this is true. Some brilliant chemist might come up with a good replacement for gasoline tomorrow. Or we might never come up with one. That’s the nature of innovation. You can’t predict it.

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In 2012 the world consumed 89 million barrels of oil per day. You point to something we produce in that amount that doesn’t have as at its base something you get from nature in vast quantities. We don’t manufacture anything that cheaply in those quantities. And even if we did, what would be the building blocks for it?

I beg of you, drop the idea of energy density. It really has nothing to do with this discussion.

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No comment on the side discussion on fuel. About the stagnation - I’m doing my bit. I donated to a Kickstarter that’s trying to breed trees with leaves that glow brightly enough to replace street lights.

I’m not holding my breath, mind you, but I figure I’ve done my bit for this year. For anyone complaining about stagnation, the fee to complain is forty bucks donated to some unlikely R&D. It’s out there, if you look, and it’s willing to send you a thank you bumper sticker. Or, in this case, seeds.

If you can’t find anything else to donate to, I have this idea for a biogas BBQ grill.

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Here you go.

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We have a Jet Pack it just not practical the fuel is used up in minutes.

It not a technology problem but a fuel problem.

Same thing with space rockets it takes 95% of fuel to get that small 5% of payload up into space.

A star trek enterprise would not even take off from earth because of size and 95% of the ship is payload or more and small 5% or 1% fuel that burns for weeks or more.There is nothing stopping building large ship in space it only cost factor.

I have seen documents of advocating building large very large rotating cities much bigger than any scfi show that makes big tar trek enterprise look like small car!!Problem is cost it very costly.

The space program is slowing down because of cost problem not a technology problem. If there was trillions of dollars growing on trees we would have moon base and mars base by now and lot more going on.It just cheaper to send space probes and too costly for space colonization and space mining.

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This conversation is taking place instantaneously with people potentially anywhere in the world. This was impossible 20 years ago (albeit possible for some people) and unthinkable 50 years ago. How is that not progress?

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My first message board was just about 40 years ago, which shows that some things take time and additional development to spread. (PLATO pad by the way.)

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And that most “breakthroughs” or “revolutions” grow out of things which were around long before the general public noticed or found a need for.

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We have fuel that could do this, we have water based jet packs that are within reasonable price and go for extended times. People don’t really want jet packs. It’s not technology or fuel - it’s economics and human needs.

We have fuels, but they are expensive to make. The solution isn’t fuel but different delivery methods (like rail guns or space elevators). Or we assemble things in space. You’re stuck on fuel as the issue but we have fuels, the problems are physics and economics. Again.

There’s not much benefit, economic or otherwise, of going into space. No matter what the cost people just aren’t that interested in it. Why would we have a moon base when we can’t provide health care for 100% of our population?

As with every one of these threads you focus on a tiny piece of the puzzle and ignore social pressures, economics, physics, and history. All you want is incredibly cheap, plentiful, non-polluting, energy-dense, safe, easily manipulated fuel. Sure, no problem - we’ll get our top people working on it right away.

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In the US we can provide healthcare for 100% of our population. We just don’t want to.
But I agree about the economics of space travel. We need a killer space app. If we had that, we’d improve the technology really quickly.
We’re also too cautious. I heard Rutan say that a lot more people died in the early days of air travel than in the early days of space travel. If the Wrights and their successors had been as cautious as NASA it would have taken a lot longer.

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The reason i got involved in this thread is because it bugs me that positive messages never get questioned – if someone throws out the opinion “the pace of technological progress has been astounding in the last few decades” noone would take exception to that. But say you find the rate of progress disappointing and you get shouted down or implied to be ungrateful. But i don’t see either of those positions to be more rational or less emotional than the other.

( But as already mentioned, i think we * can* objectively say that there’s no stagnation happening)

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Meh. That might be reasonable if it were happening.

But it’s not. sweat209 isn’t speaking about progress but about why we don’t have a superfuel that’ll allow us to travel at supersonic speeds (and somehow still better than using the same fuel but at lower speeds, at that) be ultra efficient, and cheap to produce. And wonders at what went wrong that we don’t already have it.

I suppose you could file that under “technological progress”, but really it’s a mish-mash of ideas that makes no sense. You’d have to ignore economics, history, and some basic physics to have the thesis even make the least sense.

Basically, the OP is poorly posed and doesn’t address the actual issue the OP wants to ponder, which is about science fictional air travel, for some reason.

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Probably true, but I’d feel bad saying damn the bodies, full speed ahead. I say probably true because I once read a small book on the history of steam boat engine design. That sounds more technical than it was. There were a lot of simplified illustrations to make it easy to follow.

It started with a very simple design. Then a few things were added for increased performance. OK. I expected that. Then there was change after change that was “to prevent explosions caused by . . .” The usual culprit was mud in the cooling water taken in from the river. (If you’re even trying to re-invent steam boats after a zombie apocalypse, remember to watch out for the mud.)

These weren’t explosions of a prototype in someone’s shed; these had to be explosions during boat operation. There had to be a whole lot of "well, it’s better than . . . " to offset the “they sometimes explode.” Because later, when steam boat travel was well established, the shift from wood burning boats to oil burning boats was delayed for decades in California waterways because the first oil burning boat that came to the area exploded and burned.

When there’s an alternative or no pressing need, we tend to avoid things that go boom.

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It’s also been the subject of a couple of his threads, adding to the frustration. He’s been told all of this repeatedly but it doesn’t seem to be sinking in.

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Great example. Kind of the early 19th century equivalent of a warp core breach. I believe there were many train wrecks and derailments around that time also.
There were alternatives to railroads and steam engines. I think people back then, given so many deaths from diseases and childbirth, had a different value on life when making risk versus reward decisions. Also the new machinery was considered almost miraculous, while today we are so used to new stuff that we are unimpressed by the invention and just worry about it not being perfect from the beginning.

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That message board was available to a very small number of people. The SDMB is currently available to billions of people.

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I agree about the different risk vs reward when everyone’s risk was already pretty high no matter what they did. But I have to think that there were actual risks to the alternative that I can’t totally get because I haven’t had to live that life.

The alternative to steam was walk, row, or ride a horse. On oceans and lakes, sailing was a possibility. Doing things by muscle power means that you can’t carry as much, and you’re risking injury, especially if you do it as a regular thing. You’ll be moving less goods more slowly and risking accidents, weather, and bad treatment by other people for a longer time.

Canals were great for bulk goods, pre-steam. Barges could be pulled by horses along a well traveled way. But it took a lot of muscle work to build the canals. And you could only go where the canals went, and for a fee.

Another alternative was just not to move the goods. But then you’re stuck with only what can be produced locally or what is expensive enough to make the trip worth while. I’m not sure what the cost of that would be.

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Too late to add.

The city of Stockton grew because it is was far east (that is, as close to the gold-bearing Sierra Nevadas) as you could get by boat from San Francisco. Sacramento got you nearly as far east and was further north. Once off the boat, you bought a horse and rode or bought a donkey and walked. There were some who just walked, but you had to carry your provisions.

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I’m not arguing that steam boats weren’t worth it!
Back in 1956 Eisenhower stopped the launch of early satellites, so the Russians beat us. Back then hardly anyone but some sf writers and futurists saw the benefits. Now I’d say we are pretty dependent on satellite technology for lots of things.
In fact the killer app for a lot of 1950s sf stories was that electronic equipment was so bulky and unreliable that you would have to put people up with it to take care of the equipment. The solid state revolution wiped out the need for people.
There were plenty of killer apps for steam power. What will there be for people in space. At the moment it looks like tourism. That, not technology, is the problem.
So we agree.