Well, at the risk of sounding like the guy who said “close down the patent office. Everything has already been invented.”, what IF things we predict for the future won’t work?
What if the universe does not allow at all faster than light drive, reactionless thrusters, teleportation, Star trek-like senor tech, tractor beams, force fields? What if it is essentially impossible because of power and weight and shielding considerations to travel faster than say .2c?
What if matter-energy conversion just won’t work on a useful scale (no portable replicators)? What if nano-tech just won’t work (that you can’t make a complicated circuit small enough)? What if there are no undiscovered super strong materials to make space elevators or ringworlds or whatnot out of? What if controllable fusion power just isn’t possible on a useful scale? What if hard wiring into a mind just isn’t possible?
That is, what if it isn’t a question of technology advancement, but fundamental laws of the universe?
Then maybe we actually are near the top of the technology scale. And no one will ever know, because space travel would be for all purposes impossible. Maybe this is all there is?
Then the people who think of science fiction as “syfy” will be greatly disappointed but the people who study real science won’t be remotely suprised. Add to that anti-gravity, (non-accelerational) artificial gravity, tiny but human-level or beyond AIs, and open air 3D holograms.
Why would any of that stop us from developing interstellar travel? We could send interstellar probes using principles we already know about - it’s just a matter of making the designs more mature and/or allocating more resources. Even human interstellar travel is likely possible if we devote enough resources to it.
Do you honestly see no middle ground between where we are now, and the fantasy world of Star Trek where anything can be replicated, a bus-sized spaceship can take you to another star in a few days, and even travel through time at will?
IN fact, in terms of passenger aircraft, we have stepped back a bit. In the 1970s the Concorde flew you across the ocean at Mach 2.0 . Now, and for the foreseeable future, we are limited to subsonic.
There is an argument that has been made that, with the exception of computers, there hasn’t been a lot of progress since the 1970s.
I think more in terms of the cost of energy. A lot of amazing tech advances can happen with much cheaper energy.
So, real life, no kidding, fusion would be very nice if it merely matches the cost of current (;)) sources. Lot’s of pluses there. But if it is even cheaper, then things change a lot.
But note that there’s a lot of base costs that keep things from becoming “free”. Even solar power is now dominated by all the secondary costs and not cell efficiency, etc.
And we don’t know if there’s a real breakthrough possible or not. So where we on the scale when we don’t know the range is impossible.
Planet earth as a whole has terrible technology; the vast vast majority of the earth’s population only has access to medium quality technology; many have access to far, far worse. And that’s only talking about the populated areas! Large chunks of the earth’s surface is covered with water sporting no greater technology than pollutants and garbage.
Nomadic tribespeople scraping out a meager existence on the fringes of the habitable regions during the last ice age would have killed for a plastic bag. How dare you disparage the pacific garbage patch!
100 years ago the Sopwith Camel was the epitome of aviation achievement
1000 years ago a “computer” was a bunch of beads sliding back and forth on wires.
100,000 years ago, cutting edge technology was a “rock”.
I think it’s impossible to predict how civilization will change from various scientific advancements over the next hundred years, let alone a length of time longer than “civilization” has even existed.
If your only metric was top speed, then yes. However, it’s not like mankind lost the secret to faster than sound air travel.
And lets not dismiss the impact of computers on every aspect of …well…basically everything.
I think it’s hard to visualize much of the progress made over the past 40+ years because much of it is in things like materials, fuel efficiency, safety, ergonomics, manufacturing. These advances aren’t as obvious as ones from a few centuries ago such as moving from farms to factories or suddenly having electric lights on every block.
We are not at the point of A,B,C,D,F grades and the like. We are too young for that, we would get a F and not even understand the questions if we had a flat level test. However our current ability includes our ability to progress, in that a basic score can be evaluated.
I would first rate it us as perhaps pre-K or K level at most. Actually perhaps a step back to nursery school. As our grades are age dependent. In such a school we get 'needs improvement ‘in plays well with others’. As for the question our technology, it’s for us ‘able to put some bricks together to form different objects’ I think we will be categorizes as very good, excels at such tasks.
That sounds much more like religious conviction than scientific certainty. What–exactly–do you propose for sub-atomic, cheap, room-temperature general purpose computers? It won’t be quantum computers or DNA or other molecular computers–those are faster only in very specialized areas. It won’t be optical computers or gallium arsinide computers or graphine computers–those would be only a bit faster than current computers, nothing to match the orders of magnitude increases in the past 50 years. What do you propose to use other than atoms, electrons, or photons?
Science isn’t magic. Just because you wish something is possible doesn’t make it possible.
I fully expect to see microchips/cpus hugely more powerful than today. We may be hitting the limits of current processor design, but that doesn’t mean other approaches being investigated will all fail.
I look at it this way, the Romans could probably reverse engineer most of 1900 technology. Today’s tech, no chance. In 100 years we progressed more then we did in 2000 years.
What good is interstellar travel in the short term if it takes thousands of years to get anywhere? How fast do you think a probe using principles we already know about is going to go? If you can’t go fast, interstellar probes will only return data to your great^X grandchildren, at best. Good for humanity, not good for carving out a space empire.
But you missed my point.I’m not saying we’re at the end of technology. I was asking WHAT IF you can’t invent anything more. All this “well, we’ll just invent it” is just almost a religious belief. All this talk of the glorious future that someday we’ll understand. What if this is it? We may understand the universe better, but what if that understanding means we know for sure that we can’t do anything with it. You can’t change G. You can’t have a hadron computer.
Not very. Modern technology arguably didn’t even start until the industrial revolution (arguably it goes back to the scientific revolution and agricultural revolution before that).
But most modern tech is under 150 years old or so.
Seeing how the universe will continue to exist for a long time, we’ve barely begun. Stars will exist for trillions of years. Black holes for far longer. I’m guessing a future society will learn how to travel to younger universes, create new universes, etc which means their tech will continue near indefinitely.
