So... Have we pretty much figured it all out?

Great Debates
1

WOO! FREE POSTING! WOOO! nakkid thread traverse!

Ahem, sorry. Residual giddiness, you understand.

Anyway, I was talking with a few of my friends the other day. Typical, college-level geek stuff - life, the universe, everything. Cheetos, plutonium, the respective redeeming qualities of either (plutonium wins). The usual. We all marveled at how rapidly things had changed in our generation - we’re all in our early twenties and watched the personal PC and the internet completely revolutionize the way we live. I mean, my debit card stopped working the other day at a store and the clerk had to pull out one of those ancient card-impression-reading-swiper-things. Can you remember the last time you saw one of those? I swear the thing was made of wood and hide glue.

One of my friends with whom I typically spar indicated that the next generation would look back on ours with an equal sense of smug marvel at how quaint our technology was. How did anybody get around without personal fission-powered jetpacks, anyway?

I however, disagreed (and here’s the point, rounding the bend) and made the contention that, for the most part, mankind has worked out a good fraction of his surroundings. Indeed it seems the only new discoveries these days come from blowing atoms apart to study the fragments and biochemistry. The latter may still yield some important inventions to affect our quality of life, but my feeling is we’ve basically plucked all the low-laying fruit of technology.

The printing press, metallurgy, antibiotics, microprocessors, synthetic organic chemistry, nuclear weapons, and the microwave have all impacted our modern world to a huge extent - and maybe I’m just being cynical, but when we need to spend billions to construct an elaborate particle accelerator so we can speculate on what happened 110^-10 seconds after the Big Bang, all that comes to mind is the concept of diminishing returns*.

So what gives? When my hair finishes falling out, will I need to worry about those damn cyberpunks thrashing my Nanoplex Emeraldine Full-o-matic nanotube lawn’s self-contained fission reactor system? Or will we still be setting up sprinklers?

And since this is my first real post, I hope it’s in the right spot. Mods, feel free to move it where appropriate.

2

I remember my college roommate making pretty much the same argument. That was 25 years ago. Do you think he was right?

PC

3

One point…we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of neurology and biochemistry and cellular biology. We don’t understand how the brain works, how consciousness works, how cellular development works, how proteins work. We barely understand how some genes are regulated, but it’s mostly a huge mystery. We’re only at the beginning stages of figuring out how many genes we have, much less what each one does or how they work with each other.

Add in nano-scale engineering and materials science and related fields and you might not even recognize your grandchildren as human beings.

4

This is pretty much how everybody I’ve spoken to responds to this question. Why should we expect our progress to continue at a geometric rate? Moore’s Law has been stymied by quantum effects, the growth of our energy output has plateaued and you need a bachelor’s degree just to comprehend the abstract of many “breakthrough” chemical research papers. Battery technology is running into barriers with the sheer amount of chemical energy the compounds can hold. Superconductors have exploded into the searing world of liquid nitrogen instead of liquid helium.

Don’t get me wrong - I’d love to see the next antibiotic, true AI or scalar weapon. It just seems as though we’re getting marginal benefits for our ever-increasing expenditures.

ETA: Lemur866, I conceded in my original post that biochemistry is one frontier we’ve only begun to explore. But how is “knowing” what “consciousness” is (and that’s been a primarily philosophical debate for some time in my opinion) or developing some new incredible anti-cancer drug going to inspire the kind of paradigm shifts we’ve seen in the past century?

5

You ever hear of genetic engineering? What if we learn what genes are responsible for human intelligence and genetically engineer our children to have more of them?

We’ll be like Neandertals who congratulate each other that we’ve completely perfected the stone axe and no better stone axe will ever be invented.

6

And how long has it been since we changed the design of our axes?

7

So that’s a “no, but I am”?

PC

8

Hmmm.

My inability to imagine the fantastic as ordinary says yes, my stubbornly innate drive to falliciously use induction over historical evidence says no.

Clearly, then, the only answer is “hmmm.”

Integrating our technology into our biological selves could be just such a paradigm shift, yes. Understanding consciousness could open doors to things that were only science fiction. But if you are counting science fiction as paradigms that already exist, then I don’t know how to answer your question.

Actually, I do. :slight_smile:

9

I’d say it’s more of a no, but I have justifications for my conclusion and I’m interested in, you know, reasons why I might be wrong.

ETA: How can we uncover the secrets of consciousness when we don’t even know what it is, and whether or not lobsters have it?

10

Axes are so simple that there isn’t much one can practically do to improve the design. That’s not true of humans; we have a wide variety of flaws and limitations that could be improved. We also don’t have a simple, well defined function like an axe, and are therefore targets for changes that aren’t objectively definable as improvements or not. That leaves a lot of room for alterations that would really shock you if you lived long enough to see them.

Where we seem to be approaching limits, or at least areas of diminishing returns is in various simple, basic areas like how small an object can be or extremely high energies. We have barely scratched the limit of what can be done with complex things. For example, building a working superhuman AI, or copying human minds into a computer; both are well beyond what we can do now. Or self replicating robots that can build copies of themselves from natural substances; once we invent those, our present economic/industrial system and it’s limits will be blown to smithereens. Or how about genetically engineering animals to human level intelligence ?

There’s all sorts of impressive things that are well within the limits you talked about in the OP, but that we don’t know how to make yet. So, we aren’t done with big changes yet.

11

I don’t buy the justifications any more than when my college roommate made them. However, it’s not really all that important now is it? Unless, of course, everyone starts believing it and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

PC

12

And that’s a very real worry. I don’t want to give the wrong impression - I adore technological process, would sign up first to have my brain digitized, and all-around wouldn’t mind a robot body. Progress - hey! Good stuff, even if those pesky ethics tend to slow it down.

It simply seems as though there’s a lot of resources going into research that will provide very little real benefit to mankind. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge, if you will, and let me stress that I’m all for it. But it doesn’t diminish my perception that as we climb the tree, the branches get thinner.

Or something. I’m better with a pipette than metaphors.

13

Well that may be the case. And if it is then the question is how far are we from the end? My answer is driven by humility (no, really); how can we be sure of what we don’t know? It’s hard enough being confident in what we think we do know.

PC

14

I don’t think we have it all figured out. There are contradictions between our different physics paradigms. Also, there’s a lot we can’t get any good data on, like what really causes the magnetic fields of planets, because we can’t see inside planets.

15

I think there are two areas where we should be devoting the majority of our resources and time: neuroscience and genetics.

The six billion dollars spent on producing a collider that might possibly create a theoretical Higgs Boson that might…uh…we’re not sure what it might do, but it might do something really great that we don’t know about and then ha!..those six billion dollars should be spent on neuroscience or genetic research, specifically to try to cure cancer or Alzheimer’s disease and also to aid people with disabilities.

16

What about our other senses that we may yet discover? What about ways of travelling that involve instant teleportation of the human body? What about ways of slowing the aging process and extending life? Exploring beyond the number of demensions that we are used to interacting with? What about learning how to blend our senses? (Some people already do this and most human beings blend taste and smell.)

There is a song in The Music Man that says, “Everything’s up-to-date in Kansas City; we’ve gone about as far as we can go.” I think the setting is about the turn of the 20th Century and the irony is not lost on the audience. They know how much is to come.

Near my home town a time capsule was opened in recent years. Inside, among other things, was found a list of questions. One of them was “Did man ever learn to fly?” That gave pause to quite a few who were present who had flown in for the occasion.

I am sixty-five. I expect to see some extraordinary things before I die. I’ve gone from little white specks in the sky to the images from the Hubble telescope that just mess up my mind. May you have mind-blowing adventures and marvelous surprises at the reach of your fellow Earthlings and beyond.

17

Some Victorian scientists seriously believed that everything that could be invented had been invented. Genetobiology and neurofruzochemodingomingusdew aside, I’m sure there are plenty of things that we have the technology for now that just haven’t been thought of yet. And then there are things like the jetpack that were thought of long ago that just might be practical one day with the right fuel source.

18

I’ve often had this same discussion. What I say is: If you graph useful human knowledge against time, what does the graph look like?

I suspect that it looks quite exponential in nature, and that we are nearing the limit.

What I think is the most salient point is that our planet is indeed finite, and that in the last few hundred years we have found its edges. When Columbus found America, that was a huge, huge thing. These days we have satellites that map every square yard.

In other words, there is nothing left to find.

We may indeed find useful things to do with ourselves, such as curing diseases. But in terms of what we know about the world at large? I think we are on a very slowly moving portion of that curve.

19

I think technological progress hits ruts, sometimes. Eventually, we’ll reach another breakthrough, and all hell will break lose. The 20th century was rife with breakthroughs of profound nature. If it weren’t for the computer and micro processors (and all the technology that went into producing them), it’s almost impossible to image a world much more complex than the 50s or 60s. The PC alone has been responsible for myriad technological breakthroughs at the end of the 20th century.

We may be in a relative rut right now, but you never know what’s around that corner. Besides genetics and biotechnology, there’s nanotechnology, and space exploration in our future; bringing with it major challenges and walls to break through. Once that happens, all the fruits of that research will trickle down into the general population, until it’s flooded with a brave new world.

20

Someone just found an uncontacted tribe in South America a few weeks ago. And we still have lots of ocean to explore. We’ve been to the bottom of the Marianas Trench but I don’t remember how many times, or when, or how long we stayed.