Strange way to phrase it, but it gets the point across - what are some things that we use in modern times that seem to have hit a technological-evolutionary dead end a long time ago?
my votes:
Matresses. We sleep on metal springs. Something about it seems so comically barbaric and primitve, like sleeping on a sack stuffed with straw.
Helicopters: Didn’t Da Vinci invent these things centuries ago? It seems like a missing link between the kite and the boeing 747, a historical anecdote that should have disappeared long ago. And they still don’t work - just look at how many casualities in Iraq have been the result of helicopters suddenly “not working” and going “blam!”
The internal combustion engine. We’re burning (strike 1) substances that come from deep earth rot (strike 2) to move around, and (strike 3) belch out disgusting, toxic fumes? It seems like something should have evolved here since the model T.
Jewelry. Culturally, it’s so primitive that I’m surprised that women don’t grunt their thanks before being dragged off by the hair.
What else would you have springs made of? A bed should be springy, and metal is the only springy thing out there. Nonetheless, better designs and improved materials (except for the springs) are introduced fairly often.
No.
They work just fine. Like all aircraft, helicopters need regular maintenance and a reasonable working environment. Unlike other aircraft, they’re not getting it.
Sheesh. 100,000 years of human evolution and 10,000 years of human culture before we arrive at this pinnacle of mobility, and you wanna throw away the gasoline engine after 100 years. There’s no pleasing some people.
Well, it just seems that if cars/ personal transport had followed the bell curve of everything else, the engines would be the size of a walkman, run on electricity, emit clean water, and last 50 years by now.
Good one on jewelry, though - it really is one step removed from face paint (makeup?).
Re the OP, one of the most conspicuous examples is a symphony orchestra, most aspects of which are redundant given modern music-making technology. You don’t need 8 first violins and 8 second violins and 8 third violins to try and achieve the required balanced sound. Just take one violin for each part that needs to be played, feed it through one gizmo to double- or triple- track it, or thicken it up as many times as you need, and then use a mixer to give prominence where you want it. Or just use a string synthesiser. Similarly, it’s very primitive to use little wooden boxes (violins) for high notes and large wooden boxes ( double bass) for low notes and have all the sizes in-between. With a pitch-shifter you can have a violinist play a double-bass part quite easily. Or, again, just use a decent synth and a player who can mimic the way a solo or ensemble string sound usually sounds.
Of course all the purists say ‘it doesn’t sound the same’. Well, it sounds close, and in some ways it sounds better, and you don’t need 60-odd people lugging all these old-fashioned instruments based on technology from two centuries ago just to play a piece of classical music live. You would only need as many players as there are orchestral parts.
Central-heating is fairly primitive. The romans had basically the same technology as do - heat up water and let it flow around the place through pipes. Shouldn’t we be heating our homes using hi-tech inivisible waves or something by now? Like a domestic and peaceful application of 1920s style death rays?
Thoroughly misguided. The technology you describe doesn’t exist, and in any case it would miss one crucial aspect - sixty musical minds all working together creatively. Why else does every orchestra sound unique?
BUT…to add to the list, qwerty keyboards. Front door keys. Toilet paper.
Originally, they were. Their existence is a relic from before good clothes fasteners were commonly available, like buttons, hooks and zippers. Want to keep the cold out of the neck of your shirt in the winter? Tie the opening up with… a tie.
Now, they exist soley for father’s day gifts.
Please please please please, tell me that you were kidding about that one. :eek:
(Not to say that there isn’t good electronic music out there…)
I’ll only focus on one part, related to my user name… Anyone who’se ever heard both a violin and a double bass would have to agree that no amount of pitch bending by one toward the other would ever, ever make one sound remotely like the other…
My condo has a 20th century heating/cooling device, an electric heat pump. Let’s just say that when it starts getting well below freezing outside, I wish I had an old fashioned hot water or steam system.
The basic technology of using gunpowder to shoot a metal object out of a metal tube is 600 years old or so. We should be using death rays and psy lasers by now!
Speaking as a mechanical engineer, I have to suggest that you are a bit off base with this one.
First of all, you simply can’t equate modern automobiles with a Model T. For over a hundred years there have been steady, and sometimes radical, improvements in the technology. We can do things now that we didn’t dream about even fifteen years ago. It’s far from an antiquated technology.
An internal combustion engine gives you an almost unmatchable power-to-weight ratio, excellent durability, easy maintenance, and a very long service life. Practically speaking, the thermal efficiency is pretty good too. They’re also unbelievably scalable; you can power a supertanker or a chainsaw with different models*. Alternative fuels are available, and your emissions concerns are a bit overstated. There isn’t going to be a truly viable alternative for the forseeable future.
Gas-electric hybrids, you say? Maybe, but I know I go through batteries a lot more often than I go through engines. Crappy service life on batteries. I forsee disposal problems.
*Yes, I know there are significant differences between four-stroke compression-ignition marine diesels and two-stroke spark-ignition chainsaw motors. They’re both internal combustion engines.
Telephone poles. We still have to plant big logs vertically in the ground, evenly spaced, sometimes supported by metal guy wires. Then we string long cables from the top one pole to the next, just to get power and data from one place to another. How primitive and ugly!
Fax machines! I hate fax machines, they should all be smashed. Think about it – they digitize an image, send the bits down the pipe, another machine on the far end reassembles the bits into the original image, then throws the data away. WTF?
Add to that hopeless scenario all the people who insist on printing out word processing documents, then faxing them somewhere to be re-keyed. (Assume both parties have email, but don’t know what email can do.)
Not that I’d want to go without it, but…I mean, you’d think that we’d have come up with something a little more advanced (and yet in common use) by the 21st century.
Dang. I can see I’m going to be busy with this thread.
Back when I was teaching elementary dynamics (don’t ask, that job sucked) I used to use guns as an example of a truly elegant technology. Sometimes posessing as few as three moving parts, they still operate with wonderful reliability and consistency. I don’t see them going obsolete any time soon either, because they are still a great way to deliver a lot of energy quickly. Besides, get into the wayback machine, go back 600 years to find a mope with a cannon-lock handgonne he’s loading with meal powder he just mixed himself, hand him an M1A1, and ask him if he thinks it’s the same thing.
The alternative is underground conduit. That’s an attractive alternative if you can negotiate a special franchise for the right-of-way and dig, but heavy rains can still give you headaches. Poles give you good separation from ground, and we have a lot fewer of them these days than we used to anyway. Take a look at a photograph of midtown Manhattan circa 1925 sometime.
I can add nothing to this but whole-hearted agreement.
First Category: things that no one has (yet) come up with a really good replacement for–
-internal combustion engines
-chemically powered guns
-eating utensils (what could replace these?)
-toilet paper (ditto)
-books (yeh, as far as pure data storage goes, they suck; but still the best format)
Second Category: things that ARE being replaced by better alternatives–
-spring matresses
-shoe laces
-buttons
-traditional “blackboard and lecturer” teaching
-eyeglasses
-front door keys (at least for public access. They’re still a cheap reasonably secure method of ensuring that only a few people can go through a door)
Third Category: things that people don’t WANT to replace–
-string orchestras
-jewelry
-neckties
-windup watches (if you just need a cheap accurate timepiece, get digital. But an expensive windup is still a work of art)
Fourth Category: things that aren’t really that old–
-helicopters (Da Vinci’s design has virtually nothing to do with modern helicopters)
Fifth Category: things that truly are pointless holdovers–
-Qwerty keyboard
-Fax machines
