Space rockets are same as they were in 80's, where are nuclear engines, fusion propultion, etc?
Its the same for airplanes, appliances, and everything execept computers.
https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1451342274667876353?t=RO7...
A typical mid-market car of today would have been considered absurdly high quality and uber-luxurious in 1980. The difference is night and day.
Who is the 'they' in this statement?
(I think this may say more about what sort of statements get hyped and remembered, than what reasonable people thought)
Cars are still vastly different today than in the 80s in (at least) performance, efficiency, and safety.
Planes are also getting quite a bit better, although adoption of these planes is slow as most airlines want to get as much as they can out of the old fleet.[0]
SpaceX has been landing their rockets for several years now, and are about to take an even bigger step with Starship.
But.. the homebuilt and sport space has innovated quite a bit - glass cockpits, auto pilots, efficient engines, electric power plants, micro jets, composite aircraft..
It takes even longer now while you wait in lines to get through the security parade.
I know that's the meme, but I think it's false and a dangerous thing to tell ourselves.
Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search?
And that's just the things that are publicly documented at all. There's libraries worth of implicit industrial knowledge too, including material that is explicitly proprietary. How does Intel or AMD design a modern computer chip? How does Rolls Royce design a jet engine? How do you fabricate a mono-crystalline solar cell? How do you mine for raw materials?
This is "I, Pencil" writ large. I would estimate only the smallest fraction of humanity's knowledge can be found on the internet - well under a percent, at least if you don't count "emailing an expert". If we had to rebuild society on the basis of what we could find on the internet, we'd be lucky to reach 20th century technology levels.
If you include pirating sites? Close to 100%, most books are scanned into pdf's and can be found free online. So only thing stopping this is legal and not technological.
> If you include pirating sites?
Or...just Google’s own collection:
I too wish I was vacationing in Luna City tovarich, but things have gotten better by quite a bit.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-air...
The argument is not that nothing is getting better, but that the rate of improvement has slowed. So the frequently touted 'exponential progress' is a myth.
From 1940s, in 20 years we invented jet planes and rockets, and since then for the next 60 years we are fiddling with the same basic rocket design. Are you seriously pretending that taking 3 generation to learn to land them is as big of an achievement?
If we kept up the pace of progress, we would have skyhooks in service, nuclear thermal rockers, nuclear electric propultion, fission fragment rocket and dozens of others.
We have arguably regressed, as starship will just take us to where we were before, being able to reach the moon.
With the meagre funding that has remained since the end of that there has been pretty good progress so far.
Not only that, but they invented or invested in massive technology for manufacturing all of this such that the engines are often 3d printed and designed with precision only dreamed of before.
Soviet Buran could do that in the 80's
"Starship is designed for mars"
Original starship design was 5x larger and could take meaningfull payload to Mars. It had to be scaled down so that it use the ancient Saturn 5 launchpad and other infrastructure and be more affordable. Current starship is in the same weightlifting category as saturn 5.
"First engines to use Methane"
So what? If it was first one to use Uranium, that would be a revolution. This is just burning a different propellant. Its an incremental step. It is not a 60 -year milestone. Its like saying 'i upgrading home boiler from coal to oil' - so what? You are still stuck will low energy fossil fuels
Starship is designed for mars and its design changes pending mission realities. The fact they're progressing so quick is awesome.
First engines to use Methane are great - and it shows a mission profile that is correct for a trip to mars - since they can use science to generate fuel while on mars.
Uranium wouldn't be a revolution and there is no way it would ever pass certification for leaving earth orbit beyond small decay batteries that have been used for 60+ years.
Just because you don't agree with the cool shit going on, doesn't mean it isn't cool.
And if it could have been done 60 years ago, it would have been done 60 years ago.
Dota is cool shit too, but I am not pretending it's an achievement that will be remembered in 3 generations, like the invention of an airplane.
I feel your categorisation is fed by being a fan of SpaceX and fails to put things into proper perspective.
But hey, two can play this game, you seem to hate SpaceX so you throw out the sciences and engineering too..
There are multiple space companies sending up tourists now and dropping the cost per kilo of space travel down while creating new tech to do it. Sure, it may look like a rocket is a rocket, but its certainly not the same rockets from the 1960s - these are rockets that can take off, launch multiple payloads and have components return to earth and land from where they started.
Absolutely not! I love SpaceX and the all-composite Dreamliner, but the benchmark is not 'pretty good', the benchmark being discussed is 'exponentially better than anything that came before', otherwise we don't have 'exponential progress' - perhaps we have linear progress, or quadratic, or asymptotic.
I think they are not in the same league as Wernher von Braun or the Wright Brothers - those folks changed the world as we know it, - when Braun was designing rockets, we didnt even know that human body can function in space at all. There were no engines to look at for examples. There was nothing.
> We have arguably regressed, as starship will just take us to where we were before, being able to reach the moon.
How good were we ever at reaching the moon, though?
Hammers in 1860 looked like hammers. In 1880? Same thing. In 1900? Same old hammers. 1920? 2020? Yep you guessed it, still a hammer.
Some things are invented and then perfected to a point where you can't really improve them much in a cost effective way. That doesn't mean that new stuff isn't being discovered and worked on at the same or faster rate.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/cs/2005-09-30-smith-whyihateframe...
Applying it to booster reuse on Earth waited a bit longer.
In 1980 we weren’t landing self piloting rocket stages on drone ships and reusing them a month later. The engines powering our rockets were completely different chemistry and metallurgy. We weren’t building hyper efficient carbon fiber airframes with high bypass turbofans (Dreamliner). Even my washing machine is using about half the energy compared to a washing machine in 1989.
Composites, manufacturing, and design are all completely different to how things were in the 80s
Just because something has a similar form factor doesn’t mean it is the same. There is a strong argument that the past 40 years has seen some of the fastest progress in the history of the human race when it comes to making things.
I still think somewhere between the late 19th century to the middle 20th century had the most impactful change in human history, and things have slowed somewhat in term of overall impact since then, with more gradual improvements. 1881-1951 saw more transformative changes than 1951-2021. As in the world changed more in the previous 70 years.
There's still a lot of change going on, and some of it is transformative. But not to the extent of the radical transformations from the late 19th to mid 20th centuries, with revolutions in science, technology, economics, trade, transportation, communication and political structures.
This might be more true of the developed world than the developing, which probably has seen those transformative changes more in the last 70 years. But in terms of what came to exist, it's hard to beat that period of time.
"There is a strong argument that the past 40 years has seen some of the fastest progress in the history of the human race when it comes to making things."
to test this hypothesis, let's stop arguing about somewhat subjective things, like whether fuel injection is more significant than invention of a nuclear reactor, and think about things we can measure objectively.
Think about things we can measure, in the developed world, anything all, from wage growth to energy production to production of steel, by every metric that I have seen, their rate of increase was higher in year 1955 than in year 2015. Feel free to take your pick and show any statistics that disagrees with me.
Let's just get back to tech. In the 1980s a 4mhz computer with 360k floppy disks and cga monitor cost about 2500 bucks... Today, you have a phone in your pocket exponentially faster and smaller - all in a few decades.
The apple watch - has 100s of times more compute/storage and resolution than that computer... and some of those watches have 4g / gps and things we could have only dreamed about.
In the late 90s, we used to watch "videos" in "realplayer" in a 1" block.. 20 years later, we're streaming 4k on demand on ever device in a home across wifi networks and gigabit connections to our homes.
It wasn't that long ago most of the world was excited about 56k
The only thing that's happening, is you seem hellbent on taking the science/engineering marvels of our generation for granted.
We could go on and on but nothing would change your apparent disdain for the future
Modest improvements in communications (the bulk of which are taken up by ... decidedly non-critical messages). Adtech. Another few days on the long-term weather forecast. Pervasive Panopticon surveillance, both capitalist and state, largely symbiotic. Random death from the sky if you happen to be brown-skinned.
For millionsfold increases in CPU power, and billionsfold increases in the actual number of CPUs available.
You are using a platform that can distribute that sentence to a majority of the human population, at a marginal cost that rounds to 0, in less time than it would take a human to type it.
Another few days on the weather forecast for heavily populated areas that already have a team of forecasters on staff. For the rest of the earth, we have enabled forecasts to exist at all. in 1980, if I wanted the forecast for a remote spot on earth the answer was "hire a meteorologist". Now I can have a reasonably accurate forecast sent to me hourly via a satellite constellation for a single digit percentage of the cost of hiring a meteorologist. This has HUGE implications for logistics, agriculture scientific research, etc...
Surveillance and death from the sky? The west has had no problem spying on citizens since the 1930s, and randomly killing people in less developed civilizations is a centuries long tradition for the west. All technologies have their downsides. Much like computing, metallurgy is one of the core technologies behind warfare (modern guns don't exist without steel, planes without aluminum, etc...).
Niche artists and businesses can find an audience using the internet (using ad tech, I'll note). Lives are so routinely saved by cell phone technology, that we don't even bother noting the role that technology plays. I can use google translate to have a real time conversation with a stranger on the other side of the earth without having to worry about language. I taught myself how to design PCBs and had a prototype run made by a factory in a country that I've never been to, in less than a month.
The effects of computer technology are so ubiquitous that I think they are almost invisible
Worse, the existence of such a channel incentivises low-value ways to fill it. Advertising, robocalls, spam, phishing attempts, and fraud. It's somewhat enlightening to look over the Greek and Roman pantheon to realise that Fama was interested only in trumpeting the pronouncements of the gods, not considering their value or veracity, and that Mercury was the god not only of messengers, but of tricksters and thieves. Herbert Melville's The Confidence Man, from which the modern term derives, was set on the first great superhighway of the United States, the Mississippi River.
Improvements in communications technology have much the same effect has handing out party favours to a room full of five-year-olds. Communications and intelligence isn't improved, though the noise floor is considerably raised.
My point isn't that a few days' additional improvement on weather forecasts have no value. It is that in order to achieve this, MILLIONS OF TIMES increases in computer power are necessary. Which is to say that information-processing advances of an extreme degree deliver very, very modest additional benefits.
Niche artists and businesses used to find an audience the old-fasioned way: locally, because of a phenomenon known as "friction". It cost too much to move goods (or audiences) long distances, so provisioning was local. It wasn't until the rise of the factory system, mechanised transportation, branding, and advertising, that it became possible to sell goods over a range of more than a few villages or towns (with rare exceptions). The consequence now is that:
- Every manufacturer of a durable good is competing on a global basis, and production has a strong tendency to shift to where labour and environmental regulations can be most heavily suppressed.
- Ephemeral production, as with software, video entertainment, music, fashion, banking, and propaganda centralises to where the non-ephemeralisable components of production are most suitably concentrated, giving rise to toponymic global centres (with possible variations based on language, culture, and regulation or legal jurisdictions): Hollywood and Bollywood, Nashville and Motown, Silicon Valley, New York / London / Frankfurt / Tokyo / Shanghai, Milan and Paris, Moscow and Macedonia.
Cellphones are so gunked with junk calls that actual lost hikers will ignore incoming calls from unknown numbers, a problem communications service providers have seen coming for years. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003383)
I'm not saying that there are no benefits. But that there are also costs and consequences and counterveiling trends, and that many of the so-called gains have been offeset by losses either in the same domain or elsewhere.
Wrt cars: the chip shortage is reducing car production. That says something about how much modern cars need that computational power.
- Realisation of climate change puts additional constraints on human activity, it doesn't lift them. It's what I call a "hygiene factor", along with other realisations of unintended consequences of activities. Note that the constraints existed all along, we're just made aware of them at some point.
- Extrasolar planetary systems have virtually no practical impact for life on Earth. They represent an extension of understanding but not of means.
- Self-driving taxis ... are solving a wrong problem for most people. They don't solve transportation problems (congestion, cost, pollution, land-use), they are far more capital-intensive than increased land-density, walkable (or bikeable) cities, or mass-transit. They seem to exacerbate, not solve, inequality issues amongst both drivers and riders. There may be a slight safety improvement, but that remains theoretical rather than demonstrated. On every other touted benefit, ride-hailing / self-driving vehicles have failed to deliver.
- Movie CGI is an example of a technology with very minimal upside benefits and huge downside risks. The positives are ... making it easier to tell lies in entertainment. The negatives are ... making it easier to tell lies for any other cause at all: deepfakes, porn, fraud, spearphishing, propaganda, etc., etc., etc. There may be some benefits in situation / scenario modeling and simulation, though much of that seems to have military and offensive applications as well.
- Physics, astronomy, and medicine are all domains in which return to knowledge seems to fall rapidly. Basic mechanics gave us simple machines, chemistry and gas laws gave us our prime movers, steam engines, ICEs, and turbines. Electromagnetic experiments gave us generators, electric motors, and a wide range of electromechanical and electronic systems virtually all conceived of in the 19th century. Of quantum-based systems, the most widely used are probably LEDs, lasers (in information transmission and preservation), and photovoltaics. Returns to basic medical interventions (public health, nutrition, food quality, antisceptics) are vastly greater than those to acute interventions. And we can't even persuade a huge fraction of the population to practice basic hygiene and get a proved vaccine.
- Modern cars are dependent upon computational power. It is not necessary to use computational power in those cars, and vehicles lacking any electronics do in fact function. There are marginal at best improvements in performance and safety. Pollution controls (through improved real-time combustion tuning) is probably the largest impact. Note that the primary alternative to ICE-based automobiles are electric cars, themselves a development track abandoned over a century ago in favour of (at the time, and by badly flawed economic pricing functions) cheaper fossil-fueled internal combustion engines.
Meantime, pervasive problems exist in pollution (global warming from CO2 emissions, ozone from CFC releases, lead largely from use in motor fuels though also paint and other applications, other heavy metals, endocrine disruptors, plastics), environmental and ecosystem devastation (multiple causes), economic inequity, political imbalance, massive injustice, discrimination and genocide, epistemic warfare, and fundamentally, a failure to accept and act on the reality of limits to human expansion and progress.
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics
> 1.8% per year among men from 2001 to 2017
Is that the rate you expect?
If you want a more punctuated example, how about gene therapy, which is doing things like restoring (partial) vision to the blind. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-gene-therapy-p... Early days still, but we've laid the foundation for a really exciting next decade or so in genomic medicine.
Same disease that would've killed my friend 30 years ago would kill him today, with the same treatments being used as had been available another 30 years before that, based on WWI chemical warfare.
Healthcare's shining decade was the teens.
The 1910s.
Largely based on public health measures. Much as today.
The difference in experience of driving a 2020 Tesla Model S vs a 1980 Cadillac Seville is more drastic than that same Cadillac and its 1940s equivalent.
Airplanes? There is a really good Nova episode on the electric race - we're nearing an electric age with airplanes even in commercial aviation - In the next 5-10 years we'll probably have the short hops covered by quiet electric planes - that innovation isn't necessarily paced by science, but by safety, engineering and certification - things we don't want to shortcut since humans are involved in these systems.
Hell.. we've been dabbling with autonomous cars too and driver assist and lane assist... I can go on and on
That also ignores really impressive improvements in ICE based cars (idle shutdown, cylinder deactivation, reduced pollution).
That's not even touching on electric vehicles and self-driving car advances.
The EPA says tailpipe emissions are 98%-99% cleaner, with a 71% overall drop across "six common pollutants" despite miles traveled climbing 114%[1] (They use a few different starting and end points throughout that article.)
It's easy to miss how much cleaner modern cars are.
[0] https://andyarthur.org/how-much-cleaner-our-cars-are-today.h...
[1] https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate...
GM was about to put Lithium-ion batteries in the EV1 when the project was cancelled in 1999. It was less than 10 years later that Tesla introduced it's game changing Roadster. In between Toyota's Hybrid technology both helped and hurt EV development. It helped advance EV tech but reduced commercial and regulatory pressure for pure BEV's.
Drivetrain, running gear, and fuel systems are completely different systems that would be unrecognizable to a 1985 mechanic.
This statement sounds like it came from a software engineer who has never washed grease off his hands.
If the latter is true, then it is evidence thay the statement "we have exponential progress" is false
As far as cars go, I would say a 1980 mechanic could work on a 1940 car. A 1980 mechanic could NOT work on a 2020 car.
I think alot of non-mechanically-inclined people don't understand that massive revolution that happened in car engines in the 2000s.
Cars have a whole lot fewer right angles these days.