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I think it's wrong to say that there has been little improvement in software, in both our techniques of building it and the body that is in existence. I think the advance from the disconnected dumb home microcomputer of 1985 to the globally connected iPad of today is comparable to the advance from the telegraph to television. I think it's easy to underestimate how far we've come when you've lived through the change. The salience of the contrast over time is lost, because you're too close to it, and the change seems almost imperceptible; recognizing how far we've come needs some perspective.

It's true that humanity is less in the game of building pyramids, dramatic edifices of might to be looked upon in wonder, but I suspect much of that was grandstanding in a global cold war, rather than driven by need or even a genuine striving for achievement. Our focus has moved in a more democratic, consumer-oriented place, where it is simultaneously less visible as a monument, but where its leverage, the number of lives it affects, is higher than ever.

Space exploration doesn't make a whole lot of economic sense, until there are resources beyond our planet for which the demand exceeds supply such that the price level justifies the effort. I don't have any romantic fantasies of travelling across the galaxy, much less universe; without FTL technology (which will probably never exist) or greatly lengthened human lifetimes, it isn't realistic to focus on it. If it was really necessary to go to the moon again, I'm confident it could be done much more cheaply and safely than it was last time, but I wouldn't vote for public funds to be spent on it.

> the disconnected dumb home microcomputer of 1985 to the globally connected iPad of today

But the microcomputer of 1985 was globally connected too! And that did seem like quite a technological advance: here in one's own home, a machine that, via phone lines, can exchange messages worldwide!

I agree that the number of people globally connected has increased, but it seems more incremental; a matter of economics and incremental improvements, bringing down the prices and upping the speeds, so now many more people can experience that magic of global connectivity in your own home.

Extremely few C64s and Amstrad CPC 464s were globally connected; that's the class of machine I had in mind. If you think this is just incremental, then I'd say that putting a man on the moon is just an incremental improvement in bomb-making, the culmination of the controlled release of chemical energy; a matter of slow refinement over centuries.

The moon example is advances caused by technological improvement, though, where something previously technically impossible (going to the moon) eventually became possible.

By contrast, I think much of the global connectivity improvement, at least at the basic level of connectivity, is social/economic. The technology existed in 1985 to hook people up with at least basic global connectivity; unlike going to the moon in 1920, it was not technologically out of reach to get on Usenet in 1985. And many people did get hooked up to various kinds of global messaging. That many others didn't was mainly a matter of price, education, and interest, imo, not a technological issue. It's certainly technologically conceivable to have an alternate-reality 1980s where the average home had a C64 or AppleII, and dial-up access to a global messaging/email service, using no technology that didn't exist in 1985.

There are innumerable things that are technically possible today that were not technically possible in 1985. What I'm really objecting to is this veneration of explosively moving a certain weight of flesh over a certain distance as a thing, an achievement, which we are lacking now.

Clearly, sending a man to the moon captured the imagination of a certain generation, a generation that is growing older. But it didn't capture my imagination particularly strongly; it was before my time, and now it seems to me like an massive achievement in the same way as the pyramids were massive achievements. Literally massive, in that the scale is impressive, but monuments essentially without purpose other than aggrandizing those who achieved them.

So I don't see them as a big thing that was done in the past that is lacking in the present. I don't see a need for them. You might as well ask why we haven't built a bigger pyramid than at Giza.

Unfortunately, this is one of those points where the two opposing camps are generally not able to come to any sort of agreement. I grew up reading Cosmos and straining my eyes through a bad telescope and looking up and wanting to be there instead of stuck here.

And, unfortunately, it's all too common on HN that we can't have a discussion about value that doesn't involve a concrete measurement of actual dollars, and since I am not one of the three wealthiest people on the planet, I cannot quote any kind of significant figure for what I personally would be willing to pay to leave the planet in a permanent way.

But, I will say that historically, the populist argument against exploration has always been that it wasn't worth the cost, and that that argument has almost always turned out to be wrong. The technological improvements required to accomplish the exploration have always further benefited human technological development, to say nothing of inspiring later generations to continue pushing boundaries, or of showing us just how possible it is to break through certain boundaries, or of discovering unimagined treasures along the way.

I am steadfastly amongst those few remaining people who thinks that real space exploration is not only worth it, but is essential to our species.

I tend to think of it like this: keeping all humans on one planet and expecting long term survival is like keeping all of one's servers in one data center and expecting 100% uptime. And that data center has a tendency to be hit by extremely large rocks going very fast every now and then.

Yep, but just FYI, the common counter-argument on HN is that the survival of the species doesn't matter to the individual, so they still don't think it's worth spending money on.

Yeah, I never really figured out how to argue against that... it's kind of a built in urge for me, and it's not strictly logical except from a "I'm partly driven by my genes, which have been optimized to protect my tribe" standpoint. I figure most people have that, but if someone doesn't, you probably can't really make them care.

Think about this.

The first cell phone was developed in 1947 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones

The Internet starts in 1950 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

Tablet computers were prototyped in 1968 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

It's the economic improvement since that created the iPad. iPad is not in anyway comparable to the technological innovation in 1960 that put a man to the moon.

It's like someone using VS2010 and C# 4.0 seeing the SICP book for the first time, or a chance encounter with LISP. And you would know we didn't improve that much since the days we put a man on the moon.

And gunpowder was invented in China centuries ago. That's the kind of technology that put a man on the moon, in the same relation that your examples have with an iPad.

If you really think that Lisp by itself embodies all the technology that is in C# 4.0, rather than merely being able to encode and implement such technologies, then I don't think you know what you're talking about. To get Lisp to do everything C# 4.0 can do, you'd have to write a compiler for it in Lisp macros. That Lisp has a macro system that can do this is, to me, no more interesting than that I can also write a compiler in assembler.

Gunpowder is not even remotely close to "the kind of technology that put a man on the moon". That's absurd.

Lisp might not have everything that C# 4.0 does, but so what? Most of the world still runs on C. Hell, for that matter, a depressing amount of the world still runs on Fortran and COBOL. C, Fortran, COBOL ... they are adequate, if not exactly fun, tools that can generally be used to get there from here. I promise you that there is nothing you can do in C# 4.0 and WTF 11.12 that I can't do in C.

But just go ahead and try to get to the moon using gunpowder.

Mass production and magnification is a qualitative change.

Neal Stephenson knows better than he shows in this article.

The

I agree for the most part. I video skyped with my mom today. It boggled her mind that we're able to do this. This is something that was only possible in cartoons in the 70s. She only just discovered Skype, whereas I've been using it for years and have seen it evolve.

I imagine it's like watching your nephew grow up. Don't see him for a few years, and suddenly, it's like, whoah! You're huge! But if you see him every day, maybe the difference isn't as dramatic.

I would also note that those more dramatic motives you discuss regarding things like the pyramids, space exploration, etc, may not exist today, which further decreases the dramatic level of today's technology.

Exactly. If you could travel back in time and bring an iPad back to 1985 (and somehow keep internet connectivity with the present) and showed it to someone, they'd probably consider it magical to the point that it must have been made by aliens. It's far too facile for someone in the present to dismiss it as an incrementally improved piece of technology that is no better, fundamentally, than what already existed in 1985.

lol, no, we would not have considered it magical. Based on television shows like Space:1999 we fully expected to have a large moon base and ray guns by 1999. My 1985 self would have looked at the iPad and said "That's all? The battery only lasts for a few hours, it's only two-dimensional, and I can't roll it. What happened, was there a nuclear war initiated dark age?"

I doubt that.

The iPad is an amazing technical leap over consumer electronics circa 1985 (Pong, Pacman, grainy color TV).

Pong was old school in 1985. Atari 5200 had been released a few years earlier.

It wasn't exactly caveman days, ya know.

Nonsense. In the previous decade we had gone from the introduction of LED watches to personal computers - by 1985 we had the Apple IIE, which is a bigger leap from what was available in 1975 than the IIE to the iPad. Kubrick included iPad-like devices in 2001 because he thought we would have them. I would have been surprised to see them earlier than 1995, but 2010? Late.

Stephenson is right, but he doesn't go far enough. It's not just the big things - since 1970 the pace of progress has been slowing down across the board.

Judging our pace of progress against technology imagined in a science fiction movie doesn't seem valid to me.

It seems to me that the pace of progress is accelerating everywhere, all the time. As it has throughout human history.

When my grandfather was born cars were so brand new they weren't mass produced - they were only toys for rich people. By the time he was my age he saw the introduction of flight, jet flight, and space flight. He saw the introduction of radio and television. He saw the first effective treatments for bacterial infections.

There hasn't been any period of time like that recently. Progress hasn't been accelerating. The reason we thought we'd have fusion power and moon bases and a cure for cancer is that's the trajectory we were on. So no, progress isn't accelerating at all. It's slowing down, and more perceptibly every day.

I was there, in 1985.

I don't think I would have thought it magical, or invented by aliens, just a neat bit of hardware.

And it would have beat the krep that Kirk was forced to use on Star Trek.

Video skyping is a victory of hardware development, not software. The software methodologies are not fundamentally different from the 1970s -- they are faster, and (arguably) easier in certain ways, but code is still written one line at a time, building logical constructs that have been around for decades.

What has changed is the amount of code that a device is capable of executing per second, and that is what has enabled things like video decoding.

I think you're overlooking the many algorithmic advances in video & audio codecs in that time period too. It certainly has NOT been case of the software guys sitting around since the 70s waiting for the hardware guys to catch up.

The 'advances' in video & audio codecs require more hardware to encode and decode them. It's not like I can decode a blue ray disk on a Pentium 4.

> code is still written one line at a time

I take it you have never used IDEA to write Java code? :-P

It may be that all the low-hanging was picked, and progress seems slower because we're now working on the harder problems. But I think there's plenty of world-changing advancements on the way in the next decades:

- Nano-scale manufacturing, 3D printing

- Life extension

- Quantum computers

... to name a few off the top of my head.

The problem with the space program is that it's gotten about as far as it can go without propulsion and energy-generation systems an order of magnitude or two more efficient. Hopefully we'll see breakthroughs there in the coming decades as well.

> The problem with the space program is that it's gotten about as far as it can go without propulsion and energy-generation systems an order of magnitude or two more efficient.

Exactly! And, materials science. There's this huge problem of radiation in space that hasn't been solved yet without the use of a lot of thick, heavy ("costly") materials. From the little bit that I follow the field, this seems to be an even more challenging problem than propulsion.

> - Life extension

My money for the next great advancement in science is on biotechnology. All the signs are there -- the computing power has recently become available to crack some very difficult problems, imaging systems are better than ever, and we are rapidly developing new understandings of biology, including human biology. Scientists can print organs now! If I can survive long enough to become an old man, I think there's a good chance -- if I have enough money, sadly -- that I'll live to be a very very old man.

The proliferation of cell phones is huge, and the smart phone revolution is another gigantic social change.

Conquering space in a meaningful way is a much larger problem than any of the leaps we've made technologically in the past 100 years.

Female emancipation was even bigger social change, but it wasn't the article's point. If we restrict ourselves to realm of technology, smartphones are not that much of a breakthrough. I had my Nokia and my Palm back in 1990s, it wasn't really that much different.

Your Palm in the 90's had a 16 Mhz processor and 1 MB of memory. An iPhone has a 1 Ghz processor and 32 GB of memory. If that's not "much different" you have a strange understanding of scale. And that was only 15 years ago, not 50.

The internet connectivity and storage changes are utterly radical changes in terms of what they enable. That iPhone gives you Wikipedia and Britannica and Project Gutenberg and the Kindle bookstore and Spotify and the iTunes music catalog and Netflix, all right in your pocket. Most people seem not to notice, but this is one of the most radical changes in history.

Agreed.

Think about the explosion in digital artifacts we are producing for future generations (blogs, videos, music, etc.).

The entire historical record of human history is tiny compared to the historical record of the past 15 years.

My Palm had a graphic touchscreen and handwriting recognition. A decent organizer package, and a thriving market of 3rd party applications. I could use it to surf the web, do email, IRC, or remote control my TV.

The smartphones went a big way in usability and price department, but it's not any kind of qualitative difference.

This was the time when anyone expected VRML-based web and augumented reality just around the corner. If you told me back then about iPhone in 2010, I would have really struggled feigning surprize to mask the disappointment.

It seems to me that the relative stagnation in space exploration is that there is no reason to move forward. Commercially, there's practically no incentive to move beyond geostationary orbit. Militarily, probably not either. And those are the two most powerful motivators around.

I heard a talk where it was suggested that the thing to aim for is to mine a small near-Earth asteroid for valuable ores. The hurdles are small compared to, say, going to Mars, and there's a commercial payoff. But even that requires a bunch of technology that doesn't exist and are at this point too far-fetched an investment for private development.