I don’t know man, I think that’s pretty advanced technology.
We went from room sized transistors to nm sized ones in less than a century. No way we will need a billion years to catch up.
I should probably qualify my "first transistor" statement; the device I was referring to is the first prototype created at Bell Labs in 1947. The first transistor that someone could actually buy to build a circuit out of came out a year later and was only a little larger than today's through-hole mounted transistors. They did get used to build early minicomputers, before integrated circuits took over.
> Building something useful out of that would end up comically large.
The transistors are MicroSD-size, not RPi-size, but still, it has been done:
There's no reason to assume exponential type improvements. That's not how the world works.
Did we read the same article? This was a test. The full-scale version “would produce oxygen at a rate equivalent to several hundred trees” with close to an order of magnitude more efficiency “because a bigger machine can run at lower pressures, saving energy on compression.” There are better reasons to expect exponential improvements than not.
I just don't see any of your opening statement being even close to correct given the context. There was even significant progress in space travel and fusion in the last 50 years (e.g. first reactors being net positive after startup and reusable rockets with commercial space flights).
You see this all over the place, modern guns aren’t multiple orders of magnitude improvements over guns built 100 years ago. But they are orders of magnitude better than the absolute earliest guns ever built.
So, when looking at a prototype the question isn’t can it be improved but by how much can it be improved.
“Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
Moore's Law is the prediction that the speed of computer processors doubles every 18 months.
The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel (and former CEO of the latter), who in 1965 posited a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit,[a] and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41%. While Moore did not use empirical evidence in forecasting that the historical trend would continue, his prediction held since 1975 and has since become known as a "law".
The speed of processors actually increased much faster than the number of transistors on a chip until recently. Smaller transistors used to mean both faster switching speeds and the ability to get more done per instruction cycle. The difference between the days of a 4 bit Intel 4004 and a 32Bit 486 was vast.
Not sure why you needed to rip them apart for words that you put into their mouth.
To me, this is not "generating its own electricity". The device is still an incredible accomplishment, even more so because it's operating on Mars. But it doesn't generate its own electricity. They still need to connect it to a separate energy input to run the reaction.
I want to clarify this just in case anybody skimming the comments gets the impression that chemically splitting the CO2 into CO and oxygen gas somehow produces enough energy to sustain the reaction without external input.
Which could be easily accomplished by specialized bacteria dispensed to that planet's atmosphere. Yeah. Technology is billions of years behind.
Most extremophiles we’re aware of tend towards high temps or if low temps, in the context of extreme high salinity and water presence. Which don’t line up with Mars much.
We’d have to be managing the environment they grew in, which makes it hard.
The underlying issue of course being energy gradients and biochemical availability of that energy. Life ‘eats’ to survive, but if the only energy gradients are feeble and biochemically hard to access, it’s not a good environment for life as we know it.