- Joined
- Aug 8, 2020
Let me start this thread with one of the greatest human success stories of all time:
The first powered flight happened in 1903. It was the culmination of a couple of brothers tinkering around in the shop and and deciding "I want to make something that will fly!" Truly, they were bright guys with great skill (and the tools to harness it all). Even better is knowing that we expanded on this technology at such a great pace that we put people on the moon by 1969, a mere 66 years later! People born early enough to see the first powered flight of mankind were alive late enough to see man's first steps on the moon. But progress in this field has largely hit a bottleneck from there. Maybe we found ways to maximize efficiency here and there. The space shuttle was a great way of efficiently bringing things back from space after a massive rocket brought them up there. There's promise of fully reusable rockets, but that basically hasn't changed since the 1990's. It honestly looks like we're done with flight until a whole new technology arises. It's all optimization at this point.
There's also computing, where we're desperately trying to make quantum computing halfway useful as the hard limit for conventional computing (the point where transistors will no longer be able to function normally due to quantum effects at their size) approaches. Quantum physics is hitting its own wall as demonstrated by the fact that people are freaking out over a discrepancy at 8 fucking decimal places. That's an interesting find, mind you, but compared to particle physics up to the 2000's? I can only hope it leads somewhere. But it likely won't be anything revolutionary and we'll be stuck with the same standard model that we've been using for over a decade. The one field I'm actually optimistic about is biotech as revolutions in mRNA research have allowed us to not only produce a vaccine in record time but the same tech could be used for basically every illness under the sun so long as we ensure that the jab itself is safe. We've already used gene editing to fix some degenerative diseases and I fully expect more of the same from this field in the next few decades.
My thesis is that every field is going to hit a wall where there's basically nothing new to learn until the next revolution happens. Expanding scientific knowledge is mostly a slow, grinding process and the vast majority of scientists never make a name for themselves unless they sell their asshole to media whores (at which point, they cease to be scientists). Only by sheer luck and ingenuity can we break through these walls we have before us. Science is typically a slow, incremental process. But it's only when we find a particularly interesting thread to tug at that interesting shit happens.
The first powered flight happened in 1903. It was the culmination of a couple of brothers tinkering around in the shop and and deciding "I want to make something that will fly!" Truly, they were bright guys with great skill (and the tools to harness it all). Even better is knowing that we expanded on this technology at such a great pace that we put people on the moon by 1969, a mere 66 years later! People born early enough to see the first powered flight of mankind were alive late enough to see man's first steps on the moon. But progress in this field has largely hit a bottleneck from there. Maybe we found ways to maximize efficiency here and there. The space shuttle was a great way of efficiently bringing things back from space after a massive rocket brought them up there. There's promise of fully reusable rockets, but that basically hasn't changed since the 1990's. It honestly looks like we're done with flight until a whole new technology arises. It's all optimization at this point.
There's also computing, where we're desperately trying to make quantum computing halfway useful as the hard limit for conventional computing (the point where transistors will no longer be able to function normally due to quantum effects at their size) approaches. Quantum physics is hitting its own wall as demonstrated by the fact that people are freaking out over a discrepancy at 8 fucking decimal places. That's an interesting find, mind you, but compared to particle physics up to the 2000's? I can only hope it leads somewhere. But it likely won't be anything revolutionary and we'll be stuck with the same standard model that we've been using for over a decade. The one field I'm actually optimistic about is biotech as revolutions in mRNA research have allowed us to not only produce a vaccine in record time but the same tech could be used for basically every illness under the sun so long as we ensure that the jab itself is safe. We've already used gene editing to fix some degenerative diseases and I fully expect more of the same from this field in the next few decades.
My thesis is that every field is going to hit a wall where there's basically nothing new to learn until the next revolution happens. Expanding scientific knowledge is mostly a slow, grinding process and the vast majority of scientists never make a name for themselves unless they sell their asshole to media whores (at which point, they cease to be scientists). Only by sheer luck and ingenuity can we break through these walls we have before us. Science is typically a slow, incremental process. But it's only when we find a particularly interesting thread to tug at that interesting shit happens.
