Unimaginably advanced? I'm not so sure. What unimaginable advances have happened to the jet engine in the last 30 years?
If you spend all day focusing on silicon chips, then it looks like "technology" moves very fast. But most technologies don't advance at anything near the rate at which integrated circuits have been improving. And even that rate appears to be slowing dramatically.
We live in an age where hand-held computers which are always connected to a worldwide communications network are ubiquitous. Where genetic modifications are a tool we use for medicine (insulin is grown from genetically modified bacteria which produce human insulin, for example) and food. Where self-driving cars are real. Where remotely controlled airplanes have been making a huge impact on the battlefield. Where bionic prosthetic limbs which respond to neural impulses are becoming more and more commonplace. Where cures for AIDS, deafness, blindness, cancers, and paraplegia are advancing day by day. Where anyone with a computer and the right CAD files can have items manufactured by 3D printing or CNC machining by ordering through a website. Where machines can perform near real-time speech-to-speech language translation. And where a business man talks about putting tens of thousands of colonists on Mars in his lifetime and he's taken seriously.
What will the next few decades hold? Memristor based computing. Graphene based electronics. Nano-tube based materials. Terabit/s wireless networking. Space colonization. The ability to repair or replace nearly all defective or missing body parts and organs.
And what will the next century let alone several centuries hold?
Not sure I agree completely. We're looking at a pretty tight niche here, but I think that humanity is, on the whole, is undergoing a shift where projects that appear insurmountable will become commonplace.
Have you seen the automated quad-rotor flying machines that can assemble structures with rudimentary components?
This is in early research, but the development of automation systems like this are tightly linked to microprocessor and software advances. Automation technology has been on a steady march of improvement.
Simple tasks like moving dirt, stacking blocks, and pouring concrete are a large part of the construction of flood protection projects. These tasks are perfect targets for automation.
Even without the help of quadrocopters, a firm in China has embarked upon the task of building world's tallest building in 90 days. If they pull it off, and if the building stands, it will change a lot of expectations.
I think quadcopter construction is a joke. Very cute, but not serious.
Despite having awesome computers and software for decades, construction costs are not going down. While some technology can be very helpful (cheap walkie-talkies are a boon to constructing a large building quickly), they haven't change the cost curve dramatically.
- Cell phones were just starting to be built, no body had them, people didn't even have pagers.
- There was no internet
- Only high end cars had power windows/power locks
- Jet engines were far less efficient. I don't know what improvements were made but someone with that knowledge will hopefully chime in.
Technology advances over the past 30 years have been insane. You can pull out a "phone" which accesses all the world's information wirelessly at high speeds. 30 years ago people would have never even thought that would ever be possible. They couldn't even imagine what "the internet" would be.
If the best we've gotten out of the 30 years of technological advances in the automotive space is power locks, I think my point is well made. I never said that no advances would occur.
30 years ago jet engines were certainly less efficient and less safe, but not by as much as you'd think.
And 25+ years ago I actually used a cell phone. My mother worked for Bell Labs.
I'd say that technological progress in integrated circuit manufacturing over the last 30 years has been amazing, and that's driven a bunch of other development but (1) most fields don't progress anywhere near as fast and (2) that burst of progress is not normal even in ICs and is now slowing down.
Oh, now you're being disingenuous. The Internet existed, yes, but a total information revolution has certainly happened within the last 30 years.
> If the best we've gotten out of the 30 years of technological advances in the automotive space is power locks, I think my point is well made. I never said that no advances would occur.
Yeah, that's a bad example. How about the fact that self driving cars, while not commercially available yet, are street legal in two US states? Top of the line cars are available with lane assist and adaptive cruise control which makes them essentially self driving, if not self navigating.
> 30 years ago jet engines were certainly less efficient and less safe, but not by as much as you'd think.
As stated in another comment, I don't know what the obsession with the development of jet engines is. But you're probably right, they probably haven't come a long way.
> And 25+ years ago I actually used a cell phone. My mother worked for Bell Labs.
The explosion of use of the Internet was driven by both a regulatory change in allowed use of Arpanet / the Internet, and the ubiquitous availability of cheap personal computing devices, driven largely by Moore's Law. Not by fundamental changes in underlying communications and computing technology. In fact the direct and largely similar progenitors of both modern TCP/IP and Linux systems were well established by 1982.
Cellular communications is based on principles first established by, of all people, Heddy Lamar (the actress) during WWII.
Gas turbine jet engines date to 1928. Recent technology has largely focused around noise abatement, though efficiency has also increased by roughly 50% since 1950. That's hardly the Moore's Law doubling-every-three-years experienced in ICs, and isn't too dissimilar from improvements in reciprocating internal combustion engine efficiency gains.
And it turns out that jets are not more efficient than propeller-driven aircraft. The benefits instead are greater speed and higher-altitude flight, as propellers are limited by tip speeds and must operate well under the speed of sound, and perform better at lower altitudes and greater air density.
In two cases, enablers were principally electronics (Moore's Law) developments enabling latent technologies. In the case of jet aircraft propulsion, the story is more complex, and includes IC-enabled computers in design, manufacture, and avionics systems, but involves incremental improvements on a number of engineering fronts. On an efficiency basis, it's simply returned us to where we were using alternate technologies in the 1950s.
What's the significance of jet engines? I'm not an aerospace engineer, but I'm pretty sure the 787 Dreamliner would be rather impressive to a 1982 aircraft designer.
But more relevant to the issue at hand, structural engineering: The height of the tallest building in the world has doubled over just the past decade. I don't know if it's downright unimaginable, but it's very real and significant progress.
The significance is that I have friends in the aerospace industry and from talking to them, I've learned that technological progress in this area has been much much slower than in IC fabrication. Would a 1982 aircraft designer be impressed with a 787? Sure. There have been a bunch of incremental improvements. But those improvements are on the order of 1%/year rather than Moore's law.
My point is that if you're spending all your time dealing with Moore's law, it may not occur to you that Moore's law doesn't apply anywhere else.
The height of the tallest building in the world has doubled over just the past decade. I don't know if it's downright unimaginable, but it's very real and significant progress.
Really? What technological innovations in structural engineering were needed? It seems to me that construction costs are not falling very significantly and that a handful of very tall buildings has more to do with the infusion of cash to isolated areas where land is (relatively) cheap than it does with major advances in structural engineering.
1%/year over 300 years is nearly a 20-fold improvement.
Also, while the construction improvements in the past 30 years may not be major, framed-tube and trussed-tube construction will be 50 years old next year.
You may be right that we have currently reached the pinnacle of technology, and that nothing else is possible except in the fields of iPhone games and social dating sites. The dead end in robotics may be approaching, even though it has resulting in a 150% improvement in manufacturing productivity since 1985 (we currently produce 70% more with 30% fewer people).
1%/year over 300 years is nearly a 20-fold improvement.
I'm not sure it makes sense to assume steady incremental growth over such long time frames. I mentioned 1%/yr when considering improvements over the last 3 decades.
You may be right that we have currently reached the pinnacle of technology
If you spend all day focusing on silicon chips, then it looks like "technology" moves very fast. But most technologies don't advance at anything near the rate at which integrated circuits have been improving. And even that rate appears to be slowing dramatically.