I don't know that you could measure it with something like Moore's Law, but aerospace capabilities grew at an astonishing rate at the beginning of the 20th cent

I don't know that you could measure it with something like Moore's Law, but aerospace capabilities grew at an astonishing rate at the beginning of the 20th century. From the Wright Brothers' first powered flight in 1903 to the first commercial flight in 1914 to flying around the world in 1924 to fighters and bombers and rockets in WW2 to breaking the sound barrier in 1947 to landing on the moon in 1969 . . . That sort of progress over 70 years strikes me as very comparable to the progress made in computing since the 1950s. Small wonder the science fiction writers of the previous generation thought we'd have flying cars by now! I would expect to see such an explosion of capability in a brand new field, in a society that had a lot of resources to dedicate to exploring it. It could happen with anything we really, really cared about, I think. Aerospace and computing both saw tremendous amounts of commercial, scientific, and military research during their accelerated growth phases. I don't know about nanotech. I'd say that sort of energy in this generation seems to mostly be going into building our society a hivemind. And I'm not gonna say that's wrong.