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I find the idea that we are not going to see any more life-changing technological advances quite unpersuasive. New technology usually comes from scientific adv

I find the idea that we are not going to see any more life-changing technological advances quite unpersuasive. New technology usually comes from scientific advances, and science in many fields is advancing rapidly. I can think of at least four radical technological changes that might flow from new science, ones that would make people of the future look back in horror at at how we live today. 1) Ways of curing or eliminating the main health problems we have today, such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and infectious diseases 2) Doubling the human life span 3) Greatly increasing the intelligence of the average person 4) Establishing mass colonies in space and moving much of the population there. I'm sure HN readers can think of other plausible advances.

rayiner 11y ago
Increases in life span due to medical technology have been rapidly plateauing as the low-hanging fruit is picked. Medical technology has yet to make any impact on human intelligence. And physics has been brutally unyielding in making space colonization impractical for close to a century now. That is not to say they'll never happen, but rather that those things are so out in the horizon as to be beyond the dividing line between prediction and speculation.
- maerF0x0 11y ago
  > space colonization impractical for close to a century now. How close to a century?
  - rayiner 11y ago
    General relativity killed the idea of faster than light travel a hundred years ago. Newtonian physics has made leaving earth's gravity on a mass scale for longer than that.
    - maerF0x0 11y ago
      Awesome. Thanks!
- gregrata 11y ago
  So the parent said "in space" - doesn't mean another star.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    Space is hard enough. Charlie Stross, "High Frontier Redux" http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high... As Charlie points out, he makes a living fanatasising about this stuff. But it's hard: Optimistic projects suggest that it should be possible, with the low cost rockets currently under development, to maintain a Lunar presence for a transportation cost of roughly $15,000 per kilogram. Some extreme projections suggest that if the cost can be cut to roughly triple the cost of fuel and oxidizer (meaning, the spacecraft concerned will be both largely reusable and very cheap) then we might even get as low as $165/kilogram to the lunar surface. At that price, sending a 100Kg astronaut to Moon Base One looks as if it ought to cost not much more than a first-class return air fare from the UK to New Zealand ... except that such a price estimate is hogwash. We primates have certain failure modes, and one of them that must not be underestimated is our tendency to irreversibly malfunction when exposed to climactic extremes of temperature, pressure, and partial pressure of oxygen. While the amount of oxygen, water, and food a human consumes per day doesn't sound all that serious — it probably totals roughly ten kilograms, if you economize and recycle the washing-up water — the amount of parasitic weight you need to keep the monkey from blowing out is measured in tons. A Russian Orlan-M space suit (which, some would say, is better than anything NASA has come up with over the years — take heed of the pre-breathe time requirements!) weighs 112 kilograms, which pretty much puts a floor on our infrastructure requirements. An actual habitat would need to mass a whole lot more. Even at $165/kilogram, that's going to add up to a very hefty excess baggage charge on that notional first class air fare to New Zealand — and I think the $165/kg figure is in any case highly unrealistic; even the authors of the article I cited thought $2000/kg was a bit more reasonable. Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000 — and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that's before you factor in the price of bringing them back ...
  - woodandsteel 11y ago
- Kinnard 11y ago
  I think we'll see human activity in space increase by an order of magnitude over the next decade. Multiple nations are entering into the space race and have plans for manned missions as well as space stations. Multiple private corporations are making advances weekly and have plans for manned missions and orbital habitats. Oncolytic Viruses seem very promising to me. CRISPR sounds like the invention of the transistor for genetics technology. AI research is advancing at a scary pace and that will enhance all the other cylinders.
  - dantillberg 11y ago
    > "I think we'll see human activity in space increase by an order of magnitude over the next decade." However, while I don't disagree with the potential for space activity in the coming decade(s), it makes a pale comparison to the first two-thirds of the 20th century, where humans went from largely ever living on the surface of the Earth (plus or minus 100 meters or so, for the eternity of humankind) to flying on a rocket to the f*ing MOON.
    - Kinnard 11y ago
      We will make it to Mars within the Century.
      - akiselev 11y ago
        That's exactly what everyone thought when we landed on the moon.
        Kinnard 11y ago
        Really? This century like within the succeeding hundred years or that century like the 20th Century? I'd be curious to learn more.
        bradneuberg 11y ago
        NASA had a plan in the early 70s to have humans on the surface of Mars by 1990. When Nixon canceled the Apollo and Saturn five missions, all that early planning went into the trashbin.
- orangecat 11y ago
  Increases in life span due to medical technology have been rapidly plateauing as the low-hanging fruit is picked. True, because incrementally better treatments for cancer or heart disease just mean that you die at 84 instead of 82. But we've only recently started trying to prevent or repair the effects of aging, which has a much greater potential payoff.
  - woodandsteel 11y ago
    That was my point, which I should have made more clearly. There is a good deal of research going on into what causes aging, and it seems likely it will pay off sooner or later in ways of delaying it.
- tokenadult 11y ago
  The increase in life span at ages 40, 60, and 80 is still quite steady throughout the developed world,[1] and we've hardly even begun to apply powerful statistical techniques to national health care databases to identify best prevention and treatment practices better. [1] "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day." http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....
- gwern 11y ago
  > Medical technology has yet to make any impact on human intelligence. But stay tuned! Human intelligence is now modifiable. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis has been done for a while, and increasingly is done with SNP arrays. That means you can use the polygenic scores from past GWAS studies on intelligence. I've been modeling this, and with a fairly realistic model of how IVF & PGD works and the best current polygenic score publicly available, an American could expect a gain of ~0.2 IQ points right now if they used PGD to select for intelligence, which is potentially cost-effective even. This will go up as additional GWASes come out (SSGAC has one coming out soon which should at least double the gain). More strikingly: CRISPR has already been used to edit human embryos fairly successfully. Once CRISPR is finetuned to the point of being safe enough to use for 1 edit, as the several planned human trials point to being the case now or very shortly, then 1 edit will buy you 0.5 IQ points (the effect of the largest identified gene), and as CRISPR improves linearly, the gains will scale nicely with the number of edits you can do; progress in CRISPR is so fast that it may be able to go from 'irrelevant' to 'game-changer' in a few years, somewhat like the NN Go players recently went from 'terrible' to 'amazing' just a year or two by constant improvement. (In contrast, embryo selection is easy to implement technically, but highly limited in its potential power because you turn out to be bottlenecked by how many eggs you can extract from a woman and how many of them will survive fertilization and implantation to yield a live birth.)
  - entee 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure preimplantation diagnostics are in many cases done with next-gen sequencing these days. Also even accepting the idea that GWAS studies for IQ yield real and useful results (a claim most people I know in the human genetics field find highly dubious) CRISPR isn't a panacea. I posted a more detailed description above, but in short CRISPR causes a massively disruptive amount of damage in a cell. It does it very accurately, but a double strand break is definitely a Big Deal for a cell. This means it only works when you've got lots of cells to play with, a near-impossible task with human embryology. CRISPR is an unbelievably useful tool for research and a huge advance, but it's not the Solution to Human Genetic Engineering. We're still a long ways from that.
    - 11y ago
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Increases in lifespan in the US since the 1950s have been far more from bringing up the lower end (improved outcomes for underprivileged minorities) than by extending top-end (white female & male) life expectency. Almost as if there were a diminishing returns setting in. There's actually been some recent improvement following the 1990s, but the vast bulk of life-expectency / mortality improvements came prior to 1920. Predating virtually all of modern medicine, but benefiting tremendously from antisceptics, sewerage systems, municipal garbage collection, refrigeration, and some early food safety and disease control, especially over cholera, tuberculosis, and yellow fever.
jgord 11y ago
I think when 3D printing can print electronics and metals embedded with plastics at good resolution, then we will see most consumer goods 3D printed whole, rather than being assembled, reducing their cost substantially. This is more short to medium term - say 5 to 12 years away, but would have a lot of economic impact.
themartorana 11y ago
I think we'll see the end of organ donors in our time. Growing fresh organs on scaffolds from adult stem cells has already been done. The first transplant of a lab grown body part has already been done. [0] Eliminating the need for a donor registry and transplanting organs with almost no risk of rejection (and no taking drugs for the rest of your life) would be species-altering (I really don't think I'm exaggerating) - and it would have saved the lives of at least two people I was related to. Growing working complex organs has been done, but not transplanted in humans yet. It's also crazy expensive. But it becoming generally available is something I think I'll live to see. That alone, forget everything else that will likely happen in my lifetime, disproves that point completely. IMHO. [0] http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-07/using-lab-grown-trachea-surgeons-conduct-worlds-first-synthetic-organ-transplant http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-07/using-lab-grow...
- ethbro 11y ago
  I would expect this to be the tip of the iceberg in regards to serious genetic hacking. Modify your own genome and wait for your body to heal itself? ... Sounds kind of risky and frightening! Have your heart or liver transplant source one that's 5/10/15% "better" (in function, endurance, etc)? Well, you already needed a new one...

rayiner 11y ago

Increases in life span due to medical technology have been rapidly plateauing as the low-hanging fruit is picked. Medical technology has yet to make any impact on human intelligence. And physics has been brutally unyielding in making space colonization impractical for close to a century now. That is not to say they'll never happen, but rather that those things are so out in the horizon as to be beyond the dividing line between prediction and speculation.

maerF0x0 11y ago
> space colonization impractical for close to a century now. How close to a century?
- rayiner 11y ago
  General relativity killed the idea of faster than light travel a hundred years ago. Newtonian physics has made leaving earth's gravity on a mass scale for longer than that.
  - maerF0x0 11y ago
    Awesome. Thanks!
gregrata 11y ago
So the parent said "in space" - doesn't mean another star.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Space is hard enough. Charlie Stross, "High Frontier Redux" http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high... As Charlie points out, he makes a living fanatasising about this stuff. But it's hard: Optimistic projects suggest that it should be possible, with the low cost rockets currently under development, to maintain a Lunar presence for a transportation cost of roughly $15,000 per kilogram. Some extreme projections suggest that if the cost can be cut to roughly triple the cost of fuel and oxidizer (meaning, the spacecraft concerned will be both largely reusable and very cheap) then we might even get as low as $165/kilogram to the lunar surface. At that price, sending a 100Kg astronaut to Moon Base One looks as if it ought to cost not much more than a first-class return air fare from the UK to New Zealand ... except that such a price estimate is hogwash. We primates have certain failure modes, and one of them that must not be underestimated is our tendency to irreversibly malfunction when exposed to climactic extremes of temperature, pressure, and partial pressure of oxygen. While the amount of oxygen, water, and food a human consumes per day doesn't sound all that serious — it probably totals roughly ten kilograms, if you economize and recycle the washing-up water — the amount of parasitic weight you need to keep the monkey from blowing out is measured in tons. A Russian Orlan-M space suit (which, some would say, is better than anything NASA has come up with over the years — take heed of the pre-breathe time requirements!) weighs 112 kilograms, which pretty much puts a floor on our infrastructure requirements. An actual habitat would need to mass a whole lot more. Even at $165/kilogram, that's going to add up to a very hefty excess baggage charge on that notional first class air fare to New Zealand — and I think the $165/kg figure is in any case highly unrealistic; even the authors of the article I cited thought $2000/kg was a bit more reasonable. Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000 — and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that's before you factor in the price of bringing them back ...
- woodandsteel 11y ago
Kinnard 11y ago
I think we'll see human activity in space increase by an order of magnitude over the next decade. Multiple nations are entering into the space race and have plans for manned missions as well as space stations. Multiple private corporations are making advances weekly and have plans for manned missions and orbital habitats. Oncolytic Viruses seem very promising to me. CRISPR sounds like the invention of the transistor for genetics technology. AI research is advancing at a scary pace and that will enhance all the other cylinders.
- dantillberg 11y ago
  > "I think we'll see human activity in space increase by an order of magnitude over the next decade." However, while I don't disagree with the potential for space activity in the coming decade(s), it makes a pale comparison to the first two-thirds of the 20th century, where humans went from largely ever living on the surface of the Earth (plus or minus 100 meters or so, for the eternity of humankind) to flying on a rocket to the f*ing MOON.
  - Kinnard 11y ago
    We will make it to Mars within the Century.
    - akiselev 11y ago
      That's exactly what everyone thought when we landed on the moon.
      - Kinnard 11y ago
        Really? This century like within the succeeding hundred years or that century like the 20th Century? I'd be curious to learn more.
        bradneuberg 11y ago
        NASA had a plan in the early 70s to have humans on the surface of Mars by 1990. When Nixon canceled the Apollo and Saturn five missions, all that early planning went into the trashbin.
orangecat 11y ago
Increases in life span due to medical technology have been rapidly plateauing as the low-hanging fruit is picked. True, because incrementally better treatments for cancer or heart disease just mean that you die at 84 instead of 82. But we've only recently started trying to prevent or repair the effects of aging, which has a much greater potential payoff.
- woodandsteel 11y ago
  That was my point, which I should have made more clearly. There is a good deal of research going on into what causes aging, and it seems likely it will pay off sooner or later in ways of delaying it.
tokenadult 11y ago
The increase in life span at ages 40, 60, and 80 is still quite steady throughout the developed world,[1] and we've hardly even begun to apply powerful statistical techniques to national health care databases to identify best prevention and treatment practices better. [1] "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day." http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....
gwern 11y ago
> Medical technology has yet to make any impact on human intelligence. But stay tuned! Human intelligence is now modifiable. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis has been done for a while, and increasingly is done with SNP arrays. That means you can use the polygenic scores from past GWAS studies on intelligence. I've been modeling this, and with a fairly realistic model of how IVF & PGD works and the best current polygenic score publicly available, an American could expect a gain of ~0.2 IQ points right now if they used PGD to select for intelligence, which is potentially cost-effective even. This will go up as additional GWASes come out (SSGAC has one coming out soon which should at least double the gain). More strikingly: CRISPR has already been used to edit human embryos fairly successfully. Once CRISPR is finetuned to the point of being safe enough to use for 1 edit, as the several planned human trials point to being the case now or very shortly, then 1 edit will buy you 0.5 IQ points (the effect of the largest identified gene), and as CRISPR improves linearly, the gains will scale nicely with the number of edits you can do; progress in CRISPR is so fast that it may be able to go from 'irrelevant' to 'game-changer' in a few years, somewhat like the NN Go players recently went from 'terrible' to 'amazing' just a year or two by constant improvement. (In contrast, embryo selection is easy to implement technically, but highly limited in its potential power because you turn out to be bottlenecked by how many eggs you can extract from a woman and how many of them will survive fertilization and implantation to yield a live birth.)
- entee 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure preimplantation diagnostics are in many cases done with next-gen sequencing these days. Also even accepting the idea that GWAS studies for IQ yield real and useful results (a claim most people I know in the human genetics field find highly dubious) CRISPR isn't a panacea. I posted a more detailed description above, but in short CRISPR causes a massively disruptive amount of damage in a cell. It does it very accurately, but a double strand break is definitely a Big Deal for a cell. This means it only works when you've got lots of cells to play with, a near-impossible task with human embryology. CRISPR is an unbelievably useful tool for research and a huge advance, but it's not the Solution to Human Genetic Engineering. We're still a long ways from that.
  - 11y ago
dredmorbius 11y ago
Increases in lifespan in the US since the 1950s have been far more from bringing up the lower end (improved outcomes for underprivileged minorities) than by extending top-end (white female & male) life expectency. Almost as if there were a diminishing returns setting in. There's actually been some recent improvement following the 1990s, but the vast bulk of life-expectency / mortality improvements came prior to 1920. Predating virtually all of modern medicine, but benefiting tremendously from antisceptics, sewerage systems, municipal garbage collection, refrigeration, and some early food safety and disease control, especially over cholera, tuberculosis, and yellow fever.

jgord 11y ago

I think when 3D printing can print electronics and metals embedded with plastics at good resolution, then we will see most consumer goods 3D printed whole, rather than being assembled, reducing their cost substantially. This is more short to medium term - say 5 to 12 years away, but would have a lot of economic impact.

themartorana 11y ago

I think we'll see the end of organ donors in our time. Growing fresh organs on scaffolds from adult stem cells has already been done. The first transplant of a lab grown body part has already been done. [0] Eliminating the need for a donor registry and transplanting organs with almost no risk of rejection (and no taking drugs for the rest of your life) would be species-altering (I really don't think I'm exaggerating) - and it would have saved the lives of at least two people I was related to. Growing working complex organs has been done, but not transplanted in humans yet. It's also crazy expensive. But it becoming generally available is something I think I'll live to see. That alone, forget everything else that will likely happen in my lifetime, disproves that point completely. IMHO. [0] http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-07/using-lab-grown-trachea-surgeons-conduct-worlds-first-synthetic-organ-transplant http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-07/using-lab-grow...

ethbro 11y ago
I would expect this to be the tip of the iceberg in regards to serious genetic hacking. Modify your own genome and wait for your body to heal itself? ... Sounds kind of risky and frightening! Have your heart or liver transplant source one that's 5/10/15% "better" (in function, endurance, etc)? Well, you already needed a new one...