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Despite this happening over and over again, I can never understand the attitude underlying statements like the one this article is making. "A computer will nev
by issa 10y ago
Despite this happening over and over again, I can never understand the attitude underlying statements like the one this article is making.
"A computer will never be small enough to fit in a house"
"Man will never reach the moon"
"The atomic bomb will never work"
"The telephone will never catch on"
"Heavier than air flight is impossible"
"Everything that can be invented has been invented"
The list of things declared impossible is as long as it is laughable. I hope I'm around long enough to see this article added to the list.
- koder2016 10y agoThe article was written by an average mind for an average mind, discusses natural humans and considers only nearest future.
- dasil003 10y agoLuckily we have your sublime mind to enlighten the plebs.
- tsotnet 10y agoThe author of this article argues that there exists natural limit to the human longevity, which can not be overcome by current medicine. I don't think this implies that we will never cross that limit by further advancements in technology, such as gene editing.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kiba 10y agoThe list of things declared impossible is as long as it is laughable. I hope I'm around long enough to see this article added to the list. There are things that are certainly impossible according to the law of physics as we know it, such as FTL travel or time travel. There is nothing according to the laws of physics that prevent us, say, from colonizing Mars.
- pointytrees 10y agoThe laws of physics say we can't accelerate through the speed of light, but it doesn't say we can't travel faster than light, nor does it say time travel is impossible. Particles traveling faster than light can travel back in time. Communicating with those particles has proven to be difficult. Also, traveling faster than light is pretty difficult. But, the main law is that you can't accelerate through the speed of light. Another possibility is compressing space so that you're not traveling faster than light, but you're covering more space. It's probably more likely that we could colonize Mars before we will have a vessel capable of compressing space and traveling through it in an efficient manner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
- FullMtlAlcoholc 10y agoBut FTL travel and time travel already exist. With the former, from an outside observer's reference frame, objects inside a black hole's event horizon appear to use to travel faster than the speed of light. Not that it's all that practical. Also, a rotating black hole "drags" the spacetime around it. This means that the accretion disk can appear to rotate FTL really close to even horizon as it passes through the ergosphere. It's already traveling close to speed of light in its local frame, and you add frame dragging to it and you get an FTL total violation, from your reference frame. Of course it's a useless kind of FTL that you can't do anything fun with. For the latter, every astronaut in orbit is a time traveler since they are moving at such great speeds that they experience tie dilation. I believe the Juno spacecraft is the current record holder of time travel since it is the fastest man-made object. I'm not that smart, but I have my doubts about light being the universal speed limit. Baseless rant incoming: I never advanced that far in math, but I found the notion of infinitesimal limits and infinities hard to accept and they are most likely beyond observation if they do indeed exist. So I find the idea that it takes an infinite amount of energy to move a massive object at the speed of light to be a signal that perhaps although it is exceedingly accurate, that E=mc^2 doesn't quite tell the whole story. Waxing philosophical::