2 ms·

Bear in mind that our species has only existed for a rough upper limit of 500 KILOyears. The first electric motor was built only ~200 years ago, and we've only

Bear in mind that our species has only existed for a rough upper limit of 500 KILOyears. The first electric motor was built only ~200 years ago, and we've only been technically spacefaring for ~60 years. We went from first heavier-than-air flight to first space station in 70 years. Our species has a thousand times our current age to figure things out. To unironically quote Dennis Reynolds from It's Always Sunny: we haven't peaked. We haven't even begun to peak. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS7ifk26tJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS7ifk26tJc)

simonh 6y ago
I’m afraid I don’t see it that way. Technologies don’t improve exponentially for ever, they follow an S curve. The physical properties of the universe are fixed and finite. Eventually we will discover all the technologies that are practical, and we may not be all that far from doing so. Maybe only a few hundred years, and we may be quite far along the S curve of some of the best of them.
- yourapostasy 6y ago
  While I think there is an "S" curve, I see we have quite a lot more to learn, much longer than a few hundred years' worth. I'd say more on the order of hundreds of millennia more at a minimum, because the scales I see possible are so vast. My metric is where we are on the Kardashev scale, how resilient we are to extinction-level events, and our time horizon. The ultimate "we're pretty close to knowing all the practical stuff" level being figuring out how to work around the entropic end of the universe. I count indefinite life extension among the practical tech tree, and once we accomplish that, the range of "practical" also expands. Even before all that, we're nowhere close to various practical limits we've calculated as theoretically possible in energy extraction, energy conversion, energy conservation, matter properties (compression strength, tension strength, torsion strength, and so on), computational density, information density, etc. For most of our species' history in geological time, we've barely edged over from sentience to sapience. On that scale, we're still at the boundary layer edge, and have yet to really delve into and establish ourselves within the time stream into sapience.

simonh 6y ago

I’m afraid I don’t see it that way. Technologies don’t improve exponentially for ever, they follow an S curve. The physical properties of the universe are fixed and finite. Eventually we will discover all the technologies that are practical, and we may not be all that far from doing so. Maybe only a few hundred years, and we may be quite far along the S curve of some of the best of them.

yourapostasy 6y ago
While I think there is an "S" curve, I see we have quite a lot more to learn, much longer than a few hundred years' worth. I'd say more on the order of hundreds of millennia more at a minimum, because the scales I see possible are so vast. My metric is where we are on the Kardashev scale, how resilient we are to extinction-level events, and our time horizon. The ultimate "we're pretty close to knowing all the practical stuff" level being figuring out how to work around the entropic end of the universe. I count indefinite life extension among the practical tech tree, and once we accomplish that, the range of "practical" also expands. Even before all that, we're nowhere close to various practical limits we've calculated as theoretically possible in energy extraction, energy conversion, energy conservation, matter properties (compression strength, tension strength, torsion strength, and so on), computational density, information density, etc. For most of our species' history in geological time, we've barely edged over from sentience to sapience. On that scale, we're still at the boundary layer edge, and have yet to really delve into and establish ourselves within the time stream into sapience.