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Sometimes I find it a little depressing that (at least through my laymen eyes) we are nearing a technological plateau and that more research into physics is unl

Sometimes I find it a little depressing that (at least through my laymen eyes) we are nearing a technological plateau and that more research into physics is unlikely to get us to a world describe in traditional science fiction with FTL drives and large metal spaceships that can take you from planet to planet. Then something like this reminds me that if we as a species were able to unlock the secrets of bio-chemistry (not sure if that's the right term) it would be a game changer unlike any seen so far. And the fact that there is a huge corpus of evidence out there in the world called "life" proving some of the possibilities already gives me hope that while we may never have FTL, the future could still be pretty wild.

kiba 5y ago
Sometimes I find it a little depressing that (at least through my laymen eyes) we are nearing a technological plateau and that more research into physics is unlikely to get us to a world describe in traditional science fiction with FTL drives and large metal spaceships that can take you from planet to planet. FTL drive is not needed; people think too small.
- dsign 5y ago
  That's absolutely true, but I wonder what it will take to take that point home for everybody.
  - ddingus 5y ago
    The first big project. After that there will be movies explanations stories expectations all that stuff. And to some degree it's already out there. We have those things now related to travel that's not faster than light. And tell somebody put something together for real, FPL is just a whole lot more sexy.
whimsicalism 5y ago
Disagree that we are reaching a technical plateau at all. Maybe in some parts of particle and AMO physics, but cosmology continues to advance and we are continuing to learn a lot.
ianai 5y ago
It might help if we had literature fleshing out some ideas of how alternatives could work. Ie how we could become a species more in harmony with a large biosphere - ala Jim Henson’s Dark Crystal. Though it’d have to be a human way of life.
- specialist 5y ago
  > a species more in harmony with a large biosphere Garden Earth. The biggest cultural change for attaining "sustainability" is metaphoric, from extraction to management. Maybe somewhat ironically, proponents should go all Old Testament. Stewards of the Earth and so forth. Many of our prior cultures had at least some form of this. I don't know when or why we stopped being so. Maybe due to the Enlightenment and then Industrialization. I vividly remember reading René Descartes as a kid and being shocked by his violent language and metaphors. Stuff like "We must wrest Nature's secrets and make her submit to our will" (paraphrasing, from memory).
hutzlibu 5y ago
"we are nearing a technological plateau" Well, using that analogy, I would say, it took us indeed great efforts to reach it, but now we have vast land to colonize - meaning applying all that groundbreaking research into everything. There are so many more technologies avaiable, than just what you can buy on the market. Sci-Fi is very possible. edit: oh and about FTL: I know I do not really understand quantum physics and co. but I think I understand, that no one really understands it yet - so I do not expect FTL in my lifetime, but I would not rule it out.
majewsky 5y ago
> we are nearing a technological plateau Max Planck was famously discouraged from studying physics by one of his professors because "in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes." [1] Having studied physics myself, my opinion is that we may very well be at a similar point right now. The big advancements of the last century in physics (quantum theory, relativity, chaos theory, etc.) brought us an era of swift and sweeping technological progress, and now the easy fruit seems to have been plucked. But there are still plenty of known unknowns, dark matter and dark energy being perhaps the most prominent one. Who knows what unknown unknowns are hiding behind those known unknowns? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_von_Jolly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_von_Jolly
- treeman79 5y ago
  Gravity. Still the biggest unknown.
  - billti 5y ago
    Do we even have a total understanding of light, or electricity? (I may be wrong, but I thought there were still some pretty fundamental unknowns)
    - XCSme 5y ago
      It depends on what you mean by "understanding". We can explain using a specific set of rules how something works. It doesn't mean that those rules are the best way to explain it or that they are even correct. For example, we could explain that electricity works because of how electrons move, which would be correct from our point of view, but if we find out that we were living in a simulation, then the explanation would be that this is how "electricity" was coded to behave. Also, usually in physics a formula is thought to be correct until some new laws/rules are found, then the formula is updated by adding some extra terms and then again thought to be correct.
    - z3t4 5y ago
      To summarize: we know how to smash two particles together, but not much about what they are made of. Replace particles with stones and bones. 10000 years of science progress and we are still smashing things. With the occasional lab accident like discovering that mold kills bacteria.
api 5y ago
If we can get good enough at bioengineering, a 50,000 year flight to another star using conventional propulsion might not be such a big deal. The seeming requirement of FTL to explore the universe is 100% a function of our short life span. If we can't make spacecraft go faster we have to make ourselves last longer.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Beldin 5y ago
  We'll also have to take food for the whole duration, or develop a taste for hydrogen atoms alongside a functioning Bussard ramjet. Oh, the rocket equation really doesn't like option 1. (Hypothesis: any process we can devise to turn hydrogen into sustenance will be orders of magnitude less efficient than using it as propellant.)
  - xyzzyz 5y ago
    We would only small amounts of food, if we could efficiently recycle it. Right now, we use plants/animals and solar energy to upcycle our waste products into food. However, there are no physical reasons that we couldn’t use electricity and managed bioreactors to do that instead.
  - api 5y ago
    Food can be recycled pretty effectively, and if were that good at biotech I assume we could improve on the current state of the art. They already recycle water very effectively on the ISS. It's the machine that "turns yesterday's coffee into today's coffee." Of course if we were that good at biotech we could probably hibernate a good chunk of the flight time too. Might be necessary to wake up periodically to reset the body, but you could probably hibernate most of the duration. Maybe you'd do it with some kind of weird circadian cycle with extremely elongated sleep periods, sleeping like 10X-100X as long as you are awake. During each wake period you check to make sure everything is working properly. You would not need a Bussard ramjet for the long duration flights I'm thinking of. A nuclear thermal rocket could get you a good deal past solar system escape velocity. Nuclear pulse propulsion could get you up to at least single digit percentages of the speed of light if you didn't mind a little boom-boom. Then you just cruse along on an interstellar transfer orbit until you do a retro-burn to enter the destination star system a few tens of thousands of years later. These are all technologies that are already feasible at least on paper. No new physics is needed.
specialist 5y ago
We'll reach the stars thru life sciences. Future humans will become space and time adapted. Hardened against radiation. Metabolism so slow that years will feel like minutes. The future will be pretty wild.
- croes 5y ago
  What if this is just not possible?
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    We can send persons without sending humans. With a good enough brain-computer interface we should be able to duplicate our brain contents to a digital medium, which we know can travel to interstellar space and beyond
    - specialist 5y ago
      I definitely want to believe. Then we can explore other galaxies. But I still can't even imagine what consciousness is. Maybe we'll create new intelligences, punt on the consciousness question, and delegate the task to them.
    - croes 5y ago
      We are far away from such an interface and space travel takes still far too long. When the first probe reaches another galaxy mankind is probably already gone or we are back in post war dark ages.
      - cblconfederate 5y ago
        > space travel takes still far too long. Who cares about humans, as a traveling satellite i will have all the time in the universe, literally
        croes 5y ago
ren_engineer 5y ago
>we are nearing a technological plateau and that more research into physics is unlikely to get us to a world describe in traditional science fiction with FTL drives and large metal spaceships that can take you from planet to planet. strange to me how nobody questions why beavers only make damns a certain size, birds only make nests and don't go beyond that in complexity. So many people seem blind to the idea that humans might be near their intellectual limit as a species and assume we will just keep progressing technologically. For all we know it's possible we hit a brick wall in terms of progress. Average human struggles with calculus, what if there was a species that could do advanced math as easily as we do 2 + 2? Seems the limit for human advancement is tied to rate of learning, life span, and general cognitive ability. If you want more advanced tech you need to focus on those problems
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  Average humans struggle with calculus because we have instructed average humans that calculus is hard. If we taught it to 12 year olds as a routine matter, average 12 year olds would know calculus.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    You can teach smart (not average) 12 year olds the basic rules how to compute derivation or primitive function, but I doubt they are capable of distinguishing between, say, continuous and uniformly continuous function. Which is actually pretty important when trying to reason your way around calculus.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Life span is hardly a limiting factor. It is known that most scientific breakthroughs were made by people in their twenties-early thirties.
  - ren_engineer 5y ago
    what if you could extend that academic "prime" by 30 years or longer?
Counterpointv 5y ago
As a counter point, here is Chamath talking about the advent of room temperature superconductors in 20 to 30 years https://streamable.com/ku3orn https://streamable.com/ku3orn
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  We haven't even developed normal pressure room temperature superconductivity, let alone mass manufacture. Also, why should I privilege what Chamath has to say on this subject more than any random commentator?
fidesomnes 5y ago
large metal spaceships that can take you from planet to planet. wtf are you talking about? SpaceX is going to Mars in 3 years and is designed to go past it with extra fuel transport ships.
lmilcin 5y ago
I don't agree. There is so much to learn about the world around us without even hitting physics limits. And then so much to do with that knowledge. I am not worried we will run out of problems to solve.
vdqtp3 5y ago
I've read a couple scifi stories about sophisticated alien civilizations with FTL drives who were then shocked when they found out humans were just folding space and had instantaneous travel. HFY! Obviously it's fiction, and who knows if it'll ever happen or if it's possible - but my point is that we don't know what we don't know, and it could be way cooler than we can even imagine.
godelski 5y ago
Don't be. Science usually hours plateaus but if we've learned anything from history is that there's always mountains ahead. The problem is we're searching on the dark. A flat spot doesn't mean we're at the top. In fact, we even know there's a lot of mountains ahead, we just aren't sure how to climb them yet or what we'll find along the way. But that's no reason not to climb them.

kiba 5y ago

dsign 5y ago
That's absolutely true, but I wonder what it will take to take that point home for everybody.
- ddingus 5y ago
  The first big project. After that there will be movies explanations stories expectations all that stuff. And to some degree it's already out there. We have those things now related to travel that's not faster than light. And tell somebody put something together for real, FPL is just a whole lot more sexy.

whimsicalism 5y ago

Disagree that we are reaching a technical plateau at all. Maybe in some parts of particle and AMO physics, but cosmology continues to advance and we are continuing to learn a lot.

ianai 5y ago

It might help if we had literature fleshing out some ideas of how alternatives could work. Ie how we could become a species more in harmony with a large biosphere - ala Jim Henson’s Dark Crystal. Though it’d have to be a human way of life.

specialist 5y ago
> a species more in harmony with a large biosphere Garden Earth. The biggest cultural change for attaining "sustainability" is metaphoric, from extraction to management. Maybe somewhat ironically, proponents should go all Old Testament. Stewards of the Earth and so forth. Many of our prior cultures had at least some form of this. I don't know when or why we stopped being so. Maybe due to the Enlightenment and then Industrialization. I vividly remember reading René Descartes as a kid and being shocked by his violent language and metaphors. Stuff like "We must wrest Nature's secrets and make her submit to our will" (paraphrasing, from memory).

hutzlibu 5y ago

"we are nearing a technological plateau" Well, using that analogy, I would say, it took us indeed great efforts to reach it, but now we have vast land to colonize - meaning applying all that groundbreaking research into everything. There are so many more technologies avaiable, than just what you can buy on the market. Sci-Fi is very possible. edit: oh and about FTL: I know I do not really understand quantum physics and co. but I think I understand, that no one really understands it yet - so I do not expect FTL in my lifetime, but I would not rule it out.

majewsky 5y ago

> we are nearing a technological plateau Max Planck was famously discouraged from studying physics by one of his professors because "in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes." [1] Having studied physics myself, my opinion is that we may very well be at a similar point right now. The big advancements of the last century in physics (quantum theory, relativity, chaos theory, etc.) brought us an era of swift and sweeping technological progress, and now the easy fruit seems to have been plucked. But there are still plenty of known unknowns, dark matter and dark energy being perhaps the most prominent one. Who knows what unknown unknowns are hiding behind those known unknowns? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_von_Jolly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_von_Jolly

treeman79 5y ago
Gravity. Still the biggest unknown.
- billti 5y ago
  Do we even have a total understanding of light, or electricity? (I may be wrong, but I thought there were still some pretty fundamental unknowns)
  - XCSme 5y ago
    It depends on what you mean by "understanding". We can explain using a specific set of rules how something works. It doesn't mean that those rules are the best way to explain it or that they are even correct. For example, we could explain that electricity works because of how electrons move, which would be correct from our point of view, but if we find out that we were living in a simulation, then the explanation would be that this is how "electricity" was coded to behave. Also, usually in physics a formula is thought to be correct until some new laws/rules are found, then the formula is updated by adding some extra terms and then again thought to be correct.
  - z3t4 5y ago
    To summarize: we know how to smash two particles together, but not much about what they are made of. Replace particles with stones and bones. 10000 years of science progress and we are still smashing things. With the occasional lab accident like discovering that mold kills bacteria.

api 5y ago

If we can get good enough at bioengineering, a 50,000 year flight to another star using conventional propulsion might not be such a big deal. The seeming requirement of FTL to explore the universe is 100% a function of our short life span. If we can't make spacecraft go faster we have to make ourselves last longer.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Beldin 5y ago
We'll also have to take food for the whole duration, or develop a taste for hydrogen atoms alongside a functioning Bussard ramjet. Oh, the rocket equation really doesn't like option 1. (Hypothesis: any process we can devise to turn hydrogen into sustenance will be orders of magnitude less efficient than using it as propellant.)
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  We would only small amounts of food, if we could efficiently recycle it. Right now, we use plants/animals and solar energy to upcycle our waste products into food. However, there are no physical reasons that we couldn’t use electricity and managed bioreactors to do that instead.
- api 5y ago
  Food can be recycled pretty effectively, and if were that good at biotech I assume we could improve on the current state of the art. They already recycle water very effectively on the ISS. It's the machine that "turns yesterday's coffee into today's coffee." Of course if we were that good at biotech we could probably hibernate a good chunk of the flight time too. Might be necessary to wake up periodically to reset the body, but you could probably hibernate most of the duration. Maybe you'd do it with some kind of weird circadian cycle with extremely elongated sleep periods, sleeping like 10X-100X as long as you are awake. During each wake period you check to make sure everything is working properly. You would not need a Bussard ramjet for the long duration flights I'm thinking of. A nuclear thermal rocket could get you a good deal past solar system escape velocity. Nuclear pulse propulsion could get you up to at least single digit percentages of the speed of light if you didn't mind a little boom-boom. Then you just cruse along on an interstellar transfer orbit until you do a retro-burn to enter the destination star system a few tens of thousands of years later. These are all technologies that are already feasible at least on paper. No new physics is needed.

specialist 5y ago

We'll reach the stars thru life sciences. Future humans will become space and time adapted. Hardened against radiation. Metabolism so slow that years will feel like minutes. The future will be pretty wild.

croes 5y ago
What if this is just not possible?
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  We can send persons without sending humans. With a good enough brain-computer interface we should be able to duplicate our brain contents to a digital medium, which we know can travel to interstellar space and beyond
  - specialist 5y ago
    I definitely want to believe. Then we can explore other galaxies. But I still can't even imagine what consciousness is. Maybe we'll create new intelligences, punt on the consciousness question, and delegate the task to them.
  - croes 5y ago
    We are far away from such an interface and space travel takes still far too long. When the first probe reaches another galaxy mankind is probably already gone or we are back in post war dark ages.
    - cblconfederate 5y ago
      > space travel takes still far too long. Who cares about humans, as a traveling satellite i will have all the time in the universe, literally
      - croes 5y ago

ren_engineer 5y ago

>we are nearing a technological plateau and that more research into physics is unlikely to get us to a world describe in traditional science fiction with FTL drives and large metal spaceships that can take you from planet to planet. strange to me how nobody questions why beavers only make damns a certain size, birds only make nests and don't go beyond that in complexity. So many people seem blind to the idea that humans might be near their intellectual limit as a species and assume we will just keep progressing technologically. For all we know it's possible we hit a brick wall in terms of progress. Average human struggles with calculus, what if there was a species that could do advanced math as easily as we do 2 + 2? Seems the limit for human advancement is tied to rate of learning, life span, and general cognitive ability. If you want more advanced tech you need to focus on those problems

MisterBastahrd 5y ago
Average humans struggle with calculus because we have instructed average humans that calculus is hard. If we taught it to 12 year olds as a routine matter, average 12 year olds would know calculus.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  You can teach smart (not average) 12 year olds the basic rules how to compute derivation or primitive function, but I doubt they are capable of distinguishing between, say, continuous and uniformly continuous function. Which is actually pretty important when trying to reason your way around calculus.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Life span is hardly a limiting factor. It is known that most scientific breakthroughs were made by people in their twenties-early thirties.
- ren_engineer 5y ago
  what if you could extend that academic "prime" by 30 years or longer?

Counterpointv 5y ago

As a counter point, here is Chamath talking about the advent of room temperature superconductors in 20 to 30 years https://streamable.com/ku3orn https://streamable.com/ku3orn

whimsicalism 5y ago
We haven't even developed normal pressure room temperature superconductivity, let alone mass manufacture. Also, why should I privilege what Chamath has to say on this subject more than any random commentator?

fidesomnes 5y ago

large metal spaceships that can take you from planet to planet. wtf are you talking about? SpaceX is going to Mars in 3 years and is designed to go past it with extra fuel transport ships.

lmilcin 5y ago

I don't agree. There is so much to learn about the world around us without even hitting physics limits. And then so much to do with that knowledge. I am not worried we will run out of problems to solve.

vdqtp3 5y ago

I've read a couple scifi stories about sophisticated alien civilizations with FTL drives who were then shocked when they found out humans were just folding space and had instantaneous travel. HFY! Obviously it's fiction, and who knows if it'll ever happen or if it's possible - but my point is that we don't know what we don't know, and it could be way cooler than we can even imagine.

godelski 5y ago

Don't be. Science usually hours plateaus but if we've learned anything from history is that there's always mountains ahead. The problem is we're searching on the dark. A flat spot doesn't mean we're at the top. In fact, we even know there's a lot of mountains ahead, we just aren't sure how to climb them yet or what we'll find along the way. But that's no reason not to climb them.