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Man finds a black kind of rock that burns; discovers that you can get a lot of this rock if you dig deeper, but deep mines have water. In order to successfully

• rblion 15y ago
  Yes. The conscious revolution is just beginning, our species is very young, and the stars are still far away.
  • dsrguru 15y ago
    Yeah but until we invest as much time, money, and effort into defense against weapons and customized microorganisms as we do into their creation, we're running the risk of this young species (and maybe a lot of the other ones) disappearing very, very soon.
    • tomjen3 15y ago
      Oh please. Humanity is pretty much the definition of a species that should, in all probability, have died out on a multitude of occasions over the years and I am not just talking about the world wars and Nuclear Bombs, but things like the plagues, Spanish flu and all the rest of the diseases; the host of predators for which we are no match at all (a standard monkey is stronger than all but the best trained humans), the environment we inhabited (today that is not much of an issue) when we left Africa (why do you think we left? Properly because stronger tribes where pushing us further and further away and the alternative was dead on the shore), when we left the jungle, when we went to Siberia (again almost certainly pushed by stronger tribes) and when we went to Europe (same reason) where we had to fight the Neanderthals. Basically humanity has been on the winning sides of terrible odds since we started out. Don't forget that we nearly didn't make it in Africa (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080424-humans-extinct.html http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080424-human...). No wonder we love and underdog -- there is no greater under dog than humanity.
      • jacquesm 15y ago
        > No wonder we love and underdog -- there is no greater under dog than humanity. Tell that to the Dodo, the Quagga, the Javan Tiger and the Thylacine. And many others besides.
        • jodrellblank 15y ago
          Weak and winning is "underdog", weak and losing is "loser".
          • lutorm 15y ago
            By that definition, every loser that hasn't yet lost is a winner. There is no way to tell the difference except hindsight. I bet the dinosaurs told themselves that they were totally different than all those other weak-ass species that had joined the annals of history 76 Myr ago...
      • 15y ago
• tomwalsham 15y ago
  This perspective is interesting when applied to communications. Parlay. Courier. Pigeon. Mail. Telegraph. Telephone. Transatlantic Comms. Fax. Early Internet. Email. Text Messaging. Live Chat. Voip. Twitter. Facebook Messages. Video Chat. It's a naîve summary of communications history, but look at the persistence of some of the early players. Many have not been replaced to this day - snailmail, POTS, Fax, Email, Chat, VOIP, Videochat - there are fundamental reasons to stick with certain technologies (Fax, POTS, FB and Twitter excepted). There is disruption to be had, but there is still massive value in some of the oldest methods, with some evolutionary shifts. The services need to adapt, and incumbents do restrict progress, but the 'email killer' notion is not well conceived. Most people don't use email as a 'todo' - that's an extension, not a replacement. This is why Rapportive has a market, but is not _the_ market.
  • densh 15y ago
    I don't seem to understand why did you put "Facebook Messages" in a line of great inventions. Isn't it just another "Live Chat"? Am i missing something?
    • tomwalsham 15y ago
      Facebook (and Twitter to some extent) solve one of the biggest problems of email which is the concept of verified sender. I add it to the paradigm shifts as it resolves (in its own [large] namespace) a longstanding problem with email. I add it to the 'transient' list as its solution is purely driven by network effects which leaves it vulnerable to the next player sideways market dissolution.
      • alexro 15y ago
        It's a bit of a stretch to say they solved it. I'm not on FB and so FB to me don't matter. On the other hand, I'm part of an Active Directory of my company, so AD solves this problem for me at work. But none of them guarantee that the email came from the particular person and not from a dog.
    • deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
• tintin 15y ago
  I think you are right. I don't agree with PG when he is talking about Apple. "None of them are run by product visionaries" is simply not true. Steve Jobs had great respect for companies like Sony because there are product visionary companies. Sony, IBM, Philips, and a lot of others, all companies that gave us great products we now are using every day. But it took years to get there. E-ink for example was created in 1997 and is still in development. But we all know e-readers. A great example of a visionary product imho.
  • tomjen3 15y ago
    The key is 'gave'. Past tense. I think a lot more start-up people would fear (or even care about) Microsoft if Bill Gates was still running it. The same goes for the rest of the companies you mention.
  • megablast 15y ago
    Sorry, Sony was a great engineering company, worthy of being respected, until they sold out and became a content creation company. Look at how the hobbled the mini-disc years ago. Sony deserves absolutely no respect these days.
    • replax 15y ago
      While I can totally see where you are coming from, I think it is not fair to say that sony does not deserve any respect whatsoever anymore. They were innovators at first, too and have come a long way since. I do not agree with sony's content creation affairs, however they continue to innovate with good products (e.g. look at the digital cameras, camera sensors etc.) More often than not, there is no clear distinction between good and bad, certainly less so with amazingly huge companies such as sony, apple, exxon etc.
• d4nt 15y ago
  Before the rail roads, people didn't do all that much travelling from A to B, unless they were very wealthy or had some external pressure like the need to find work or religious persecution, they mostly stayed at A. Which makes the invention of rail roads even more impressive in my eyes, it created demand rather than addressing it.
  • chernevik 15y ago
    What moved from A to B was coal, ore, wheat, manufactures, but mostly by rivers. You can see this on a good map of northeast U.S. -- ask yourself why Pennsylvania is essentially rural in its center, with large cities at both ends, or why New York State is essentially rural 50 miles from the Hudson. Inland water transport was so important that the major capital projects of the early 19th century were canals. The initial advantage of railroads over barges wasn't reach but speed. By moving goods faster, merchants were able to sell and receive payment faster, no small thing when credit was scarce, uncertain and expensive. I expect the initial rail lines served the same markets as the canals (that's where the business was), then began to extend their reach with spur lines. There was probably some rail demand creation as the roads extended into the West -- farmland near a railroad was no different than that 20 miles away in anything but railroad proximity. But that was later, after the technology's dynamics were well understood and the players well capitalized.
• bane 15y ago
  Similar, but different story. In the 800s, looking for an immortality elixir, man discovers a solid black chemical explosive. In time (around 1132), this finds itself as an early propellant in ranged missiles. Later it uses in other applications: mining, firearms, entertainment, bombs and myriad others. But the use as missile propellant remains. Looking for similar, but more powerful propellants for these missiles (to give them more kinetic impact, longer range, and other properties). Progress was slow until the late 19th and early 20th centuries when liquid fueled rockets were invented as well as an entire host of various chemical explosives with vastly different properties. Progress was rapid, and soon missiles could travel hundreds of miles, and had enough extra capacity to deliver even more powerful explosives to their target. However, accuracy was poor at best. Various types of complex control systems were designed and built into the missiles. As man realized that missiles could be scaled up and lift payloads up into orbit and beyond, bringing the payloads down in the desired location became even more important. Inertial systems, radio control, celestial navigation and even attempts at manned guidance! However, navigating is a general problem, and not just useful for missiles. Ships, people, surveyors, and others, all need to know where on the earth they are. In the 60s, with the advent of orbital missiles and satellites, a system of satellites was placed in orbit. And using a complicated collection of quartz oscillators, early computers, and various radio receiving equipment, one could (after a number of minutes collecting data and inputting it into dedicated guidance computers) determine where they were on Earth to accuracy of a few hundred meters. Enter the nuclear age which gave us ultra-precise clocks, combined with transistors, then integrated circuits and all segments of the navigation problem were improved. By 1978, these components were small and reliable enough that missiles pushed constellation after constellation of satellites into orbit. Ground receivers were small enough to fit into the bodies of other missiles enabling them to navigate to targets with accuracy in the single meters with constant positional fixes along the flight path. Realizing that the navigation computers and radios were now small enough to fit on a missile, it also meant they could be fit onto ships, large aircraft, and large trucks. Later improvements to atomic timekeeping, computers, radios and other pieces meant that the receivers could be made man carry-able and fit into backpacks, small vehicles and on and on. Accuracy was improved to inches, and missiles could suddenly be dropped into selected air vents in specific buildings. Except suddenly nobody cared as much about moving missiles, they found that knowing where they and their stuff was in the world was far more interesting and useful. Further improvements in computing meant that the navigational radios and computers could fit into a handheld device, then be integrated with high quality geospatial data, heuristic path finding algorithms and suddenly we have satnav in our cars. Reusing the same navigation tech and we find we can improve the geospatial data considerably, improving navigation. Fixing these devices to the ground and we can measure plate tectonics for the first time, track fleets of vehicles in real-time, saving millions of dollars in fuel, compute phasors in power lines improving power delivery systems, ultra precise atomic clocks means precise time synchronization (with accuracy +-10 ns). Further improvements in miniaturization puts navigation into handheld phones, and suddenly we know what restaurants are nearby. Tie it to a database collecting reviews and we know if it's good. Tied to the previously developed navigation system and we can even get walking directions there. In other words, most people don't need to guide a missile, but they do need to find a good place to eat. And when the technology developed for busting a bunker left the avionics systems it got people and their stuff where they wanted to go faster and with less confusion than before. Today it's hard to imagine a time when we didn't know the exact location of just about everything.
• armandososa 15y ago
  I think this is a good thread to recommend Andy Kessler's book "How We Got Here" which can be downloaded from here (http://akessler.blogs.com/andy_kessler/2005/04/hwgh.html http://akessler.blogs.com/andy_kessler/2005/04/hwgh.html). It's a parallel history between economy and technology evolution up from the steam engine genesis.
• trevoro 15y ago
  If you're interested in this sort of thing, you should watch the BBC series "Connections". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcSxL8GUn-g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcSxL8GUn-g