4 ms·
It's a bit difficult to arrive at any number of years past 10,000 for any invention imaginable, past that they will all be unimaginable.
by BoardsOfCanada 3y ago
It's a bit difficult to arrive at any number of years past 10,000 for any invention imaginable, past that they will all be unimaginable.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> bit difficult to arrive at any number of years past 10,000 for any invention imaginable The mean time between paradigm shifts in the natural sciences [1] is 25 years. (Max: 144 years, between Copernican cosmology and Vesalius's work on anatomy in 1543 and the transition to classical mechanics in 1687. Exempting that, the mean time is 18 years.) I would take that, which is remarkably close to to the length of a generation [2], as being a fundamental factor of the maximum extent of our technological forecasting abilities. A century, 4x that factor, strikes me as the upper bound, though I could be convinced of even 10x in a very stable field. 400x, on the other hand, seems absurd. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift#Natural_sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift#Natural_science... ranges taken at midpoint [2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm7047 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm7047
- gretch 3y agoWhat about a Dyson sphere? Or time travel? Or FTL travel?
- angiosperm 3y agoIf we haven't figured out fusion by the time we could build a Dyson sphere-analog, and therefore have no need for such frippery, it will be our shame. Time travel is easy in the forward direction; we are all performing it at close to light-speed, in Minkowski space. FTL travel might turn out to be possible in the next millennium, even if not meaningfully useful. FTL travel and (backward) time travel are equivalent.