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It took 15 if not 20 years to commercialize even such obvious, low-tech thing as radio telegraph, which can literally be built form common house supplies. It ha
by nine_k 7mo ago
It took 15 if not 20 years to commercialize even such obvious, low-tech thing as radio telegraph, which can literally be built form common house supplies. It happened about 60 years after Maxwell predicted the electromagnetic waves theoretically.
Red LEDs were invented / discovered in 1920s, became commercially successful as indicators in 1960s. Optical fibers were invented in 1920s or so, became a commercial success in 1980s.
Certain things just take time. Do not dismiss a good physical effect, they are much more rare than so-called good ideas.
- bitexploder 7mo agoIt feels a little disjointed to compare old tech. Computing tech iteration cycles and adoption rates seem more interesting than things at the dawn of communications technology.
- nurettin 7mo agoIt doesn't take long to commercialize feasible new tech in this day and age. If someone invented an electromagnetic hovercar tomorrow, it will be available for sale next week and regulations will follow after.
- TOMDM 7mo agoWaymo has cars that drive themselves and are dramatically safer than people in most conditions and yet they're only in select cities. Do you just think Google hates money, or does this only work for hover cars
- nurettin 7mo agoI don't know the costs and logistics of such an operation. Maybe you do?
- antonvs 7mo ago> Waymo has cars that drive themselves With the help of “remote assistance”, that is. Which is probably one of the reasons for the limited rollout.
- rossjudson 7mo agoPerhaps you could clarify your definition of "remote assistance", or describe scenarios.
- antonvs 7mo agoIt’s been widely reported, and there were US Senate hearings about it. See e.g.: https://philkoopman.substack.com/p/waymo-tap-dances-about-remote-drivers https://philkoopman.substack.com/p/waymo-tap-dances-about-re...
- atoav 7mo agoWhat advantage would hovering have?
- mastermage 7mo agoNo Street Infrastructure needeed to drive anywhere (kinda).
- atoav 7mo agoOk, and where does the energy to consistently keep a weight in the air come from and is it really worth spending? I know flying cars are some sort of futuristic trope, yet I cringe at it every time I see it. They always assume magical infinite power. In the real the reason we do not have flying cars is the same why you don't use a drone as a coat hanger at home: It is just more practical to use a mechanical solution that holds your coat for infinite time without any energy use or noise/heat emissions and it is much cheaper. Lifting stuff against gravity is not free, but a piece of wood, a brick or a rubber wheel does a pretty good job at it. One way to do it is magnets, but that means you need even more complicated roads. We are living on a warming planet where only the naive and the evil pretend that energy use is something only the poor have to think about. We all have to think about it.
- volemo 7mo agoWhat do you mean “we don’t have flying cars”? What are helicopters then?
- atoav 7mo agoDeathmachines that in their mechanical hubris angered the gods?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- shiroiuma 7mo ago>I know flying cars are some sort of futuristic trope, yet I cringe at it every time I see it. They always assume magical infinite power. No, they assume magical anti-gravity technology. "magical infinite power" implies they're basically a hovercraft, forcing air downwards to hover. Without a shroud, even with infinite energy available, this means constantly blasting high-speed air all around the vehicle, which has some really obvious practical problems. It works for drones because they're small and lightweight and not near the ground and not even that close to each other. >Lifting stuff against gravity is not free It's close to free when you have magical anti-gravity technology. Similarly, traveling to other star systems hundreds of lightyears away in a couple days isn't so hard when you have magical FTL propulsion technology that somehow warps spacetime.
- noosphr 7mo agoThe only technologies that are commercialised quickly today are the ones that can be commercialised quickly. The ones that can't won't be for decades yet. In short, if a tech takes 40 years to be commercialised it would have been invented some time in the 80s.
- antonvs 7mo ago> It doesn't take long to commercialize feasible new tech “Feasible” is doing some heavy lifting there. The whole point of the comment you replied to is that it can take a long time for some new physical technique to become commercially feasible.
- bastawhiz 7mo agoIt's a good physical effect that doesn't obviously solve any real problems. Consider: 5D optical storage is thirty years old and SOTA transfer speed is about as many megabits per second. By the time it's fast enough to even approach a speed that's commercially useful, all of the other tech we have will have continued to progress. That's not to mention how fragile the quartz disks are. It's a real physical effect that doesn't solve problems. We already have zero retention energy storage. The phenomenon in this paper isn't even all that new by the author's own admission—that's how it got to the fifty third revision. The tier 2 setup described here is purely speculative. Producing a single square centimeter of pure "fluorographane" (sic?) is still a task that would be exceedingly challenging for a research lab. And it's not clear how much energy it would take to read and write the data, or support the hardware necessary to do it at a speed that's makes it uniquely useful. Even if all of these problems are solved, and the cost is made reasonable, it's still completely unclear if it would be substantially better than what we have today.
- nine_k 7mo ago> all of the other tech we have will have continued to progress These other techs also came from somewhere, often brewing slowly for decades until the conditions align for a commercial success. This one may be, or may not be, one of these slow-brewing techs of the future, suddenly displacing the SOTA of the (future) day. Hell, the steam turbine was in principle invented in like 300 AD, and first commercialized (or, rather, militarized) by the end of 19th century. Leonardo da Vinci invented the helicopter, the submarine, and the tank, in principle; it took about 500 years for them to become large commercial and military successes.