Is technology advancement rate slowing down?

[Kozmos]

The next Industrial Revolution is in about 20 Years, when our first nanofactories come online. The one after that will take about 20-30 years when limitless power become available.

 

[Sidhe]

havent heard of much advancements so far...

Are you in a scientific field though? Have you seen the advancements in nanotech materials, genetics and medicine(I recently read about a gene sequence in rats that increases the effect of chemotherapy on cancer cells by 40,000 times) Physics(Fusion and quantum computing) To name but few, Electronic engineering, maths, and so on.

To be frank if you read the literature out there, its replete with advancement, and shows no sign of slowing down. This idea that it is is despite the advances, it strikes me as somewhat ignorant; as I said look at now, and compare our level to previous years, it's hard to see the slow down, even if you haven't seen the extent of scientific progress first hand, you've seen it every day you were alive anyway. The information age is here, and it's flooded science with all sorts of new possibilities and spheres. Honestly the idea that it's slowing down is bemusing to me to say the least.

The next Industrial Revolution is in about 20 Years, when our first nanofactories come online. The one after that will take about 20-30 years when limitless power become available.

Indeed nanotech is the fastest growing science atm, it's possibilities are atm endless, how is it slowing down, we're on the verge of so many technological revolutions? I just don't get it?

 

[useless]

Are you in a scientific field though? Have you seen the advancements in nanotech materials, genetics and medicine(I recently read about a gene sequence in rats that increases the effect of chemotherapy on cancer cells by 40,000 times) Physics(Fusion and quantum computing) To name but few, Electronic engineering, maths, and so on.

To be frank if you read the literature out there, its replete with advancement, and shows no sign of slowing down. This idea that it is is despite the advances, it strikes me as somewhat ignorant; as I said look at now, and compare our level to previous years, it's hard to see the slow down, even if you haven't seen the extent of scientific progress first hand, you've seen it every day you were alive anyway. The information age is here, and it's flooded science with all sorts of new possibilities and spheres. Honestly the idea that it's slowing down is bemusing to me to say the least.

of course im being ignorent because god forbid if dont know what advances are being made.

 

[Sidhe]

of course im being ignorent because god forbid if dont know what advances are being made.

In that case show how it is, I'm not claiming you are ignorant, just asking how you can justify it? Because I really don't see it?

 

[useless]

In that case show how it is, I'm not claiming you are ignorant, just asking how you can justify it? Because I really don't see it?

if i dont see, or even hear of these advancements how am i supposed to know they exist?

 

[Sidhe]

if i dont see, or even hear of these advancements how am i supposed to know they exist?

Get a subscription to a scientific magazine, get involved with academia? Honestly it's all happening atm, maybe you just haven't seen it?

From my point of view though, and I'm sorry if I sounded a little confused, there is just so much out there atm, we're on the verge of a technological revolution, mind you we have been since the industrial revolution, it's just these new ones are coming so thick and fast it's hard to keep up.

It's a great time to be alive if your interested in science.

 

[useless]

Get a subscription to a scientific magazine, get involved with academia? Honestly it's all happening atm, maybe you just haven't seen it?

From my point of view though, and I'm sorry if I sounded a little confused, there is just so much out there atm, we're on the verge of a technological revolution, mind you we have been since the industrial revolution, it's just these new ones are coming so thick and fast it's hard to keep up.

It's a great time to be alive if your interested in science.

assuming the scientists have money to fund their advancements..

 

[Kozmos]

Just read some of the examples made here, great site for all modern science related things:

http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/nanotechnology

 

[Sidhe]

assuming the scientists have money to fund their advancements..

indeed, the funding can hardly keep pace with the technology. But it's all happening too fast so... Mind you the best will hopefully always get funding, politics aside, common sense usually prevails.

 

[useless]

Just read some of the examples made here, great site for all modern science related things:

http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/nanotechnology

nanotechnology.. im sure that would be expensive. but would eventally get cheaper.

 

[GinandTonic]

Consider human transport:

19th century

Steam Engine
Bicycle
Internal Combustion Car

20th Century

Powered Air Plane
Oil Powered Ships
Submarine
Electric Train
Jet Plane
Hydrogen Peroxide Submarines
Helicopter
Turbine Ships
Nuclear Submarine
Space Rocket
Hovercraft
High Speed Trains
Space Shuttle

on the face of it, the 20c century has been more productive than the 19th,
but look again when did those innovations occur?

The last was launched in 1981.

Although there has been a bit of development on these,
French recently broke world record for high speed train,
there has been Nothing New in the 26 years since then!!

Powered Air Plane - another internal combustion product.

Oil Powered Ships - another internal combustion product.

Submarine - another internal combustion product.

Electric Train - 19th c invention. 188? Germany for the first example.

Jet Plane - The 19th c turbine meets the fuels and tec behind the internal combustion engine. Very cool though.

Hydrogen Peroxide Submarines - not significant.

Helicopter - another internal ombustion product.

Turbine Ships - 19th c invention. FWIW by my stepmothers great-uncle.

Nuclear Submarine - Nuclear reactor a very good idea, but not one we have really got effective, possibly ecause of the pwnage of the internal combustion engine.

Space Rocket - Very cool. No debate.

Hovercraft - another internal combustion product, an one not a terribly significant one either. Cool though.

High Speed Trains - 19th c. design. Apart from maglev we have just tinkered with the design. And, of course, applied the internal combustion engine.

Space Shuttle - While very, very cool not trribly revoloutionary over the rocket in terms of the ultimate buck per pound into orbit. Things like the Virgin project do have the possibility to genuinely revoloutionise access to orbit, but lets see how it goes.

Basically the 19th c. was more advanced than you give it credit for, an in the early-mid 20th c. we had the internal combustion engine which was a massive winner. We are now in the information revoloution. As the mid 20th c. was marked by the internal combustion engine (and to a much lsser extent by the jet and rocket engines) we live in a world being transformed by the computer.

The industrial revoloution peeters out and we enter the information revoloution.

 

[useless]

Powered Air Plane - another internal combustion product.

Oil Powered Ships - another internal combustion product.

Submarine - another internal combustion product.

Electric Train - 19th c invention. 188? Germany for the first example.

Jet Plane - The 19th c turbine meets the fuels and tec behind the internal combustion engine. Very cool though.

Hydrogen Peroxide Submarines - not significant.

Helicopter - another internal ombustion product.

Turbine Ships - 19th c invention. FWIW by my stepmothers great-uncle.

Nuclear Submarine - Nuclear reactor a very good idea, but not one we have really got effective, possibly ecause of the pwnage of the internal combustion engine.

Space Rocket - Very cool. No debate.

Hovercraft - another internal combustion product, an one not a terribly significant one either. Cool though.

High Speed Trains - 19th c. design. Apart from maglev we have just tinkered with the design. And, of course, applied the internal combustion engine.

Space Shuttle - While very, very cool not trribly revoloutionary over the rocket in terms of the ultimate buck per pound into orbit. Things like the Virgin project do have the possibility to genuinely revoloutionise access to orbit, but lets see how it goes.

Basically the 19th c. was more advanced than you give it credit for, an in the early-mid 20th c. we had the internal combustion engine which was a massive winner. We are now in the information revoloution. As the mid 20th c. was marked by the internal combustion engine (and to a much lsser extent by the jet and rocket engines) we live in a world being transformed by the computer.

The industrial revoloution peeters out and we enter the information revoloution.

agreed, it looks alot compared to 20th century inventions perhaps for transportation though.

 

[nc-1701]

I beliee technology growth will maintain, and or increase, until we meet the point where we run into physical boundaries, like spped of light and stuff. Once we hit the absolute highest tech we will of course slow down, but not until we start getting close to it.

I mean in the last three years more information was produced than in the previous 1000

 

[innonimatu]

Are you in a scientific field though? Have you seen the advancements in nanotech materials, genetics and medicine(I recently read about a gene sequence in rats that increases the effect of chemotherapy on cancer cells by 40,000 times) Physics(Fusion and quantum computing) To name but few, Electronic engineering, maths, and so on.

Well, I think I can answer that question. Nanotech is a fad, the nanotech achievements are just incremental developments in the much older field of chemistry. And as a chemical engineer my opinion is that there will never be such a thing as a “nanofactory”. We will continue to discover new useful materials, and hopefully we will find some easily achievable conditions for the chemical reactions that will produce these new materials. But don’t be tricked by the wording used to attract media attention and funding: nanotechnology is just a branch of chemistry, and has been around for a long time, we just have better and cheaper equipment now to research new materials. And don’t expect it to improve much more, we’re reaching the physical constraints for equipment (times in the picoseconds range, sizes in the nanometers range).
Contrary to what many people may think, chemistry is still a tremendously empirical science. Properties of complex molecules are neither easily predictable nor easily measurable, and the methods used are not new, most have been around for over 30 years. I was recently at a workshop where one of the topics was why one particular fluorescence behaviour of a molecule happened. Over some 20 years 4 explanations were proposed and people still did not agree!

Physics has reached a stage where there is a lot of speculation around very complex proposed theories but no real useful results for all that effort. Physicians are starting to look like a cross between mathematicians and philosophers, disconnected from the real world.
In all other fields there is evolution, but I see little that looks like new discoveries.

AS for the impact of the information age in science, it already has been felt. Currently most investigators are not yet saturated with information, but that will increasingly be the case. They will reach a point (and some have already reached it) where it simply becomes impossible to keep up with the news in their particular field and still have time for their own research! The problem of the increasingly large number of published articles has already been mentioned.

 

[Tee Kay]

As far as I see it, the 19th century was a time of innovation, the 20th century was a time when those innovations were improved and became widespread. As far as the 21st century goes, I see gradual slowing down of technological advancement relative to the 19th and 20th century (but not a complete stop. There'll still be progress made, but major breakthroughs and new discoveries are not as common as in the past). In constrast to the individual creativity that drives the advances of the 19th and 20th century the 21st century will be a time where new technologies are pioneered exclusively by big corporations for profit and ordinary people are less likely to benefit from them.

 

[Perfection]

Saying that FTL travel is impossible is though. The maths is basic no object with mass can achieve light speed, unless it is instantaneous. There is no evidence that we can't do it only maths per se. Thus it's not confirmed by actual experiment.

The maths say we can't do it; the maths are supported by experiment. Every other experiment failed to do so. There comes a point where you can say it's impossible without having to acknowledge the tiny chance you're wrong.

I tend to agree it seems impossible.

So the difference between "is" and "sems" sufficient to rant and rave and call me arrogant?

But think of it like this, does science know everything? Does it have all the answers, are there therefore not ways we can circumvent science that we haven't yet thought about, would it not be arrogant to assume there are? All I'm saying is that you can't base future development or the technology of 4 billion AD on what we know about the universe now, that is arrogant.

The only thing we can base predictions of the future on is present knowledge.

Perfection you are arrogant, you assume much about the universe from a platform of a God who sees the whole of reality and knows it, that always and ever science will be true, that a theory is gospel.

No I don't, I just assume that when the vast majority of scienstists in a field reach a conensus, it should be listed to.

99.99999% my arse we aren't even close to that, God your such a believer, but sadly it's faith, we are always right, I cannot question science, it must be true and always will be, physics has all the answers, the experiments we do now do not suffer from our ignorance, there are no aunanswered questions. Come on, stop philosophising about the future in 4 billion years time. You have no idea how much ignorance we have, saying now that this is our limitation is fine, I agree, but making claims that it will always be so is basically arrogance.

I question science all the time. I just don't question basic widely accepted scientific truths without a damn good reason.

Let me ask you this perfection, are all laws uniform in all parts of the universe? Or is there a general assumption being made about what we can see through a telescope; then answer me this, is what we see and have experimented on absolute, do scientists put down there pens and paper once the evidence is in? You do, thankfully everyone else is asking questions. It all just seems simple to you it's all black and white. If only...

These assumptions are vital to science, without them we'd be nowhere, so forgive me if I use the basic knowledge of science without mentioning every assumption behind it.

Questioning science is meritable, accepting absolutely is ignorant.

When the hell did I accept everything the scientific community absolutely. Quit lying about my beliefs.

You have all the answers, and yet you claim that I have none? Fact is you don't really have the answers and neither does science, but you'll claim you do anyway, Praise the Lord!!! Physics is dead, Perfection knows all about now and the future, halelujah.

With that philosophy you never get answers! I'll accept the chance of being wrong in exchange for being able to use answers and move forward.




The bottom line is, we all say things that have a very high probability of being true as if they were true. You do it, I do it, everyone does it. Whining about it is utterly insane.

 

[boarder]

No Imo the pace of technology isnt slowing down, but it isnt as fast as was estimated say 30 odd years ago, or wed be going to work in our flying cars by now.

 

[Sidhe]

I just assume

That's it really, your so full of yourself that you throw out, it is impossible to travel faster than light, like it's a sceintific dead cert. Rubbish you don't know any where near enough to make that claim. Maths does not experiment make. Show me where we have proven that spacecraft can never travel faster than light? lame, you talk like a prophet, and yet you don't even have the wherewithall to talk like a scientist, even they have the good grace to say as far as we know. With you it's we know, it's certain maths is God. It's pretty arrogant and it makes you sound full of it.

You have absolutely not the first clue what will happen in 100 years let alone 4 billion, so stop making out you do. What are you Nostradamus? Elijah? Good grief, I've met plenty of scientists professors and PhD's people with real qualifications who don't have the balls, or the BS you have. Mind you this is typical of degree level where everyone is taugh physics is set in stone. Just like you didn't even know that in the interpretation you learnt the wave function is not considered real, or modelled by the schrodinger equation. You tell me it is? What are you studying the big book of positive assertions that aren't true or experimentally verifiable?

 

[Bozo Erectus]

I dont know what you guys are arguing about, but man, it sure is funny

 

[Sidhe]

I dont know what you guys are arguing about, but man, it sure is funny

At least someone is amused.

I'm not amused by arrogance generally.