Whenever I hear that, the technology is not there yet or that scientists predict we may have the technology by x year, I wonder why is it so ? We have acess to the same materials on earth as before so how do we constantly find new ways to improve our tech and why does it happen in small doses over long periods of time ? Why can’t we develop technology now, that would otherwise take us 200 years or some ?
In: Technology
From Wikipedia, ‘Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years.’
Basically, we understand the rate at which technology generally increases in complexity, but not specifically what needs done. First we figure out how to do a thing, and then we have to figure out how to do it better, more efficiently, make it smaller, make it useful, etc etc.
A project designing laser cutting equipment might be at the point where they know what the next step is, but the lenses they need aren’t currently possible to build. So they look at the rate at which lense manufacturing tech has been improving and can make a projection about how far out until they’ll be able to take that next big step. In the meantime, they keep picking at what they’ve got, doing tests, learning stuff, providing data to other projects for all kinds of things. What you learn about heat dispersion from lasers might be what a project trying to automate circuit building needs to take their next step, and on and on. Everything we build and design comes hand in hand with everything else.
And the rate at which we’re going, there’s nobody alive who knows what the world will look like in thirty years. The figures of our past could not have imagined what we would become.
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