On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 7:31 AM, Perry E. Metzger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Thaths <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> And feed five thousand with five loaves and two fish, turning bayse
>> metals into golde.
> If someone had told you in 1950 that by about 2000, teenagers would
> get into trouble for making pornographic films of each other with
> their pocket sized mobile telephones and posting them on "social
> networking sites" (I don't even know how to explain that one), would
> you have believed them, or would you have laughed?
There is something to what you say about the changes that time brings.
However, my contention is that predictions of the future have been off
the mark be they about flying cars, personal jet packs, ever
increasing home values or buying petfood online.
> So, instead of thinking about what is plausible with one's "gut
> reaction", which is largely predicated on one's all too human instinct
> to think the future will look like the present, try going through the
> physics and the engineering challenges involved, and try to figure out
> what is possible on that basis.
Didn't the imagineers try this with Epcot center? We can both agree
that the World's Fair, OTOH, was shameless shilling for GM and
Westinghouse ('Westing-who?' the kids these days ask).
The trouble I have with imagining a world in which nano machines clank
away in their molecular workshops twisting this double bond this way
and adjusting that hydroxyl group the other way is what sounds like
cyclical logic to me:
Where will the power to run these bazillion nano machines come from?
Why, they will be come out of other nano machines building ever more
perfect solar panels and table-top Fleishman-Pons reactors.
I hesitate to believe in diamond ages because they sound like ponzi
schemes or overoptimistic extrapolations of Moore's law (of economics,
not physical science).
Thaths
--
"I saw this in a movie about a bus that had to SPEED around a city, keeping
its SPEED over fifty, and if its SPEED dropped, it would explode. I think
it was called, 'The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down'." -- Homer J. Simpson
