X-Message-Number: 20896 Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 09:41:08 -0500 From: Daniel Crevier <> Subject: Re: the apparent slowdown of progress The explanation for the apparent slowdown in progress may be just that we have made all the easy inventions. Now we are up against the hard stuff, and it takes more time. The inventions described in mid-twentieth century science fiction, like flying cars and weather control, which were expected to materialize by 1980, were in fact much much harder to develop that we thought at the time. Consider the flying car (you know, the 'Back to the Future' gadget that hovers silently by buildings and flies at hundreds of miles an hour). There is considerably more complexity to it than meets the eye. I suppose that, if they'd really set their minds to it, Boeing or GE could long ago have developped a car-like vehicle that just flies and lands vertically. I surmise they didn't do it because if that's all it does, there is no money in it. Such a gadget would be costlier to make than a helicopter (otherwise helicopters would be flying cars already), and therefore be priced way out of the ordinary person's budget. It would also be no easier to fly than a helicopter, which requires a highly paid professional pilot. And there is the environmental issue: if you've ever been under a helicopter hovering close to the ground, you couldn't help but to notice the downdraft: it almost flattens you to the gound. A flying car would have to woosh down just as much air, except it would be concentrated in an area the size of a car. The darn thing would have a small hurricane under it. Finally, consider air traffic control: present ATC can barely manage the thousands of airplanes in our skies. Handling millions of flying cars would be exponentially harder. It turns out that some recent developments, pertaining mostly to computer technology, could resolve some of these problems in the not too distant future. Artificial intelligence could enable the aircar to fly itself, thus obviating the need for a pilot. Automation, with the possible help of nanotechnology, could make it affordable. Enough computing power could get around the traffic control issue. Alas, barring antigravity, I dont see any way around the environmental problem, so aircars would have to take off and land at designated sites, and stick to high altitudes elsewhere. I think we are in the developmental equivalent of what psychologists call a learning plateau: when you learn a new skill, periods of rapid progress tend to alternate with episodes of constant performance. This doesn't mean that learning doesn't go on during a plateau: it just doesn't manifest itself. We may just be, slowly but surely, accumulating the knowledge that will allow us to develop the inventions we've dreamed of. And when it happens, things may go very fast. Daniel Crevier Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=20896