Then something like this reminds me that if we as a species were able to unlock the secrets of bio-chemistry (not sure if that's the right term) it would be a game changer unlike any seen so far. And the fact that there is a huge corpus of evidence out there in the world called "life" proving some of the possibilities already gives me hope that while we may never have FTL, the future could still be pretty wild.
Max Planck was famously discouraged from studying physics by one of his professors because "in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes." [1]
Having studied physics myself, my opinion is that we may very well be at a similar point right now. The big advancements of the last century in physics (quantum theory, relativity, chaos theory, etc.) brought us an era of swift and sweeping technological progress, and now the easy fruit seems to have been plucked. But there are still plenty of known unknowns, dark matter and dark energy being perhaps the most prominent one. Who knows what unknown unknowns are hiding behind those known unknowns?
We're not anywhere near a technological plateau, we just lost track on funding. Until the fall of the Soviet Union, the US invested a lot of money in foundational research, often not even caring if it would prove useful or possible, and with big enough money behind it that people could plan careers.
These days, researchers have to waste half their working time to chasing the few grants that are still available, and forget about a stable career, job security or enough work-life balance to found a family.
I think it's worth every penny, but at first glance it feels incredibly abstract and disconnected from practical application, as well as expensive. (Though, to be honest, I just looked up the LHC cost and $9Bn USD doesn't feel expensive. I was expected it to come up in the hundreds of billions.)
There's also this famous quote that is frequently mis-attributed to Kelvin: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement".[0] (I'm not sure who actually said it.)
[0] https://www.quora.com/Which-19th-century-physicist-famously-...
One human lifespan will be seen as a trivial amount of time to the next step of humanity.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/05/12/the-...
And at some point we also don't have infinite time - we will have heat death of the universe at some point too.
So they can't both be right.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/nov/04/relativity-quan...
For example, we could explain that electricity works because of how electrons move, which would be correct from our point of view, but if we find out that we were living in a simulation, then the explanation would be that this is how "electricity" was coded to behave.
Also, usually in physics a formula is thought to be correct until some new laws/rules are found, then the formula is updated by adding some extra terms and then again thought to be correct.
strange to me how nobody questions why beavers only make damns a certain size, birds only make nests and don't go beyond that in complexity.
So many people seem blind to the idea that humans might be near their intellectual limit as a species and assume we will just keep progressing technologically. For all we know it's possible we hit a brick wall in terms of progress. Average human struggles with calculus, what if there was a species that could do advanced math as easily as we do 2 + 2?
Seems the limit for human advancement is tied to rate of learning, life span, and general cognitive ability. If you want more advanced tech you need to focus on those problems
I think we will eventually need a paradigm shift from science being built around human grokable models (e=mc^2) to external human manipulatable models (ie, large scale machine derived models that we can't actually grok but can use for analysis and engineering). I think we're already starting to see this - there are already mathematical proofs that are so large and complex (in the GB range) that they had to be found by automation and only other automation can verify them.
Isn't most of this kind of just a matter of fitness, same as why birds become flightless on islands where there are no predators which demand flight to escape from? Basically, building anything more than a minimally-viable nest or a dam requires using energy that could be invested elsewhere to greater evolutionary advantage.
Humans have gone beyond because for as long as we can remember, we've always had vast, vast surpluses of energy, initially through the cooking of meat and agriculture, then via animal labour, and then finally via fossil fuels.
On the flip side, nothing seems more exemplified by humanity than a zeal for doing a thing as big and grandiose as possible: for curiosity, for business, for art, or just for sheer vanity.
I don't think we've seen how far those will take us yet, even w/o improvements to the bottlenecks you suggest. I do agree that those "meta" fields matter and will make a huge difference.
Probably because beavers and birds have made dams and nests the same way for the past 100 years, whereas humans in the same time have developed a bunch of tools and can specialize and distribute the fruits of their expertise without requiring others to be experts themselves.
Perhaps it's not true that on average we know more e.g. math now than we did 100 years ago, because there are so many more people. I believe we are nonetheless much better at teaching and learning now.
It's more than possible that all of this growth will be our downfall, and that that will regulate our growth, however.
Unlike humans, beavers and most species of birds don't work cooperatively, which means they can't separate the workload needed for survival (e.g. one group hunts, one group builds dams, one group does childcare).
The future will be pretty wild.
If that's not enough to make a difference, it's because we started too late and the problem is too large, not because technological development is too slow. Admittedly, nuclear could have done the job already, and the issue there is social.
If human lifespan technology moved at half the climate change technology speed, we'd have 25 extra years per decade and be effectively immortal today.
Incremental progress may be ideal. Alas, whatever forces that may be, trying to preserve the current equilibrium, fight off change. Until the compulsion to change overwhelms the system.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
So when humanity finally goes carbon negative, it'll be despite the opposition, because they couldn't defend the status quo any longer. Then all that bottled up change will be like a dam bursting.
Hopefully it'll happen sooner than later.
I don't think we are capable building computer system (and that includes power system for running it) right now that would last few hundred years without any maintenance, even here on planet.
Or it would at least be very non trivial to build it
Who cares about humans, as a traveling satellite i will have all the time in the universe, literally
It excites me to think about discovering the origin of our consciousness and being able to transfer that.
But I still can't even imagine what consciousness is.
Maybe we'll create new intelligences, punt on the consciousness question, and delegate the task to them.
Pretty soon, parents will be picking their kid's eye color and temperament. For better or worse. Surely future humans will become a great deal hardier than ourselves.
Maybe we can choose eye color, but temperament? Far too complex, far too many possible side effects.
Just look what happened of the dream that AI could help with Corona
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-...
It is currently trending in the other direction.
FTL drive is not needed; people think too small.
And tell somebody put something together for real, FPL is just a whole lot more sexy.
Also, why should I privilege what Chamath has to say on this subject more than any random commentator?
Well, using that analogy, I would say, it took us indeed great efforts to reach it, but now we have vast land to colonize - meaning applying all that groundbreaking research into everything. There are so many more technologies avaiable, than just what you can buy on the market.
Sci-Fi is very possible.
edit: oh and about FTL:
I know I do not really understand quantum physics and co. but I think I understand, that no one really understands it yet - so I do not expect FTL in my lifetime, but I would not rule it out.
Garden Earth.
The biggest cultural change for attaining "sustainability" is metaphoric, from extraction to management. Maybe somewhat ironically, proponents should go all Old Testament. Stewards of the Earth and so forth.
Many of our prior cultures had at least some form of this. I don't know when or why we stopped being so. Maybe due to the Enlightenment and then Industrialization.
I vividly remember reading René Descartes as a kid and being shocked by his violent language and metaphors. Stuff like "We must wrest Nature's secrets and make her submit to our will" (paraphrasing, from memory).
There is so much to learn about the world around us without even hitting physics limits.
And then so much to do with that knowledge.
I am not worried we will run out of problems to solve.
The seeming requirement of FTL to explore the universe is 100% a function of our short life span. If we can't make spacecraft go faster we have to make ourselves last longer.
Oh, the rocket equation really doesn't like option 1.
(Hypothesis: any process we can devise to turn hydrogen into sustenance will be orders of magnitude less efficient than using it as propellant.)
They already recycle water very effectively on the ISS. It's the machine that "turns yesterday's coffee into today's coffee."
Of course if we were that good at biotech we could probably hibernate a good chunk of the flight time too. Might be necessary to wake up periodically to reset the body, but you could probably hibernate most of the duration. Maybe you'd do it with some kind of weird circadian cycle with extremely elongated sleep periods, sleeping like 10X-100X as long as you are awake. During each wake period you check to make sure everything is working properly.
You would not need a Bussard ramjet for the long duration flights I'm thinking of. A nuclear thermal rocket could get you a good deal past solar system escape velocity. Nuclear pulse propulsion could get you up to at least single digit percentages of the speed of light if you didn't mind a little boom-boom. Then you just cruse along on an interstellar transfer orbit until you do a retro-burn to enter the destination star system a few tens of thousands of years later. These are all technologies that are already feasible at least on paper. No new physics is needed.
Good luck to Moderna.
Richard Dawkins has a very good explanation for this in The Blind Watchmaker.
>and is mindlessly progressing along so effectively that despite all of our technological capability we can barely contain it.
There's technological capability and America's punishment fetish because people who get aids "deserve it". If we really wanted to, we would have had one.
In theory we already have the technology to eliminate HIV. People taking PrEP have a >99% reduced chance to catch HIV. The drugs used to treat HIV can reduce viral levels in HIV+ people to the point that it's impossible for them to transmit it.
Right now, the problem is more about actually accessing the people who might have HIV, getting them to test themselves regularly, and then giving them access to HIV medication if they are positive. Often these people are on the fringes of society. A vaccine would be an ideal tool to reach these people than asking them to get tested regularly.
HIV is a way harder virus to develop a vaccine for than SARS-CoV-2. For starters, once you have it, HIV is way more dangerous. Most people with covid don't need medical attention at all, they can deal with it themselves. Meanwhile, someone infected with HIV is basically sentenced to death in a couple of years if they aren't medicated (>90% mortality rate). The current covid pandemic is so severe because covid spreads so much better than HIV does. Our immune system can't really deal with HIV in a way that we survive the encounter. With SARS-CoV-2 you only need to slightly nudge the immune system into the right direction. That's a way easier task.
HIV also has an immensely large mutation rate. The genetic diversity in a single individual is larger than the genetic diversity of one entire yearly influenza outbreak. So you need to come up with defenses that help against a gigantic set of HIV viruses. We still need to vaccinate people yearly with an influenza shot, because we can't create universal influenza vaccines yet. It's an open problem similar to how a HIV vaccine is an open problem.
TLDR: There is already something like warp speed for HIV, but we were mostly lucky that it was so easy to come up with a covid vaccine.
also, doesn't your immune system lose like 30% of its T-cells after you seroconvert, but prior to developing AIDS? iirc that's why HIV+ people are considered immunocompromised regardless of viral load.
As for the CD4+ T cells, you are right that their numbers decrease before it's called AIDS. In some individuals the counts can successfully recover to "normal" levels. According to studies, it depends on how early you start treatment.
https://www.aidsmap.com/news/dec-2018/cd4-count-recovery-fre...
And despite President-level dismissal of HIV/AIDS at the time, significant resources were devoted to it in the 80s, such that even though we didn't make huge progress against HIV at the time, the research on HIV progressed the rest of the field.
And a lot of our anti-viral drugs have come out of HIV research as well.
A modern Project Warpspeed probably wouldn't be quite as successful as a Covid19 Warpspeed, because a lot of the first ideas have already been attempted. But with the new sorts of designs that mRNA vaccines allow, there's a lot more that's possible now.
Of course the above is about odds. Individual exceptions do not prove me wrong.
That doesn't mean HIV isn't horrible. It also doesn't mean congress is right for the right reasons.
I just think it's wrong to call tiny 'simple' life, just because we are so insanely complex.
https://vimeo.com/260291607
(also how awesome is the music?)