Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments
by dharmab on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:32PM
(#36966278)
Don't forget: Soap/handwashing, antibiotics, the smallpox vaccine, the Haber-Bosch process, blood transfusion, anesthetic and PCR!
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Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments
by kragen on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:21PM
(#36966584)
soap is a good one for sure; the others might turn out to be less important than the transistor
time will tell
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments
by dharmab on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:47PM
(#36966737)
Haber-Bosch is the reason there are over 7 billion humans on Earth instead of closer to 2 billion. It's very difficult for any digital technology to compete with that.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments
by kragen on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:13AM
(#36967189)
agriculture is the reason there were 2 billion instead of 20 million, which is a much bigger difference
it seems likely that digital technology will be crucial in enabling there to be far more humans off earth than on earth; o'neill cylinders could enable many orders of magnitude more physical humans even within this solar system
to say nothing of the possibility of backing up your mind with a brain scan and thus becoming immortal, and possibly forking into more copies of your mind than there are humans alive today
(nitpick, transistors aren't digital)