Posted on 12/13/2017 11:20:50 AM PST by Red Badger
“The 20th Century saw more technological advancements than the previous ten centuries combined........................”
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Very true,but I think that the printing press and electricity had more of a direct effect in the improvement of peoples’ lives.
“Well, I have a problem with the dangerous fission nuclear power plants but once they get the clean fusion process figured out (haven’t figured out how to deal with the heat requirement), that will be great I think.”
Think there is any possibility they’ll make an error and create a black hole in which we will all disappear ?
Maybe that explains why we can’t find anybody else...they are all gone because they were a more advanced civilization than we are and got to fusion first? LOL...
At that acceleration rate, the next 10 years are gonna be...fun.
Hence my pet theory on why we haven’t seen any [sophisticated] extraterrestrial life: all go through roughly the same process of scientific discovery, reaching a point where a sentient being goes “what happens if I try _this_?” and the entire planet disappears.
If I remember correctly, Disney had a program every Sunday night. They would introduce us to science. A man had 1000 spring type mouse traps in an enclosed room each with 2 ping pong balls resting on them. The man tossed a ping pong ball into the room and Pop! two ping balls were launched, then four, and a second later, the room exploded with ping pong balls. Hence, a simulated nuclear explosion.
Many of the great nuclear physicists in Europe were Jewish. Mrs. Enrico Fermi was also Jewish. They fled Europe, Germany in particular, in the 1930s.
Never count on your enemy being a genocidal maniac and chasing away his best scientists ... but be grateful when it happens.
As the old saying goes, fusion is the energy of the future, and it always will be.
The drive of Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi to produce a sustained nuclear fission reaction was more than just to produce electricity after the war.
Kept secret at the time was the fact that already in 1941, Art Wahl, a graduate student of Glenn Seaborg, had isolated plutonium from bombarded uranium, and they, along with others at the University of California had discovered that plutonium-239 was significantly more fissionable than uranium-235. Thus began the Manhattan Project, with Fermi and Wahl going to Los Alamos, Seaborg going to the Met Lab in Chicago, and others going to Hanford, WA, in the enormous Manhattan Project to build a plutonium bomb. (Oak Ridge was primarily responsible for working to enrich U-235 for a uranium bomb.)
Less than three years after the first controlled nuclear chain reaction under the University of Chicago football stadium, a plutonium bomb was tested near Alamagordo, NM, on July 16, 1945. Less than a month later, a uranium bomb had exploded over Hiroshima, Japan, another plutonium bomb had exploded over Nagasaki, and Japan had surrendered.
A little known fact about CP-1:
Brian Williams was standing right behind Enrico Fermi’s right shoulder double-checking Fermi’s slide rule calculations on his HP=35 hand calculator. He later confirmed that it was his approval that allowed Fermi to pull the rod out the last few millimeters to attain criticality.
#ThanksBrian
For all Nazi Germany’s technological prowess, they applied it poorly. A German officer was captured during the Normandy invasion and was allowed to watch part of the American supplies coming ashore. He asked, “Where are the horses?”
At that acceleration rate, the next 10 years are gonna be...fun.
And while we have landed on Mars, where are our flying cars?
They were forecast for the 1950s.
It’s my opinion that innovation has flattened out and struggles under the weight of federal regulation, which gets less and less onerous as you go back in time.
I was raised about 50 miles from there................
Thanks for posting. Great short history.
Regulation indeed limits our productivity & advances.
The other factor in not already being in the future imagined decades ago: we discovered much of “the future” actually was boring, costly, or otherwise undesirable. “2001”’s orbiting hotel offered nothing but a great view, or a stopover on the way to the Moon. Getting to the Moon is cool, but being there isn’t - it’s inert dead rocks amid radiation extremes. Flying cars (in the form predicted) are possible, but the space & cost & training needed are more trouble than worth; scaled-up human-carrying drones ARE looking quite possible, in part because of the computing power reaching the point where you tell it where to go and it takes care of piloting for you (autonomous flight being actually easier than autonomous ground-driving). In all of these, the energy costs are staggering relative to the benefits; you’ll get a lot more done by staying on the ground.
What wasn’t expected was the Information Age. Instant worldwide communication using a pocket-sized magic slate, coupled with staggering data storage capacities, opened up possibilities which the past’s futurists couldn’t predict.
With that context - the unexpected Information Age supplanting the predicted Space Age (because cat videos are more interesting than moon rocks) - consider what will happen when the _next_ unexpected development occurs.
“No tree grows to the sky.”
Correct, but I can make a tree into an airplane and fly there.
Good points, all.
My dad worked on the Manhattan project.
He told me that at the time, he was living in an apartment. Seems he became friends with a science fiction buff who lived in the same building. The friend knew that my dad was working on some top secret military project. One day, to my dad’s shock, he announced that he had figured out what the project was. It seems that all discussion of atomic bombs had abruptly disappeared from sci-fi literature, so he concluded that the a-bomb was, in fact, the secret project.
The Japanese came to same conclusions using the same reasoning. They started a nuclear program (One of their leading physicists had been a student of Oppenheimer!) it was roughly a year to 18 months behind ours when the war ended.) There is some evidence try actually tested “something” on a Korean (now North Korean!) island in the China Sea.
Could very well be. But I don’t think so. “Impossible” is the trigger mechanism for breakthrough.
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