Humans went from flying the first airplane in December 1903, to landing on the moon in July 1969, which is an absolutely insane change in such a short period of time. Naturally, advances in aviation, medicine, computer electronics and consumer goods slowed down, but what if it didn't? What would standards of living and the wider world look like if up until 2023, technology kept on improving at this rate.
What if the rate of technological progress between 1900-1969 never slowed down?
- Thread starter Johnyaazz
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I would disagree that advances in Computers slowed down, if anything they sped up, computers went from gigantic machines in 1969 to desk-sized machines in 1981.
Diminishing returns (and exponential side effects) in advancement of existing techs meant that new fields advances faster when stumbled upon. This is why the real world during the year of 2001 doesn't have the massive spinning space station or Pan Am Spaceplanes of the fictional year of 2001, but instead boring ass communications satellites that can transfer data in streams far greater than those massive space stations ever could. We might not have robots like Astro Boy, but we do have Chatgpt and IBM Watson, who while can't save the planet from evil aliens, but are quietly working in the background in a number of groundbreaking research.
Can't physically see that shit though, so they don't count I guess.
Can't physically see that shit though, so they don't count I guess.
People foresaw fusion power and flying cars, but missed the Internet and the cell phone.
The rate of "disruptive" patents and papers is and has been slowing down while costs are rising, but quantifying "technological change" is extremely difficult and the causes are unknown. What sort of "technological change" do you mean when you say that it maintains the rate it had 1900-1969?
The rate of "disruptive" patents and papers is and has been slowing down while costs are rising, but quantifying "technological change" is extremely difficult and the causes are unknown. What sort of "technological change" do you mean when you say that it maintains the rate it had 1900-1969?
Space stations are not about hard technology. They are about bringing along supplies like food, water, and ecosystems so people can survive. It is a poor analogy. You don't build PanAm spaceplanes when you can only live in a place for a short time. This is the failure of the hard analogy. A massive spinning station is not useful without a regenerative life support system, IBM Watson has nothing to do with biology. The existing techs in the 1960s are a far cry from regenerative life support. It is actually not why we don't have space stations in 2001. Ecosystems are not military in nature, they are not rockets, and do not act like Cold War technologies or computers. Computers might be used to model ecosystems, but it is advances in biology, not rocket engines that limited access to space. In the 1950s, there were nuclear thermal rockets which could take us to Mars. The problem was the supplies and life support, not the hard technology. It is not until recently that people started building remotely useful space greenhouses and regenerative life support. Also, it is the ability to use resources in situ that will determine colonization, things like 3d printers to make houses and tools, and self replicating solar power fields weren't even discussed at that time. In addition, the life support systems will have to be built from compact sources, seeds, regolith, earth, stored water and other resources. If you extrapolate from 1960-1969 you miss the boat, because it is ultimately biology and automation that will determine long term space survival.
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There's also a lot of future techs and came and went, but are still associated with the future (mostly because of aesthetics) instead of the past. Things like supersonic airliners and cross channel hovercrafts came because they were the future, then went away because the costs outweighed the benefits and it wasn't as cracked up to be.
Not my point, which being in that large space stations (as envisioned by sci-fi of the 50s-70s) was envisioned to take on the role of communications hubs to facilitate connecting the world with instantaneous communications and broadcasting, but since with in invention of the modern microchip a series of small unmanned sats can do the same thing but better the liner progression of the space station tech line was not pursued, instead the new branching tech line of comms sats was/is.
The point with the AIs/robots is that unlike what sci-fi (and speculative fics/articles) envisioned (general purpose androids that seek to mimic the human experience), the actual AIs/robots of today has gone on a different branching path of specialization instead, and in those specialization they are in many ways better than their fictional counterparts.
For example, Data from Star Trek has a total linear computational speed rated at sixty trillion operations per second... not bad for fictional 24th century lost tech (and it is lost tech, or else starfleet would have mass produced those already). A supercomputer from the ancient days of 2022 has already exceed that.
Riain
Banned
What's disappointed me most is the lack of progress with physical speed and physical technology despite all this bullshit computer crap.
Even with the oil crisis would could have had high speed rail proliferate, powered by thorium nuclear reactors virtually eliminating aircraft and cars from the 300-800km travel sector. Supersonic aircraft could have proliferated for transoceanic travel as well, bringing the world much closer together than these 15-18 hour long haul flights.
Even with the oil crisis would could have had high speed rail proliferate, powered by thorium nuclear reactors virtually eliminating aircraft and cars from the 300-800km travel sector. Supersonic aircraft could have proliferated for transoceanic travel as well, bringing the world much closer together than these 15-18 hour long haul flights.
Part of the problem of technological development was that by the 1960s the problems with it were becoming somewhat obvious, from both a technological feasibility versus cost standpoint (supersonic airliners being the epitamy of this) and the "what is the side effect of this?" standpoint, the latter being particularly difficult for a lot of chemical, agribusiness, manufacturing and materials science industries in the 1960s and 1970s. Thalidomide, Silent Spring, Minamata disease, Dioxin in 2,4,5-T, the difficulties caused by PCB accumulation, lead poisoning as a result of TEL in motor fuel, the discovery that dilution is NOT a solution to hazardous waste....it all added up, and it all came to a head in the 1960s, and that is before one considers nuclear science or other such cutting-edge details.
If tech didn’t “slow down” then ww Would Be living in a world with ”2001” levels of tech or the flying cars from Blade runner or whatever.
But I am not convinced tech development slowed down as much as tech advances have gotten harder as the low hanging fruit has been picked.
it is like the video games with tech trees. The early tech cost100 research points to develop and 100 resource points to build. The 5the step up the tree costs 1000 reserach points and 1000 recorded points to build and the the 10 steps costs 10,000 research points and so on,
In the early 1900s. Two guys in a garage with hand powered tools could build an airplane from parts and skills needed to repair bicyles. In the mid 50s a couple of guys could build a “state of the art“ race car and win the Indy 500.
Now in the early 21st century it takes billions of dollars and years of work from hundreds or thousands of men in order to build an airplane that is better then what we currently have and a top of the line F1 teams spends hundreds of millions of dollars to build a race car that is 1 second (or less) faster then then the car that qualifies 20th.
Whatever device you are reading this on is probably more powerful then all the computers NASA used to get to the moon in 1969 combined.
The things we have that’s ere not predicted 60 years ago are things that are derived from technology that typically deve as an off shoot of somewhere else. Cheep computers, and the government wanting a web computer network that could withstand war damage results in the Internet. The internet and some good ideas and programing results in the WWW. Smaller and more powerful computer chips added with a bunch of other tech results in a smart phone. Heck the first Apple IPhone was literally three devices combined as one as Steve Jobs point out when he introduced it by repeating Ipod, phone and internet device, The iPhone didn’t invent anything that we didn’t have it just combined them.
Much of out tech in the last 40+ years is nothing new it is just “better” or ”cheeper”. Because new breakthroughs are hard time consuming and expensive.
And perhaps uneconomical.
Two guys selling and repairing bikes could afford to invent a functioning aircraft just because they want to, But no two people can afford to invent a hypersonic aircraft or a flying car. The cost would bankrupt even the richest people on earth. So only large companies or governments can afford this level of research, And companies need to show a profit which is why we are not flying at supersonic speeds. person I would love to get to France in 3 hours but not at a cost higher then I would spend on the rest of the vacation. And Governments only spend on research for economic or political or military gains.
But I am not convinced tech development slowed down as much as tech advances have gotten harder as the low hanging fruit has been picked.
it is like the video games with tech trees. The early tech cost100 research points to develop and 100 resource points to build. The 5the step up the tree costs 1000 reserach points and 1000 recorded points to build and the the 10 steps costs 10,000 research points and so on,
In the early 1900s. Two guys in a garage with hand powered tools could build an airplane from parts and skills needed to repair bicyles. In the mid 50s a couple of guys could build a “state of the art“ race car and win the Indy 500.
Now in the early 21st century it takes billions of dollars and years of work from hundreds or thousands of men in order to build an airplane that is better then what we currently have and a top of the line F1 teams spends hundreds of millions of dollars to build a race car that is 1 second (or less) faster then then the car that qualifies 20th.
Whatever device you are reading this on is probably more powerful then all the computers NASA used to get to the moon in 1969 combined.
The things we have that’s ere not predicted 60 years ago are things that are derived from technology that typically deve as an off shoot of somewhere else. Cheep computers, and the government wanting a web computer network that could withstand war damage results in the Internet. The internet and some good ideas and programing results in the WWW. Smaller and more powerful computer chips added with a bunch of other tech results in a smart phone. Heck the first Apple IPhone was literally three devices combined as one as Steve Jobs point out when he introduced it by repeating Ipod, phone and internet device, The iPhone didn’t invent anything that we didn’t have it just combined them.
Much of out tech in the last 40+ years is nothing new it is just “better” or ”cheeper”. Because new breakthroughs are hard time consuming and expensive.
And perhaps uneconomical.
Two guys selling and repairing bikes could afford to invent a functioning aircraft just because they want to, But no two people can afford to invent a hypersonic aircraft or a flying car. The cost would bankrupt even the richest people on earth. So only large companies or governments can afford this level of research, And companies need to show a profit which is why we are not flying at supersonic speeds. person I would love to get to France in 3 hours but not at a cost higher then I would spend on the rest of the vacation. And Governments only spend on research for economic or political or military gains.
And the average today's smartphone has more computing power than a 1981 desktop.
Which circles back into the perception issue: most innovations and technologies within living memory are not flashy or grand scale. It doesn't matter the strides we made in automation of logistics & production, communications and networking, and bio sciences and those things are making huge differences in both military and civilian applications: those are just not as fancy as giant killbots, fusion power armor, or supersoldiers.
Candy Crush brings more happiness and impact to people than Orion nuclear battleships, but the latter sure as fuck looks more meaningful than the former.
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In 1974 people were pondering about computers fitting in a desk
It's also worth mentioning changes in lifestyle; the everyday lives of people (or at least Europeans and Americans) in 2020 are closer to those of 1960 than those of 1960 to those of 1900. Even so, the changes 'under the hood' have been staggering.
Tbf once you reach point there's so little so you can radically change, but to say technological advancement has slowed is ignorant, it's just that it's less flashy now.
Computer electronics went from Apollo moon landing that according to wikipedia had
- 15-bit wordlength + 1-bit parity
- 2048 words RAM (magnetic-core memory)
- 36,864 words ROM (core rope memory)[1]
Medicine has not slowed down, it just depend how much money that goes into research. If AIDS during the 80s had gotten the money Covid got in 2020 i think that we might have had a cure for it, but even so we got medicine that slow the virus and people that died within a few years after contracting AIDS now live decades.
As for consumer goods, TVs were bulk things until late 1990s when they became thinner. People had 20-25 inch screens to watch TV, nowdays almost noone have a TV below 42 inch screen.
Space exploration moved slow in the 1950s and it was not until JFK held his Moon speech when the space race heated up and money was thrown at it. After USA got to the moon people lost intrest and the funding was reduced.
If you look at the development of aircrat you have to look at the development in regards to the world wars. Before WW1 the aircrafts were not much better than what the Wright brothers had, between 1914 and 1918 the development was hughe. Then the development slowed again and it was only after 1933 that the development went faster. When WW2 started many airforces still had types of planes they had in 1918. The development in WW2 went from biplanes in some eras in 1939 to jet fighters in 1944/45. In 1939 there was no commercial flights between USA and Europe. After the war the commercial flights began in earnest, but it still took until 1950s until the last passenger ships could not compete with flight.
And how much of that is because of our relative proximity and familiarity to current times and the near past vis a vis the more distant past? Because I think a more sober look would show some very stark differences.
- [average] Work life balance [in the Euro-Atlantic countries]: 1900: +12hr workday in factory/mines/whatnot but the work does starts & stop at highly regimented bells regulated by timekeeping. 1960: 40-60hr work week with standardized pre-set times of which are known and such. 2020: heavily part time/informal work schedules along with remote work with unpredictable times (made possible by advances in telecommunications] of which in many cases to bypass the traditional separations of work/home balance. (tl;dr: work/home balance exists in both 1900 & 1960, but not in 2020).
- Children's entertainment/playtime: 1900: touching grass. 1960: touching grass. 2020: touching grass in minecraft.
- News cycle: 1900: Newspaper brings you the world at a daily pace. 1960: radio (and some TV) brings you news at the hourly if so desired. 2020: fuck this I don't need the world shoving news down my throat every second.
- Debating/discussion: 1900: chatting with your local homies at the bar. 1960: chatting with your local homies at the bar or some community center. 2020: I can bet most of y'all don't live anywhere near me, and we're certainly not debating in some physical location.
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Perhaps, knowing the issues involved with the rate of technological change shifting (slowing down in some areas, speeding up in others), perhaps the best question to ask is what would the world be like if the pace stayed rapid (or at least rather faster than OTL) for many of the fields that rapidly accelerated in the time period up to 1969 and then slowed a lot afterwards (space travel, aircraft, transportation technologies, nuclear science, chemical and materials sciences, agribusiness)? It's not as if many of the basics of the next advancements of the above fields weren't known by then, they just hadn't been fully fleshed out and made beyond experiments yet.
Cure your desire for flying cars by watching pretty much anyone else [1] on the road now, then imagine the last breakdown, crash or near miss you experienced happening at 5,000 feet!
Still, I would like superfast trains, very fast air travel, medical super science and the predicted life of leisure (assuming I still got paid well enough for what little work I needed to do).
[1] it's not so easy to watch your own driving, but realistically for most of us it's probably not much different from that of others.
Still, I would like superfast trains, very fast air travel, medical super science and the predicted life of leisure (assuming I still got paid well enough for what little work I needed to do).
[1] it's not so easy to watch your own driving, but realistically for most of us it's probably not much different from that of others.
I want to see what Florida man can achieve with a flying car!
That's a social economic problem, not necessarily a problem that could be solved on any level of technology (at least, not without curbing some fundamental freedoms).