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Originally Posted by MartinSE
Agree, and remember, fire to candles took millions of years, candles to electric lights took thousands of years, incandescent electric lights to LED lights took a hundred years. Technology advances at an exponential rate.
It appears linear to us, but if you take any aspect of technology and trace it from it's origin to today, you will see this exponential nature
Take speed of transportation - walking on all fours, to walking and running upright (3mph average) Millions of years and we start riding horses. Tens of thousands of years and we get boats and wagons. Thousands of years and we get steam. Hundreds of year(s) and we get gas engines. How long for electric? Who knows.
There is abnormal obvious reason for this. Each step along the way uses the previous tech to help the next step. Once we got computers (and computer aided design) things really picked up the pace. Now, with AI design birthing, we can expect the computers to being making faster smarter, and better computers, which will then increase the advance of technology even faster.
We will see where this goes, but 15 years ago, cell phones were HUGE and dumb, now I wear one on my wrist, that is more powerful than the computers used to get us to the moon and back.
I think there is a chance if we don't destroy ourselves first, that we could switch to an electric based economy in 10 to 20 years.
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Excellent points about technology development. I recall hearing awhile back that the sum total of mankind's knowledge doubles every two years. I don't know how accurate that observation is but the development of technology would certainly to bear that out.
Odd, though: a lot of people see technology development as linear. I've often thought that seeing it that way can be limiting. Case in point: the Stirling engine. Most people have never heard of it, but it was invented well over 200 years ago (with the roots going back more than a century before that); a closed-system pressure-differential engine that depending on the fuel, can be very low-emission or even emission-free. They've been around in a limited fashion, used for mine-pumping and the like, but they never really caught on because even though they're an environmentalist's dream they're pretty underpowered, at least at their current state of development. You can buy 'em online: most are toys but some are designed to provide significant (if slow) power.
There's been some work done on using solar power to power 'em. I saw a deal a few years back where someone rigged a fresnel lens to focus sunlight on the heat element of the engine, and the little bugger was humming along at breakneck speed. Pretty impressive, both from a performance aspect and the fact that there was power being produced at absolutely no environmental cost.
Back to the future?