Technophilia

Off the microphone of RE

Aired on the Doomstead Diner on October 28,2014

Discuss this Rant at the Science & Technology Table inside the Diner

Are you a Technophile? Think Flying Carz and Hovering Skateboards are in your Future? You might want to reconsider this idea…

Snippet:

…So for today I am going to look at a more theoretical Doom Problem, the Cornucopian/ Technophile idea that not only can we resolve our energy problems through more advanced technology, we can even go on to live the Jetsons Lifestyle,with the Flying Carz, Robot Servants and all the rest of the techno-shit served up here since the 1964 World’s Fair at least, but probably going back at least as far as the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.

Who FUNDS those World’s Fairs anyhow? Basically they have all been a Pitch for further Industrialization ever since they were initiated, a Celebration of the brilliance in accessing gobs of energy and using it to create such revolutionary living devices as the Iphone.

Every device we currently use and in many cases depend on was first promoted at some World’s Fair, from Carz to Airplanes right up to Video Phones, which just about everyone in the industrialized world now carries in his or her pocket courtesy of Apple or Samsung. So many of the devices first envisioned by Sci Fi writers like Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov and promoted at World’s Fair’s have come into REAL existence, that the general belief amongst the population is that in the course of due time, ALL of them will become available, like the Flying Cars yet to make the scene, or Fusion Power also off in the indeterminate distance, not to mention the Star Trek Food Replicators and Transporters which dissolve your body into Information to be reconstituted somewhere else in the universe along with Schrodinger’s Cat, neither Dead or Alive once you arrive, or both at the same time perhaps. LOL…

For the rest, LISTEN TO THE RANT!!!

11 Comments

Stucky

October 28, 2014 2:38 pm

You introduce so many Straw Men in that rant you could feed an entire herd of cows.

I believe you are a luddite.

You sound like the guy from the US Patent office … in 1899.
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For crissakes … a mere 135 years ago humanity didn’t even have a light bulb!!!

A mere 100 years ago, on February 3, 1914, W. H. Carrier patents design of the air conditioner. Air conditioning was installed in a home home for the first time in 1914 …. in the Minneapolis mansion of Charles Gates ….. it was seven feet high, 6 feet wide, 20 feet long. By 1931 H.H. Schultz and J.Q. Sherman invent an individual room air conditioner that sits on a window ledge—at a cost between $10,000 and $50,000 ($120,000 to $600,000 in today’s money.)

So, you conclude mankind will NEVER find a solution to fossil fuels. I believe this is a bullshit prediction.

Given enough time — and, of course, THAT is the big question; “is there enough time?” — but, assuming there is, how in the hell do you know what humanity will accomplish in the next 500 years, especially considering the advances in the past 100??

ThePessimisticChemist

October 28, 2014 2:45 pm

It took us 60 years from flying to the moon. 60 years from the first computers until smartphones.

The only thing more impressive than our ability to destroy is our ability to create.

Stucky

October 28, 2014 3:34 pm

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ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) — the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer, Feb 15, 1946

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— 17,458 vacuum tubes
— 7,200 crystal diodes
— 1,500 relays
— 70,000 resistors
— 10,000 capacitors
— 5 million hand-soldered joints.

— weighed 30 TONS
— It took 18 MONTHS to build

Power consumption? 160 kilowatts!!!

Reliability — several burned out vacuum tubes, per day ….. the longest continuous period of operation without a failure was 116 hours.

MAXIMUM storage capacity — twenty 10-digit decimal numbers

Performance, per second
— 5,000 additions
— OR, 357 multiplications
— OR, 38 divisions.

more pics and info —- http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/12_things_you_didn%E2%80%99t_know_about_eniac

Stucky

October 28, 2014 3:35 pm

65 years later … iPhone 5

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— 3.95 ounces

— 65 GIGA-bytes storage

— 2,000,000,000+ instructions per second

Reverse Engineer

Author

October 28, 2014 3:42 pm

All that “progress” came at a very high price, the depletion of the raw materials necessary to build and run all those machines for the last 150 years. Not to mention turning the planet into a polluted sewer.

Feel free to believe in the Fusion Cavalry if you wish, but after 50 years reading that it’s “just around the corner”, it remains on the drawing board and I for one no longer believe this “progress meme” will continue in perpetuity. Face it man, we can’t even keep the potholes filled or do maintenance on the electrical grid. The Titanic is on its way down here.

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ThePessimisticChemist

October 28, 2014 4:02 pm

“Face it man, we can’t even keep the potholes filled or do maintenance on the electrical grid”

I know its arguing semantics, but I wouldn’t say we can’t do those things, just that we have prioritized other things. For example, the US could successfully crush the combined military might of most of the rest of the world. This focus on the Pax Americana has caused a lot of the issues you have listed (and implied).

These issues were NOT caused by a lack of resources, manpower, willpower, or time. We just need to put the emphasis back on the US first.

Please note, I’m not an isolationist, but our responsibility as a nation is to ourselves first and foremost. Cutting the military down alone would free up a lot of those four things for focus on infrastructure and the middle class.

“Feel free to believe in the Fusion Cavalry if you wish”

Compared to what we’ve spent on war (hot/cold/proxy/drugs/terrorism/poverty etc) the amount spent on fusion projects is miniscule.

The Fusion puzzle will one day be solved. Probably in my life time. It won’t fix our problems overnight because while human needs are finite, their wants most certainly are not, but its certainly a solid start.

The US should become something to aspire again, we have the natural resources and technology to do it, we just need to get back to manufacturing and focus on the homefront again. Now, somebody just needs to convince the super rich that its actually in their best interest to support a strong US economy rather than savaging it for the immediate gains globalization has brought them.

Stucky

October 28, 2014 4:14 pm

“Not to mention turning the planet into a polluted sewer.” ——– RE

The most polluted nations tend to be undeveloped nations.
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“Feel free to believe in the Fusion Cavalry if you wish …” ——– RE

Stop putting words in my mouth. I said NOTHING about fusion.

—- engineers at MIT are experimenting with carbon nanotube arrays that can concentrate solar energy as much as 100 times more efficiently.

— algae can produce up to 60% of their dry weight in the form of oil … by 2030, plant-derived formulas could make up as much as 30 per cent of the worldwide market for aviation fuel.

— Biological Hydrogen Production … the idea of artificial photosynthesis …. renewable generation of fuel hydrocarbons, created entirely from sunlight, carbon dioxide and water. The isoprene hydrocarbons created represent the emergence of an entirely new generation of fuels made from little more than fresh air.

Maybe those will help, maybe not. That’s not my point. Here’s my point; could the brilliant mind of Benjamin Franklin even CONCEIVE of nuclear power? Of course, not. Likewise, you can’t even begin to imagine technology 100 years from now ….. except to predict it will solve nothing, ever again.

Reverse Engineer

Author

October 28, 2014 4:26 pm

I won’t be around in 100 years to witness the outcome on this side of the Great Divide, however, when we meet up on the Other Side, one of us will have the “I Told You So” rights, and it won’t be you.

Technology 100 years from now?

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