We don’t know what we don’t know, and we’re trying to figure out how a black box works from inside an infinitesimally small corner of it. Frankly, I find it amazing we’ve worked as much as we have.
That said, whatever breakthroughs we make from one generation to the next, what a stroke of luck it is that some things remain constant: we can fall in love, enjoy a good story, drink, eat, be merry, and argue about the meaning of life in whatever fora present themselves.
Not really. Modern science has been looking at the origin of the universe for less than a single human lifespan. It's not surprising how little we know. It's pretty amazing that we know anything really. If you'd been studying physics 70 years ago you'd be wondering if the Big Bang or the Steady State theory is right.
Crazy.
Who knows what things will look like in 1 more lifetime. I'm still blown away by the memory of getting constantly lost growing up, my dad hand drawing maps for people, comedians stopped telling jokes about men not asking for directions and it still feels like nobody stopped to notice.
It's partly that impulse to never stop and appreciate what we have, that dissatisfaction, that keeps people pushing into the unknown.
The usual prediction I see is that the rate of discovery will continue and in another 2 lifetimes everything we think we know now will seem just as silly and naive as what people believed 2 lifetimes before us.
I don't think that's the case. It's a question of whether we're on a (near) infinite exponential curve of discovery, or on the rapid upward stretch of an S curve. I'm in the S curve camp, and I suspect we're at least half way up it on most topics.
Just look at relativity, quantum mechanics and cosmology. Most of the great discoveries in these fields were actually quite a while ago. Relativity and Quantum mechanics are over 100 years old and most of the advances were made in the early decades. Progress has not stopped but massively slowed down.
In cosmology it's been slower progress, but we've charted time back to milliseconds after T=0 of the big bang, detected thousands of exoplanets, analysed the gravitational waves from black hole collisions and mapped the cosmic microwave background. There's more to learn about dark matter and dark energy for sure, some serious mysteries there, but how much difference will those answers actually make? The Higgs boson discovery was cool, but really just a cherry on top of the standard model rather than a revolutionary discovery that upended science. I'm not sure there are any of those still to come.
The closing chapter on the big questions in science still has to be written, but I think the chances it will force us to completely rewrite, rather than simply revise and update the previous chapters, seems slight IMHO. I'm expecting the GUT to simply update or reframe relativity and quantum mechanics to make them compatible, not throw them out completely.
It truly is astonishing to be alive at this nexus in human development, whatever our individual take on it might be.
Now technology is catching up to give us the computing power, massive collective memory, digital records, and AI to start gaining again. We basically have to build a better mind to get to the next level.
We are still in the early days of applying that tech to the fields it's going to effect most.
We're in the "get a home page for your local business" phase not yet the "faang has changed the face of civilization" (for the better or worse) phase.
This is going to continue to ramp knowledge in bioinformatics and other areas, the technology is still in the infancy of being harnessed for biology and medicine.
That combined with cheaper robotic arms and cheaper sequencing machines which is just now coming dropping below certain cost thresholds.
(I know a group/lab that's automating discovery of drug/compound targets doing purely NDA'd work for merck and other pharmaceuticals, the tech is wild and still in it's infancy.)
Cutting edge voice and image style transfer, realistic computer speech, computer vision.. the list goes on, that's just the highly visible stuff and there is still only a small pool of people versed in those areas of tech.
> "incredible advances in science and technology"
That's what this thread is about. Please note the context.
I feel like this is more a modern misconception than reality. Play a game of Civilization and you'll start to appreciate just how deep human technology really is. In Roman times, they probably said similar things thinking about how advanced they were compared to the Macedonians a couple hundred years back.
Yea we lost some progress or at least the rate of change greatly slowed from 400 - 1600, but other than that blip I think the progress has actually been fairly linear from 4000 BC to 2021 CE. It just seems like it's not because of the cognitive bias to take for granted all the things that seem so basic compared to computers or nuclear reactors, but in reality, those things actually were very difficult to develop with the knowledge and production techniques available at the time.
The fall of the Roman Empire, and actually really even the decline from when the city stood at more than a million people during the time of Augustus and Tiberius until the far, saw massive declines in technological knowledge and even scientific knowledge. Much of that information was not rediscovered until the Renaissance when the last remaining archives of the Roman Empire were evacuated from Constantinople to nobles and merchants across Europe during the Turkish invasion. Even today we're still rediscovering material science knowledge that the Romans and ancient Chinese had. In fact, much of our rapid advancement in technology was not even due to knew ideas, it was due to ideas that had be theorized by Greek and Roman philosophers and alchemists, and which were recorded and stored in the archives.
There was real stagnation in most knowledge and technology throughout the world. In the West because of the decline of the Roman Empire (most likely caused in part due to lead poisoning and decreasing fertility of North Africa and Judea) and in the East due to constant infighting and political strife preventing unification of India or China under stable rulers for long enough to see real advancement.
For what it's worth...
I've been to Ephesus (which is amazing, I'd like to check out Pompeii as well) the armory in Venice is one of my favorite repos of old cutting edge tech and having spent time in Rome, truly their achievements are amazing and the Pantheon absolutely blows my mind, it's no wonder the village dwellers believed the God's lived in Rome, I would have.
But harnessing the power of the atom, understanding fundamental physics, biology and sound/light speed global communication... and the technology that these things have enabled (including my own living past 3 years of age due to modern medicine) is truly a leap, in my opinion the Roman's and those brilliant technologists and logistics civilizations of the past were still closer to living in caves by modern comparison.
I would not have wanted to live back then and I literally couldn't have. Our recent exponential explosion certainly depends on their hard fought knowledge, but in my reckoning even their best tech and logistics are deep in the early part of the curve.
That means, more people than ever working on more problems, with more tools, background knowledge, resources, distinct goals, and collaboration.
This is not even close to being true
The world population increased from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.7 billion today.
I'm not going to do the math but there's something to be said about how many we are today vs. even 200 years ago. But, no, the majority of humans ever born are not, in fact, still alive today...
Most humans ever born, are still alive today. Our population growth over the past centuries dwarf populations of the prior centuries.
Our entire civilization past and future may be just a momentary bubble in a cosmic ocean frothing with countless happenings for aeons.
there's dozens upon dozens of orders of magnitude of space that a being could occupy. scanning for life through the multiverse and time, it would also be easy to miss us. too small and you see cells and organelles, larger we see organs mixed with bacterial cultures, etc, and at just the right scale we are visible.
there are arguments that earth is a living entity, and there may be larger forms of life going many orders of magnitude larger than planet-sized.
with such a large range of time, location and scale to scan for life, it could be argued we basically don't even exist.
Or maybe they found us but they just don't care because on cosmic scales we aren't as special as we appear to be from our own limited perspective.
I always express that the greatest science "fiction" story is actually the reality above us, and the multitude of unanswered questions.
Now, how all this shocking amount of matter came to exist from energy, which also had to come from somewhere... That's a head scratcher alright. The path to God is hidden behind rock solid plausible deniability.
The series was from the mid 2000s.
No one suggested this very obvious process until an astronaut on the ISS had a fine-grain substance in a small plastic bag (no, not THAT one), and they noticed the grains stuck together.
Take a look at the wikipedia page for this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebular_hypothesis
Just as an example:
> The formation of planetesimals is the biggest unsolved problem in the nebular disk model. How 1 cm sized particles coalesce into 1 km planetesimals is a mystery. This mechanism appears to be the key to the question as to why some stars have planets, while others have nothing around them, not even dust belts.
We don't know what space, time or matter are. We don't know where it's coming form or where it's going. And we don't know most things in between.
It's a marvel we figured out so much about how some details seem to work given we still don't know mostly anything about the more fundamental phenomena.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...
By what scale, exactly? This corner is just as large as it is small. There are an equivalent number of grains of sand on Earth than there are stars in the observable universe.
We are not small. Size doesn't work like that. Space is everywhere, including here.
Very blessed to be an observer though.
Example: $100 isn’t less or more just because of increasing or decreasing the physical footprint of the bill. We still confer a purchasing power of $100 to a $100 bill regardless of the bill’s physical dimensions.
So the takeaway here is that it’s a non-sequitur to say that because of Earth’s small scale relative to the rest of space, nothing on Earth matters.
It's humbling because it puts all that hubris away, which most people tend to have an excessive amount of - and begin to focus on living and achieving simple happiness instead of some illusion of grandeur.