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It would have been more convincing if you had given real past examples rather than speculative future ones :) Although I'm pretty sure there are plenty that many people can think of, so it doesn't really detract much from your point.
Penicillin has gotta be on that list. Just randomly happened to culture on a Petri dish left out on vacation, happened to be the worlds first antibiotic
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I like the idea of this list. Some others: - Quantum supremacy - HIV vaccine - Synthetic life - Discovery of ET life - P vs NP solution
Bonus points if the ET life is broadcasting useful information.
video[0] linked from wikipedia[1] showing the levitation in action. [0] https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1V7kS/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#cite_note-51
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Auctions, sanitary towels, retirement, banking, disposable razor, sewing machine, canned food, interchangeable parts, antibiotics, solar cells, postage stamp, light bulb, pencil, air conditioning, insurance, dwarf wheat, spreadsheet, cold chain, double entry book-keeping, S-bend, infant formula, clocks, public key cryptography, passports, batteries, printing press, video games, GPS, contraceptive pill, shipping conta…
But other than that, what the Romans have ever done for us?!
For those experiencing this type of "black swan, but good" event for the first time, it is helpful to recognize that the human tendency to believe that all future "big events" will be dystopian downers, is statistically unsound. For a while I've kept a list of the things that could be "good" swan events, but to be fair I didn't have "room temperature superconductor on that list" :-) Other things that could happen: 1)…
1. Anti-gravity 2. Light year capable transport 3. Inertia dampers 4. Mass scale carbon capture technology 5. Robots to prepare space for habitation 6. World recognition to manage resources globally
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I feel like the host of “in 30 years we would have X” made 40 years ago are suddenly manifesting.
Im posting this reply from my mainstream smartphone: a pocket supercomputer with a 4K 60Hz HDR video camera. I’m chock full of designer vaccines and can watch a catalog of almost all the movies ever made on demand tonight. I listened to an podcast in my EV on the way to work. And SpaceX probably launched 60 satellites this week on the 14th flight of a rocket that flew home afterwards. Things have been moving along. e…
One of my favorite movies of all time is “Contact” mainly because of how damn _hopeful_ it portrays humanity. I want to live in that world, not the gloom and doom “we’re ruining everything around us” that is so often shown in recent media.
And the whole thing is perplexing to me because as you’ve put it, we _are_ living in the future! There is soo many great things happening around us, but people seem not to notice - not just the technological things you’ve mentioned - but societal too.
Like because of recent developments in economy theory, the world altering global shut down due to corona did not end with a great depression like event for the whole world, and that alone to me is simply a miracle.
Human longevity studies have now reproducibly able to reverse aging _in primates_ - human trials starting this year!
Feminism has become all but mainstream, unlocking like 50% more of human ingenuity.
Urbanism studies have finally popularized environments where people can live happily and sustainably their entire lives, while there have always existed places in the world that are “nice” to live in one way or another, we’re kinda getting the science down why, and starting to popularize it a little (strongtowns).
Its just a crazy good time to be alive, there are countless problems all around us but they are actually getting solved at least somewhere, instead of banging our collective heads against the wall, one can just look for how it has been successful handled somewhere else and try to replicate!
The last week reminds me of the story of Bardeen & Brattain's invention of the transistor (e.g. in The Idea Factory ). It barely worked and heaven forbid you bump the table. There was even a third slighted figure who wanted credit. Part of me wants to be skeptical but OTOH if it's hard to reproduce that seems totally normal. How exciting that some other people have got it working now.
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326K (+127 deg F) and 340K (+152 deg F) for their less and more pure samples respectively. And, yes, if it's a superconductor as we understand them, that's the temperature at which it would have zero resistance as well.
53°C and 67°C. Wow.
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1. Anti-gravity 2. Light year capable transport 3. Inertia dampers 4. Mass scale carbon capture technology 5. Robots to prepare space for habitation 6. World recognition to manage resources globally
> 6. World recognition to manage resources globally Do you mean communism?
For those experiencing this type of "black swan, but good" event for the first time, it is helpful to recognize that the human tendency to believe that all future "big events" will be dystopian downers, is statistically unsound. For a while I've kept a list of the things that could be "good" swan events, but to be fair I didn't have "room temperature superconductor on that list" :-) Other things that could happen: 1)…
What you're missing is the fact that in today's world, where almost every aspect of life is subject to top-down control, any "enabling" technology above all else enables oppressors to oppress more effectively. If free-form gene editing were developed today, you would see the elites using it to make themselves immortal, while denying the same to everyone else. If fusion power suddenly became viable, you would see the…
A bit of history would do you wonders. Top-down control was the norm*. If it has changed, it’s less now.
* For 95% of the peasant/slave population