Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why things might have taken so long

meteuphoric.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 194 posts

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#71

Post by oldandtired »

There is an old adage about necessity being the mother of invention.

Invention takes place every day in oh so many peoples lives all around the world. However, too many of those same people don't see what they are doing as being inventive. Hence, they quite often do not share their inventions and ideas with others as they don't think that those inventions and ideas are good enough.

If you watch little children, you see invention occurring all the time. It is only when we are adults that we lose the concept that invention is everywhere.

The natural world around us is an incredible source of ideas and usable inventions. As James Tour has put it, we can learn so much advanced technological manufacturing processes from studying the internal workings of biological cells, let alone all the other processes that occur between cells and in the various organs in different species.

The fact of the matter with technological advancement is that we advance despite all of our efforts. In every field in which we humans work, the status quo is the important thing and so we take great efforts to slow change to a crawl for all sorts of reasons. Change occurs and those who have driven the next set of changes then drive the next status quo to stop change.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#72

Post by daveFNbuck »

bambax wrote: post #53
simonbarker87 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the case, the famous (if apocryphal) quote of "everything that can be invented has been invented" made in 1900 by the head of the US patent office was clearly wrong and made either in jest or due to an enormous lack of imagination. The point is that there is always more to invent and the possibilities keep increasing. There are plenty of inventions yet to make, from complex AI enabled devices down to the…

Agreed. La Bruyère in 1690 wrote a very famous phrase "Tout est dit, et l'on vient trop tard depuis plus de sept mille ans qu'il y a des hommes et qui pensent." ( Everything has been said, and we're too late after 7000 years of human existence and thought. ) I can't find the quote right now but Aristotle complained once that the level of comfort attained in his era and city was so high nobody would ever conceivably w…

Human-powered flight does exist, it's just not very good because people are weak and heavy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-powered_aircraft

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#73

Post by pjc50 »

fastball wrote: post #49
kalonis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck with making your own wheel or rope from scratch (i.e. alone and naked in the woods)!

Making your own rope is easy with some trial and error. You just take a bunch of stringy things and twist them together to make a stronger stringy thing. The twisting bit takes some finesse, and obviously you won't be making nylon rope with your bare hands, but making a grass rope is child's play. Making a wheel, once you have the concept of a wheel, is pretty damn easy too. If you want a stone wheel, take a large st…

Wheels are one thing, axles and their bearings and lubrication are another.

> take a large piece of wood and whittle away until you have a wheel

This does not resemble the actual construction of any but the smallest wooden wheel for toys.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#74

Post by matte_black »

quadrangle wrote: post #17

About not having invented anything: it's harder to invent something novel today simply because so much has already been invented and knowledge of it is available. Centuries ago, it was easier to think of things to invent (we should be able to fly, to stay under water longer, to copy books faster, to notate music… ). It still took a lot of work to actually realize the invention (which only could be done by people weal…

A breakthrough in battery tech that results in small but very long lasting batteries will result in the invention of a bunch of obvious things that are currently impossible or impractical given current tech.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#76

Post by adrianN »

bambax wrote: post #53
simonbarker87 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the case, the famous (if apocryphal) quote of "everything that can be invented has been invented" made in 1900 by the head of the US patent office was clearly wrong and made either in jest or due to an enormous lack of imagination. The point is that there is always more to invent and the possibilities keep increasing. There are plenty of inventions yet to make, from complex AI enabled devices down to the…

Agreed. La Bruyère in 1690 wrote a very famous phrase "Tout est dit, et l'on vient trop tard depuis plus de sept mille ans qu'il y a des hommes et qui pensent." ( Everything has been said, and we're too late after 7000 years of human existence and thought. ) I can't find the quote right now but Aristotle complained once that the level of comfort attained in his era and city was so high nobody would ever conceivably w…

You should try a bicycle.

If you want actual wings, that's just one of those problems that need absurd amounts of money and brains to figure out. Genetic engineering is certainly a lot more difficult than inventing Nitrocellulose.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#77

Post by adrianN »

cf wrote: post #61
quadrangle wrote: post #17

About not having invented anything: it's harder to invent something novel today simply because so much has already been invented and knowledge of it is available. Centuries ago, it was easier to think of things to invent (we should be able to fly, to stay under water longer, to copy books faster, to notate music… ). It still took a lot of work to actually realize the invention (which only could be done by people weal…

Inventions are motivated by problems, and we still have lots of them. We sorely need cheap sustainable energy, cheap drugs, artificial organs, more efficient transportation, denser batteries, and that's just stuff off the top of my head. Some of that stuff will entail using existing technology, buy much of it will require new inventions. Many ideas that seem easy to invent only seem so in retrospect. The article repe…

Inventing rope isn't obvious, but it's something a single individual can do. You don't need a team of people that each has studied some field for twenty years and a brilliant idea, you just need a brilliant idea. Inventing a device to cheaply store energy at grid scale is not something a single person can do, ever.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#79

Post by radioactivist »

Joe-Z wrote: post #54
Swizec wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have absolutely no contract with the universe or nature that guarantees us that there's "always more to invent", even less so that "the possibilities keep increasing". Think of human knowledge as a circle. The edge of that circle is the edge of human knowledge. Inventing a thing makes a little bump in the circle that pushes the edge outwards. The bigger the circle, the bigger the circumference, the more possibil…

That's just a metaphor, and exactly of the type which GP argued against. To illustrate GP's point metaphorically: Think of human knowledge as discovered areas on a map. The dark areas are what is still unknown to us. Inventing a thing makes a little spot on the map visible. The more you have discovered, the less you still have to discover. (And to extend it a bit: Of course you can make the already discovered areas m…

As an isolated example of this kind of thing, consider the shape of the Earth as discussed in Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" [http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm]
Post reply on HN