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How long until we hit PL 6?
- Thread starter Peterson
- Start date
Roudi
First Post
I'm an optimist. Recently, an international coalition of scientist have begun a project to achieve sustainable fusion. I'm betting that they'll be successful within the next five years, either out of industriousness or necessity.
Also, lasers and microwave weapon / defensive systems have been developed; their perfection and common use is only a matter of time.
Also, lasers and microwave weapon / defensive systems have been developed; their perfection and common use is only a matter of time.
Aussiegamer
First Post
I don't think we are even properly into PL 5 let alone PL 6.
Morgenstern
First Post
I can't help but think that its taken 20+ years for the F-22 to go from concept to service.
Don't kid yourself - military technology crawls along. Uphill. Both ways. On it's lips. Over broken glass.
It is agonizingly slow.
Then again I dislike the broad "Progress Level" concepts in games because it makes assumptions about all sciences advancing together or in a particular order that are unsupported guesses. It's a tool of convienience at best and a design crutch at worst
. I'm slightly more fond of incremetal technolgy such as you see in games like Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri where there are a lot of potential technologies as discrete advances and any particular society/race might have wildly different tools available to it depending on its interests and needs. Cheap fusion power is probably a defining moment for any civilization, but does having it necessarily tell me ANYTHING about that society's medical technology? Does having fusion plants tell me that they must have overcome their moral qualms about cloning? How does that work? Power, medicine, fabrication, armament, computing, transport, communicaions... These things are related, but can easily run on separate tracks.
Don't kid yourself - military technology crawls along. Uphill. Both ways. On it's lips. Over broken glass.
It is agonizingly slow.
Then again I dislike the broad "Progress Level" concepts in games because it makes assumptions about all sciences advancing together or in a particular order that are unsupported guesses. It's a tool of convienience at best and a design crutch at worst
. I'm slightly more fond of incremetal technolgy such as you see in games like Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri where there are a lot of potential technologies as discrete advances and any particular society/race might have wildly different tools available to it depending on its interests and needs. Cheap fusion power is probably a defining moment for any civilization, but does having it necessarily tell me ANYTHING about that society's medical technology? Does having fusion plants tell me that they must have overcome their moral qualms about cloning? How does that work? Power, medicine, fabrication, armament, computing, transport, communicaions... These things are related, but can easily run on separate tracks.
Wolv0rine
First Post
Realistically, it'll take about 20 years after the technology is actually discovered before the corporate powers that be will consider allowing such things to be anything more than fringe papers in scientific magazines.
We're a damned long ways off, because the old techs are busy squeezing blood and spinning it into greenbacks.
We're a damned long ways off, because the old techs are busy squeezing blood and spinning it into greenbacks.
Mustrum_Ridcully
Hero
I remember that a scientist on a science day at our school (sometime at the end of the 90s) predicting that we would have sustainable fusion technology in the 50th of the 21th century. So far, I have seen nothing that suggests otherwise, so I chose 26-50 years.
But many factors seem dependend on each others.
Example: You need knowledge about quantum mechanics (and technology to affect material on that level) to build even faster computers. The same knowledge can also help to understand the chemical processes in a body, especially when related to DNA.
The drive to build stronger materials, create better medicine or faster computers on the other hand also means that you will explore quantum mechanics.
A capatalistic society requires constant growth, and as such, more refined technologies become a requirement - you need to produce more, in shorter amount of times, for a better price, at a higher quality.
A democracy requires a certain amount of education of anyone, otherwise they would have difficulties making a (more or less) sensible vote. When anyone can become a politician and voted into a position of power, everyone needs to have some education, too, otherwise there aren't enough politicians that could be eleted (and still hope to make at least a few good decisions). A good education also leads to a larger base of people capable of advancing science, or at least being able to operate the fruits of scientific advancements. (Ever considered what incredible amount of abstraction is required to grasp the concept of chatting with people over the Internet?)
A society only has to decide wether it accepts cloning or not once the technology to do it comes into existence (before that, it might never have considered this possiblity!).
That said, there seems still a bit of wiggle room - our cars today rely on gas/oil, but in the beginning of the automobile era, that was just one possible option - the option that somehow won (maybe even literally, I remember reading that there was a race between different engine variants, and the gas/oil combination won that race), but that might have been by chance and not by a general superiority of the technology.
It is an interesting question wether scientific (and social/political) advances are all dependend on each other. We have no good answer to this question so far - we have only our own example available.Morgenstern said:I can't help but think that its taken 20+ years for the F-22 to go from concept to service.
Don't kid yourself - military technology crawls along. Uphill. Both ways. On it's lips. Over broken glass.
It is agonizingly slow.
Then again I dislike the broad "Progress Level" concepts in games because it makes assumptions about all sciences advancing together or in a particular order that are unsupported guesses. It's a tool of convienience at best and a design crutch at worst
But many factors seem dependend on each others.
Example: You need knowledge about quantum mechanics (and technology to affect material on that level) to build even faster computers. The same knowledge can also help to understand the chemical processes in a body, especially when related to DNA.
The drive to build stronger materials, create better medicine or faster computers on the other hand also means that you will explore quantum mechanics.
A capatalistic society requires constant growth, and as such, more refined technologies become a requirement - you need to produce more, in shorter amount of times, for a better price, at a higher quality.
A democracy requires a certain amount of education of anyone, otherwise they would have difficulties making a (more or less) sensible vote. When anyone can become a politician and voted into a position of power, everyone needs to have some education, too, otherwise there aren't enough politicians that could be eleted (and still hope to make at least a few good decisions). A good education also leads to a larger base of people capable of advancing science, or at least being able to operate the fruits of scientific advancements. (Ever considered what incredible amount of abstraction is required to grasp the concept of chatting with people over the Internet?)
A society only has to decide wether it accepts cloning or not once the technology to do it comes into existence (before that, it might never have considered this possiblity!).
That said, there seems still a bit of wiggle room - our cars today rely on gas/oil, but in the beginning of the automobile era, that was just one possible option - the option that somehow won (maybe even literally, I remember reading that there was a race between different engine variants, and the gas/oil combination won that race), but that might have been by chance and not by a general superiority of the technology.
In 1980 I bought my first computer. I used a cassette tape machine and a black-and-white television for storage and display. If I wanted to do word processing, I first had to write the code for a word processor application, and then run it. In 25 years, we've moved a long way. If the computing power continues along this exponential curve, in 25 more years the computing power will rival that of the human brain, only its memory will be much more reliable and its ability to process what we'd call "conscious" tasks will be much greater.
If you plot a graph where the x-axis is the year, and the y-axis is time measured in hours-to-days, and then graph the time it takes to get from London to New York, you'll see something interesting. If you go back to, say, the 1400s, and then move forward in 50-year increments, the time it takes starts to slowly go down until the 19th century and the time curve takes an inverted-exponential curve. What used to take months later took weeks, then later took days, and then later took hours. I don't know that we'll get it down to minutes within my lifetime (okay, the space shuttle can get across the Atlantic in minutes, but I'm talking commercial travel), but it could happen.
I'm thinking that between 20 and 40 years looks about right--with the usual proviso that the major cities of the world aren't radioactive junkyards.
Dave
If you plot a graph where the x-axis is the year, and the y-axis is time measured in hours-to-days, and then graph the time it takes to get from London to New York, you'll see something interesting. If you go back to, say, the 1400s, and then move forward in 50-year increments, the time it takes starts to slowly go down until the 19th century and the time curve takes an inverted-exponential curve. What used to take months later took weeks, then later took days, and then later took hours. I don't know that we'll get it down to minutes within my lifetime (okay, the space shuttle can get across the Atlantic in minutes, but I'm talking commercial travel), but it could happen.
I'm thinking that between 20 and 40 years looks about right--with the usual proviso that the major cities of the world aren't radioactive junkyards.
Dave
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