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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 7056591" data-attributes="member: 22779">Just a point.  H. G. Wells was most certainly did not have a utopian outlook on science and in fact was the very opposite.  In Wellsian fiction, science doesn't solve problems.  One only has to look at War of the Worlds to see this - Earth's science is totally ineffective against the Martians and it's only bacteria, lowly, low tech influenza or whatever, that defeats the aliens.  You're confusing Wells with Verne.Now, this, I disagree with.  Well, sort of.  If you only look at that single technology, in a vacuum, then, yes, I can see your point.  But, technological advances are never done in a vacuum.  They influence everything around them, which in turns spurs greater changes.  Refrigeration technology, for example, hasn't really massively changed in the last 100 years.  Yes, there have been advances, but, by and large, if you took your refrigerator back 50 years, no one would look at it like it was out of this world (well, unless your fridge talks I suppose <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> ).  But, the advent of refrigeration completely reshaped all of humanity.  It allowed for the explosive growth of population that we have seen in the past century or so.  Without refrigeration, you have a maximum limit on the size of cities.  With refrigeration, we have cities today that are more populous than entire countries were at one time.  And that of course, reshapes all sorts of elements of civilization.  We live closer together than ever before, allowing freer interaction between people.  We have the explosive growth of educational facilities.  On and on and on.  If you were to compare, say, Paris in 1250 with Paris in 1450, they aren't really all that different.  Styles, sure, but, by and large, they would be instantly recognizable.  Compare Paris of 1817 with Paris of today and no one would even be able to recognize the city outside of a few landmarks.  I mean, Paris in 1817 had a population of 713, 966 (according to a quick Google search).  It's now about 2.5 million people in Paris proper and about 10 million if you include the suburbs.  That's what the whole "future shock" theme refers to.  That life within a single generation can advance at such a rate as to be virtually unrecognizable.  So, while Moore's Law seems to be limiting advances in computer speeds, the rate at which computing is reshaping our world continues at a massively rapid pace.</blockquote>

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