Fascinating article, with just one quip I'd have:<p>Plutonium-238, the material in nuclear batteries is very different from Plutonium-239, a material for nuclear weapons. There is great stigma against Plutonium, but mainly because of Pu-239. If you remember some of the news around the launch of the Cassini probe, there was opposition because of the Pu-238 pellet powering the RTG.<p>Compared to Pu-239, Pu-238 is non-fissile and also produces a lot of heat (which is the point, really). Pu-238 poses almost no proliferation risk. Even the radioactivity is in the form of alpha radiation, which needs very little shielding (hardly even penetrating the skin). The only problem with Pu-238 right now is that it's very expensive to produce and also very scarce. If Pu-238 were abundant, it could find many applications and pose very little security risk; building a dirty bomb out of it won't really work (as a matter a fact, neither making one out of Pu-239).<p>In general, our civilization has an irrational fear of nuclear energy. Even more egregious since there is a variant of nuclear technology that's almost completely proliferation-free, namely the thorium cycle.
<i>In hindsight, it seems clear that if humanity had decided in 1939 to colonize space, instead of expending ~$17 trillion and ~74 million human lives on war and destruction, we would have reached the moon in a robust and durable way by no later than the mid-1950s</i><p>He kinda gives away the answer to this earlier in the article, while explaining why the cool edge-case technologies the Romans had never took off:<p><i>the truth is that all technological advances are dependent upon a complex mix of social, political and environmental factors which we still do not understand, and thus cannot predict</i><p>The implication then is that, had WWII not happened, 1950 would have looked a lot like 1939. Instead, the world saw nearly 10 years of rapid technological advances, with nations inventing amazing new things as though their life depended on it.<p>Plot the rise and fall of the Space Program alongside the Cold War, and you can see the pattern again.
The Romans did not have the printing press. The press produced a sharp exponential increase in technological progress.<p>Without the press, the spread of new ideas and techniques is extremely slow, and there isn't much cross-pollination of technologies. Worse, an awful lot gets forgotten.
The informative first half of the article was fascinating, but it slowly deteriorated from there as I read the argumentative second half. In my view, things took a drastic turn for the worse around this sentence:<p><i>Mature genetic engineering, nanotechnology, strong artificial intelligence, and quantum computing, to name but a few, each hold many times the potential for systemic harm to, or destruction of our civilization; and they do so absent the inherent check on their proliferation that was present in the case of nuclear energy...</i><p>The suggestion that strong artificial intelligence and quantum computing are more likely destroyers of civilization than nuclear energy seems laughable without further argument. As with nuclear weapons, problems only arise in the application of technology by humans, not in the concepts themselves, and I see far more potential for physical and societal devastation in the application of nuclear weapons than in AI or QC.
The article mentioned:<p>"The Montgolfier brothers came up with the idea while lying beside a fire and watching hot ash and embers float upwards – and they thought about this in a military context – namely how to take Gibraltar from the British."<p>And later<p>"However, Hero of Alexandria (10–70 CE) was well known for constructing complex automata, had powered a pipe organ using his wind-wheel (windmill) and developed a variety of steam driven devices using his aeolipile; a primitive turbine type steam engine with surprising motive capacity."<p>From wikipedia <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloon" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloon</a>
"Unmanned hot air balloons are popular in Chinese history. Zhuge Liang of the Shu Han kingdom, in the Three Kingdoms era (220–80 AD) used airborne lanterns for military signaling."<p>"In fact, von Braun was engaged in designing and building the V-2, and much more sophisticated rockets, solely because he wanted to achieve the exploration of space; both personally and for the human species."<p>In each example above where technologies were invented / discovered, you can see that these innovations were driven by individuals and their purpose. In the case of the automata and the hot air balloon, both were invented by a leader of their own respective society - "Hero of Alexandria" and "Zhuge Liang" - the chinese military genius. Von Braun wanted to invent rockets for the purpose of space exploration... but his effort was redirected into war and destruction.<p>Comparing to innovations we've made in the past, say, 30 years, you can see the same. Bill Gates commoditized hardware and brought computers onto many desks cheaply. And Steve Jobs... you know the rest.<p>Each story of humans' invention seems to just as much be a story of the individual who led its discovery, rather than the environment surrounding him/her, and when the environment is taking into account, it seems it does more to stifle innovation than to foster it.
"Such rapid and direct application of biomedical advances to humans is now inconceivable, not only in the US, but virtually anywhere in the world."<p>This is true, but for one very simple reason: at the time of these inventions, there was <i>no other option</i>. If someone needed a heart operation that required stopping the heart, they would die. If someone needed dialysis after kidney failure, they died. Rapid applications come in the face of dire consequences. In these cases, almost <i>anything</i> was better than death.
"<i>Transhumanists must come to realize that in order to control history, and thus their own destinies, they must leverage their way into a position of control over the ideology, morality and direction of this civilization. To fail to do so at this juncture in time is to accede to the end of our history – not by the practical abolition of death, but rather by its universal application to humankind, and perhaps to all life on earth.</i>"<p>The followers of hate, fear, and superstition spend virtually every waking hour attempting to leverage such control. Why not visionaries?<p>But there is a counterpoint too. The ideology of <i>some</i> sectors of the transhumanist/visionary community is uncomfortably reminiscent of superstition itself. I am referring to Ray Kurzweil and his Singularity University cult, and others. It looks very much like a religious movement reminiscent of Scientology or flying saucer contactees in the 1950s. It doesn't strike me as being much more rational than many other superstitious religious movements.
There's a somewhat negative cast towards the end of this article where the author discusses "the fundamental inability of most humans to handle such technology responsibly" and how "psychosocial factors" retard progress. And then you have some dire, terminal outlook for humanity. This reads like correspondence bias to me. At first, it seemed contradictory to the first paragraphs of the article, which seemed to be leading up to, "this is another engineering problem and we must analyze it for a solution before we can continue to progress technologically." So I reread the whole thing... and it seems that was just my own bias inserting itself between the lines.<p>And I still don't understand why the political components of the dynamics of social and technological progress cannot be approached as an engineering problem.
I don't think this question is as profound as it seems. Basically, it is asking: If a civilization had access to the resources to create a technology, why didn't they?<p>Take perspective, or drawing things so that they look real. Closer things are bigger, further things smaller. Until it was invented around the Renaisance (1400/1500), all art was flat and kinda clumpy. Why couldn't people draw nice things until then?<p>That's what new technology is. A profound change in how we use resources.
The governmental analysis around 1997-99 concluded that nuclear fusion power woulnd't be cheaper than 4c/kwt (i.e. than coal based electricity) and thus it wouldn't make an economical sense (thus that close to 0 investment in that research - only LLNL's NIF which is deep in petty managerial fights (and laser driven approach isn't really the one what will get it) and Sandia which finally got back to the experiments at the level they left in 99 (though now they use different target which allows for a lot of new articles on plasma behavior (deja vu of Tokamaks, one can spend whole life looking at and describing patterns of flowing water under the bridge), yet that type of target is much worse for the fusion than the type used 10 years ago) .<p>It is easy to imagine an outcome of the battlefield maneuverability analysis by a Rome DOD bureaucrat of horse driven chariot vs. hot air balloon and the resulting decision on the development of the balloon technology.
A 17th century attempt:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolomeu_de_Gusm%C3%A3o" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolomeu_de_Gusm%C3%A3o</a>
Best example of a technology that we have not followed is Nuclear powered space flight project Orion. One such launch would lift more material into orbit then all the rockets we launched so far. Flight to Mars would be trivial, staying on it would not but thats another issue
There are some good theories on this in social science; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism</a> and the book "The co-construction of users and technology" <a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Users-Matter-Co-Construction-Technology/dp/0262651092/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/How-Users-Matter-Co-Construction-Techn...</a>
The problem is their numbering system which makes it difficult to do countdowns.<p>ex, eye-ex, eye-eye-ex, ve-eye-eye-eye, ve-eye-eye, ve-eye
ve, eye-ve, eye-eye-eye, eye-eye, eye<p>now what's next ? What's less than eye?<p>don't know - we have to wait for somebody to invent zero...
"Research into stem cell therapies, cloning, and gene therapy technology have
also been greatly slowed by psychosocial concerns."<p>Dear humanity: you are simply too dumb to have nice things.
Kudos to the Montgolfier for inventing the hot air balloon based on a need to invade a strongly held fortress.<p>But when did the idea of slowly floating towards your fortified, gun-toting enemy in a giant gas filled balloon seem a good idea?
I wonder what history would have been like if the Roman empire had gunpowder and bronze cannons? Just like with hot air balloons, they had all the necessary basic technology but never thought to put the pieces together.
I came to read about Roman hot air balloons, instead everyone is talking about plutonium and nuclear weapons. Thanks guys, I am probably on a watch list now.<p>Reported.
Bleh. The moment you start thinking "one of the most powerful and off putting military advantages that could have been deployed, in either Ancient, or Renaissance times, would have been hot air balloons." is the moment you start thinking 'What if sharks had lasers?"<p>The breathless "and then I thought"s and stupid hypotheticals: "How would the technological arc of the ancient world have been changed if Archimedes, and not Edison, had invented the phonograph?" are just another series of what ifs.<p>The universe didn't fucking happen that way. Archimedes doesn't have access to those ideas. You can't just wonder what would have happened if people had discovered the internal combustion engine in the bronze age, because that question is meaningless.