[cf]

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 repeatedly points out that inventing rope isn't obvious.

[adrianN]

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.

[cf]

Inventing a better battery is something a single person can do in the lab. I worry that you are conflating inventing things and the engineering of scaling them out. Scaling things almost never was doable by one person, but the initial seed was and usually is.

[adrianN]

A lot of money has been poured into battery technology over the last decade or two. We don't have much to show for it. That makes me believe that inventing a better battery is not as simple as it might seem. Coming up with a terrific chemistry is one thing, finding something that is can be manufactured at a good price is something very different.

You can make your own graphene with some charcoal and sticky tape. Graphene is an amazing material, but making it industrially useful is extremely hard.

[MrFantastic]

Bicycles are 97% efficient. Society could be organized around the bicycle.

Many of the health issues would be corrected if our environment required people to exercise to get around.

People are just really lazy.

[dwaltrip]

This seems a bit myopic. The Earth receives less than one hundred billionth of the energy being dumped into space by the sun. Of the incredibly small portion the Earth does receive, we barely use any of it. There is plenty of energy available. We just have to harness it.

[quadrangle]

Don't get into victim-blaming. Where bicycling is prioritized in the development planning (e.g. Netherlands, where it's also quite flat), people bike all the time.

There are powerful entities who throw their weight around in both policy and propaganda to promote the wasteful forms of transportation.

[cf]

As someone who commutes to work on a bike, you definitely have a sympathetic ear with me.