[jeremycw]

Sometimes I find it a little depressing that (at least through my laymen eyes) we are nearing a technological plateau and that more research into physics is unlikely to get us to a world describe in traditional science fiction with FTL drives and large metal spaceships that can take you from planet to planet.

Then something like this reminds me that if we as a species were able to unlock the secrets of bio-chemistry (not sure if that's the right term) it would be a game changer unlike any seen so far. And the fact that there is a huge corpus of evidence out there in the world called "life" proving some of the possibilities already gives me hope that while we may never have FTL, the future could still be pretty wild.

[majewsky]

> we are nearing a technological plateau

Max Planck was famously discouraged from studying physics by one of his professors because "in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes." [1]

Having studied physics myself, my opinion is that we may very well be at a similar point right now. The big advancements of the last century in physics (quantum theory, relativity, chaos theory, etc.) brought us an era of swift and sweeping technological progress, and now the easy fruit seems to have been plucked. But there are still plenty of known unknowns, dark matter and dark energy being perhaps the most prominent one. Who knows what unknown unknowns are hiding behind those known unknowns?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_von_Jolly

[nn3]

Dark matter seems like a gigantic hole. Either we don't know what most of the cosmos is made of, or there is a problem with general relativity.

[pedrocr]

And then dark energy is more than 2x that. Apparently we only have a good explanation for 5% of the total (normal matter we can see).

[mschuster91]

> Having studied physics myself, my opinion is that we may very well be at a similar point right now.

We're not anywhere near a technological plateau, we just lost track on funding. Until the fall of the Soviet Union, the US invested a lot of money in foundational research, often not even caring if it would prove useful or possible, and with big enough money behind it that people could plan careers.

These days, researchers have to waste half their working time to chasing the few grants that are still available, and forget about a stable career, job security or enough work-life balance to found a family.

[xtracto]

It's really too sad ... I (PhD on CompSci) could helping on the research of something groundbreaking for humanity instead of "maximizing shareholder profits". But Academia basically sucks in its current state, and in my country there is less than 0 capabilities to do real research.

[lkbm]

I do want us to pour money into foundational research, but form an outsider's perspective, it does seem like a lot of it does require increasingly large capital costs with things like the LHC, and feels all so theoretical.

I think it's worth every penny, but at first glance it feels incredibly abstract and disconnected from practical application, as well as expensive. (Though, to be honest, I just looked up the LHC cost and $9Bn USD doesn't feel expensive. I was expected it to come up in the hundreds of billions.)

[lkbm]

Lord Kelvin famously said there were just two "clouds" in left to physics—two mysteries remaining to explain. Those two mysteries let to relativity and quantum mechanics.

There's also this famous quote that is frequently mis-attributed to Kelvin: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement".[0] (I'm not sure who actually said it.)

[0] https://www.quora.com/Which-19th-century-physicist-famously-...

[boringg]

Time. We still don't think about time properly - there are likely some huge technological gains if we can unlock time in relation to physics (not in terms of sci fi time traveling).

[koheripbal]

Along the same lines, FTL won't be needed if we merge with technology and live indefinitely long.

One human lifespan will be seen as a trivial amount of time to the next step of humanity.

[beeboop]

This isn't entirely accurate. We will not be able to visit the vast majority of the universe even given infinite time if we are not able to travel faster than light. Like 94% of the universe is unreachable without FTL, even without time constraints.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/05/12/the-...

And at some point we also don't have infinite time - we will have heat death of the universe at some point too.

[TheCoelacanth]

The remaining 6% is still orders of magnitude larger than would be involved in a typical space opera.

[beeboop]

I've never actually looked up what the "quadrants" are in Star Trek. Apparently just our one galaxy divided into four. 6% of the universe is indeed an unfathomably large amount of space.

[mpweiher]

There's also the minor issue that probably our two best physical theories, quantum dynamics and general relativity, are incompatible.

So they can't both be right.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/nov/04/relativity-quan...

[treeman79]

Gravity. Still the biggest unknown.

[billti]

Do we even have a total understanding of light, or electricity? (I may be wrong, but I thought there were still some pretty fundamental unknowns)

[XCSme]

It depends on what you mean by "understanding". We can explain using a specific set of rules how something works. It doesn't mean that those rules are the best way to explain it or that they are even correct.

For example, we could explain that electricity works because of how electrons move, which would be correct from our point of view, but if we find out that we were living in a simulation, then the explanation would be that this is how "electricity" was coded to behave.

Also, usually in physics a formula is thought to be correct until some new laws/rules are found, then the formula is updated by adding some extra terms and then again thought to be correct.

[z3t4]

To summarize: we know how to smash two particles together, but not much about what they are made of. Replace particles with stones and bones. 10000 years of science progress and we are still smashing things. With the occasional lab accident like discovering that mold kills bacteria.

[whimsicalism]

Maybe at a certain point "what they are made of" ceases to be a meaningful question.

[gmadsen]

Quantum electrodynamics is the most precise and accurate theory ever created. So not sure what you mean exactly by understand.

[jhrmnn]

One big difference—the discoveries waiting to be made in the early 20th century all concerned regular matter. As a result, once they were made, they enabled huge technological advancements.

[ren_engineer]

>we are nearing a technological plateau and that more research into physics is unlikely to get us to a world describe in traditional science fiction with FTL drives and large metal spaceships that can take you from planet to planet.

strange to me how nobody questions why beavers only make damns a certain size, birds only make nests and don't go beyond that in complexity.

So many people seem blind to the idea that humans might be near their intellectual limit as a species and assume we will just keep progressing technologically. For all we know it's possible we hit a brick wall in terms of progress. Average human struggles with calculus, what if there was a species that could do advanced math as easily as we do 2 + 2?

Seems the limit for human advancement is tied to rate of learning, life span, and general cognitive ability. If you want more advanced tech you need to focus on those problems

[joshmarlow]

I've often wondered about this. My suspicion is that there is a limit to the complexity of mental models that humans can fluently manipulate and I think we're starting to bump into it in some cases.

I think we will eventually need a paradigm shift from science being built around human grokable models (e=mc^2) to external human manipulatable models (ie, large scale machine derived models that we can't actually grok but can use for analysis and engineering). I think we're already starting to see this - there are already mathematical proofs that are so large and complex (in the GB range) that they had to be found by automation and only other automation can verify them.

[raxxorrax]

We have tons of numerical simulations in engineering. Light modulation alone, just 3-5 lenses with different qualities can occupy a modern processor for a few hours.

[mikepurvis]

> ...strange to me how nobody questions why beavers only make damns a certain size, birds only make nests and don't go beyond that in complexity.

Isn't most of this kind of just a matter of fitness, same as why birds become flightless on islands where there are no predators which demand flight to escape from? Basically, building anything more than a minimally-viable nest or a dam requires using energy that could be invested elsewhere to greater evolutionary advantage.

Humans have gone beyond because for as long as we can remember, we've always had vast, vast surpluses of energy, initially through the cooking of meat and agriculture, then via animal labour, and then finally via fossil fuels.

[mr-wendel]

I love the analogy, but I think it flawed: the limits are practical and excess just adds risk.

On the flip side, nothing seems more exemplified by humanity than a zeal for doing a thing as big and grandiose as possible: for curiosity, for business, for art, or just for sheer vanity.

I don't think we've seen how far those will take us yet, even w/o improvements to the bottlenecks you suggest. I do agree that those "meta" fields matter and will make a huge difference.

[gugagore]

> strange to me how nobody questions why beavers only make damns a certain size, birds only make nests and don't go beyond that in complexity.

Probably because beavers and birds have made dams and nests the same way for the past 100 years, whereas humans in the same time have developed a bunch of tools and can specialize and distribute the fruits of their expertise without requiring others to be experts themselves.

Perhaps it's not true that on average we know more e.g. math now than we did 100 years ago, because there are so many more people. I believe we are nonetheless much better at teaching and learning now.

It's more than possible that all of this growth will be our downfall, and that that will regulate our growth, however.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

Life span is hardly a limiting factor. It is known that most scientific breakthroughs were made by people in their twenties-early thirties.

[ren_engineer]

what if you could extend that academic "prime" by 30 years or longer?

[Andrew_nenakhov]

It would do little, I think. Not because people get less smart with age, but because with years they establish themselves in their field, and become more conservative and less willing to shake the status quo.

[colordrops]

I normally buy into this sort of logic, but there's a fundamental difference. We experience the world in a way that recognizes beavers' and birds' limits, whereas they do not. We can modify ourselves and our environment in a way and changes our limits. Perhaps if the world is a simulation, then there are hard limits, as we are but bits in a computer so to speak, but even then it's not certain - we could become aware of the world outside the simulation and learn to manipulate it thought I/O mechanisms.

[MisterBastahrd]

Average humans struggle with calculus because we have instructed average humans that calculus is hard. If we taught it to 12 year olds as a routine matter, average 12 year olds would know calculus.

[inglor_cz]

You can teach smart (not average) 12 year olds the basic rules how to compute derivation or primitive function, but I doubt they are capable of distinguishing between, say, continuous and uniformly continuous function. Which is actually pretty important when trying to reason your way around calculus.

[mschuster91]

> strange to me how nobody questions why beavers only make damns a certain size, birds only make nests and don't go beyond that in complexity.

Unlike humans, beavers and most species of birds don't work cooperatively, which means they can't separate the workload needed for survival (e.g. one group hunts, one group builds dams, one group does childcare).

[specialist]

We'll reach the stars thru life sciences. Future humans will become space and time adapted. Hardened against radiation. Metabolism so slow that years will feel like minutes.

The future will be pretty wild.

[thatcat]

I'm not so sure that is the case, simply for economic and social reasons. Climate change is a much more tractable and immediate problem, yet technological developments and their implementations still seem to be moving too slowly to matter at the moment.

[Stupulous]

Solar has dropped 50-75% in cost in the last decade, and accounts for 10x more wattage. Battery capacity has doubled in that time. Wind energy capacity has doubled. Geothermal capacity is 1.5x. Electric cars are 4x more common than they were 5 years ago. Carbon sequestration has advanced at a technological level, although production hasn't seen serious advances (probably because renewable energy produces a profitable resource, while sequestering just exchanges money for fighting climate change).

If that's not enough to make a difference, it's because we started too late and the problem is too large, not because technological development is too slow. Admittedly, nuclear could have done the job already, and the issue there is social.

If human lifespan technology moved at half the climate change technology speed, we'd have 25 extra years per decade and be effectively immortal today.

[specialist]

It seems to older me that punctuated equilibrium is some kind of natural law.

Incremental progress may be ideal. Alas, whatever forces that may be, trying to preserve the current equilibrium, fight off change. Until the compulsion to change overwhelms the system.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

So when humanity finally goes carbon negative, it'll be despite the opposition, because they couldn't defend the status quo any longer. Then all that bottled up change will be like a dam bursting.

Hopefully it'll happen sooner than later.

[vidarh]

Instantly made me think of Cordwainer Smith. In particular "Scanners live in vain", but many of his stories deal with adaptations to space.

[croes]

What if this is just not possible?

[cblconfederate]

We can send persons without sending humans. With a good enough brain-computer interface we should be able to duplicate our brain contents to a digital medium, which we know can travel to interstellar space and beyond

[unionpivo]

Complex computers break down too. It might well be true that any computer capable of approximated human intelligence is even more fragile than normal human.

I don't think we are capable building computer system (and that includes power system for running it) right now that would last few hundred years without any maintenance, even here on planet.

Or it would at least be very non trivial to build it

[cblconfederate]

we currently have at least 2 functioning computers in interstellar space that are 44 years old. I think we are already at a point that we can make centuries-lasting computers

[croes]

We are far away from such an interface and space travel takes still far too long. When the first probe reaches another galaxy mankind is probably already gone or we are back in post war dark ages.

[cblconfederate]

> space travel takes still far too long.

Who cares about humans, as a traveling satellite i will have all the time in the universe, literally

[croes]

And then? What the purpose of a conscience at a faraway planet? Something like We Are Legion (We Are Bob)?

[3520]

I wonder if people will view it as sufficient that a digital copy of 'them' (or at least something identical to them at the point of copying) exists, despite their original biological minds eventually perishing.

It excites me to think about discovering the origin of our consciousness and being able to transfer that.

[specialist]

I definitely want to believe. Then we can explore other galaxies.

But I still can't even imagine what consciousness is.

Maybe we'll create new intelligences, punt on the consciousness question, and delegate the task to them.

[specialist]

Ya, that'd suck. But consider. Tardigrades are pretty tough. And elephants have x10 more cancer fighting genes than us apes.

Pretty soon, parents will be picking their kid's eye color and temperament. For better or worse. Surely future humans will become a great deal hardier than ourselves.

[croes]

Genetics is complex and we don't even can handle complexity in computer programs.

Maybe we can choose eye color, but temperament? Far too complex, far too many possible side effects.

Just look what happened of the dream that AI could help with Corona

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-...

[daddylongstroke]

> Surely future humans will become a great deal hardier than ourselves.

It is currently trending in the other direction.

[kiba]

Sometimes I find it a little depressing that (at least through my laymen eyes) we are nearing a technological plateau and that more research into physics is unlikely to get us to a world describe in traditional science fiction with FTL drives and large metal spaceships that can take you from planet to planet.

FTL drive is not needed; people think too small.

[dsign]

That's absolutely true, but I wonder what it will take to take that point home for everybody.

[ddingus]

The first big project. After that there will be movies explanations stories expectations all that stuff. And to some degree it's already out there. We have those things now related to travel that's not faster than light.

And tell somebody put something together for real, FPL is just a whole lot more sexy.

[vdqtp3]

I've read a couple scifi stories about sophisticated alien civilizations with FTL drives who were then shocked when they found out humans were just folding space and had instantaneous travel. HFY! Obviously it's fiction, and who knows if it'll ever happen or if it's possible - but my point is that we don't know what we don't know, and it could be way cooler than we can even imagine.

[Counterpointv]

As a counter point, here is Chamath talking about the advent of room temperature superconductors in 20 to 30 years

https://streamable.com/ku3orn

[whimsicalism]

We haven't even developed normal pressure room temperature superconductivity, let alone mass manufacture.

Also, why should I privilege what Chamath has to say on this subject more than any random commentator?

[hutzlibu]

"we are nearing a technological plateau"

Well, using that analogy, I would say, it took us indeed great efforts to reach it, but now we have vast land to colonize - meaning applying all that groundbreaking research into everything. There are so many more technologies avaiable, than just what you can buy on the market.

Sci-Fi is very possible.

edit: oh and about FTL:

I know I do not really understand quantum physics and co. but I think I understand, that no one really understands it yet - so I do not expect FTL in my lifetime, but I would not rule it out.

[whimsicalism]

Disagree that we are reaching a technical plateau at all. Maybe in some parts of particle and AMO physics, but cosmology continues to advance and we are continuing to learn a lot.

[godelski]

Don't be. Science usually hours plateaus but if we've learned anything from history is that there's always mountains ahead. The problem is we're searching on the dark. A flat spot doesn't mean we're at the top. In fact, we even know there's a lot of mountains ahead, we just aren't sure how to climb them yet or what we'll find along the way. But that's no reason not to climb them.

[ianai]

It might help if we had literature fleshing out some ideas of how alternatives could work. Ie how we could become a species more in harmony with a large biosphere - ala Jim Henson’s Dark Crystal. Though it’d have to be a human way of life.

[specialist]

> a species more in harmony with a large biosphere

Garden Earth.

The biggest cultural change for attaining "sustainability" is metaphoric, from extraction to management. Maybe somewhat ironically, proponents should go all Old Testament. Stewards of the Earth and so forth.

Many of our prior cultures had at least some form of this. I don't know when or why we stopped being so. Maybe due to the Enlightenment and then Industrialization.

I vividly remember reading René Descartes as a kid and being shocked by his violent language and metaphors. Stuff like "We must wrest Nature's secrets and make her submit to our will" (paraphrasing, from memory).

[lmilcin]

I don't agree.

There is so much to learn about the world around us without even hitting physics limits.

And then so much to do with that knowledge.

I am not worried we will run out of problems to solve.

[api]

If we can get good enough at bioengineering, a 50,000 year flight to another star using conventional propulsion might not be such a big deal.

The seeming requirement of FTL to explore the universe is 100% a function of our short life span. If we can't make spacecraft go faster we have to make ourselves last longer.

[Beldin]

We'll also have to take food for the whole duration, or develop a taste for hydrogen atoms alongside a functioning Bussard ramjet.

Oh, the rocket equation really doesn't like option 1.

(Hypothesis: any process we can devise to turn hydrogen into sustenance will be orders of magnitude less efficient than using it as propellant.)

[api]

Food can be recycled pretty effectively, and if were that good at biotech I assume we could improve on the current state of the art.

They already recycle water very effectively on the ISS. It's the machine that "turns yesterday's coffee into today's coffee."

Of course if we were that good at biotech we could probably hibernate a good chunk of the flight time too. Might be necessary to wake up periodically to reset the body, but you could probably hibernate most of the duration. Maybe you'd do it with some kind of weird circadian cycle with extremely elongated sleep periods, sleeping like 10X-100X as long as you are awake. During each wake period you check to make sure everything is working properly.

You would not need a Bussard ramjet for the long duration flights I'm thinking of. A nuclear thermal rocket could get you a good deal past solar system escape velocity. Nuclear pulse propulsion could get you up to at least single digit percentages of the speed of light if you didn't mind a little boom-boom. Then you just cruse along on an interstellar transfer orbit until you do a retro-burn to enter the destination star system a few tens of thousands of years later. These are all technologies that are already feasible at least on paper. No new physics is needed.

[xyzzyz]

We would only small amounts of food, if we could efficiently recycle it. Right now, we use plants/animals and solar energy to upcycle our waste products into food. However, there are no physical reasons that we couldn’t use electricity and managed bioreactors to do that instead.