Intereting website. I’m pretty much a science and technology nut. I can’t help it. I also have made it a point to examine many of the innovations of the 20th century, and I guess my biggest question is what’s next? Paradigm shifts abounded during the last 100 yrs which mainly benefitted countries that already had a technology infrastructure. I am hoping that off-shoring of some of the globe’s scientific development will create not only a new market with a new set of problems, but also a new way of going about problem solving in general.
Regardless of what ultimately gets done where, I am really interested in how one goes about projecting innovation efforts in the future. e.g. Computers . . . How fast is fast enough? How small is small enough? How “smart” can you make a component or piece of material? As of now, we are still brought to our knees when we experience the common cold or flu, and we still have a majority of the global population which lives at bare subsistance levels. The economic condition of scarcity affects us all, so as I sit here and think about it, maybe it’s the potential new ways of thinking about scarcity that will drive the newest innovations and scientific efforts. . .
I was asked by my boss in 1998-99 sometime, why anyone would need a 1GHZ cpu. I now have a machine I built myself with a 2.1 GHZ cpu and I’m looking to upgrade further. I can think of good uses for a 10GHZ cpu but the cooling system would be prohibitive (water or NO2). High speeds, low power consumption is the future for PCs, IMHO. And that only comes with major advances in nano-tech.
The problem is what I call the Popular Science syndrome. When I was a kid I used to religiously read Popular Science until I began to realize that all the verbs used in the articles were conditional. This technology may…. That technology could…. 90% of what was in there were press releases from some corporation and very little of it was about what can be done and what is being done. The same seems to be true of nano-tech today. We are constantly hearing about what this new discovery COULD mean or MIGHT help bring about. We are not hearing about what IS working now.
Welcome! Looking forward to your thoughts.