A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

Calliban · 2024-10-09 10:28:04

This article posits that the reason there appear to be no galaxy spanning civilisations, is that technology has basic limits. I suspect that this idea will be uncomfortable to many readers here.
https://www.space.com/lack-of-intellige … ment-limit

According to this idea, human technology is already approaching fundamental limits. Technology rests on previous discoveries in basic science. So far as physics is concerned, our understanding of the universe is approaching completion. Recent experiments most notably the LHC, have confirmed the validity of the standard model. And there doesn't seem to be much scope for new physics beyond the standard model. There are physicists that devote their lives to finding holes in standard model physics. But there really aren't that many anomolies remaining that cannot be explained within the existing scientific framework.

There are still some mysteries, such as how gravity fits into the standard model and how to merge relativity with quantum mechanics. But new discoveries are increasingly few and require progressively more resources to uncover. The discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics were achievements that are unlikely to be rivalled by anything we discover at any point in the future. And yet, we don't have warp drives or wormholes or faster than light communication. Nor is there any hint that such things are remotely possible. The universe doesn't allow them. And there is no new physics that could make it otherwise. We already know most of what there is to know. If true, then our technology a thousand or even a million years from now, might not be that different to what we have now. And even that assumes that we don't reverse due to some form of catastrophic societal collapse.

If there are other civilisations out there, it may well be that their technology is no more advanced than ours is now. This is because there are limits to how far technology can go and we are already discovering those limits. With present technology, interstellar travel is would take millenia and resources beyond what we can muster. What if present technology is about as good as we are going to get? Where does that leave human ambitions to spread across the cosmos?

Last edited by Calliban (2024-10-09 10:45:05)

Calliban · 2024-10-09 10:42:39

One thing that human advancements have rested upon in recent decades is scale. It took organised industrial societies with hundreds of millions of members, to develop quantum physics and nuclear fission. It took huge economies of scale to develop electronics. It took globe-spanning resources to build the LHC and ITER. These weren't things that a small group of human beings could ever have done, no matter how wise.

The slowdown in human development is partly due to the fact that the scale of human civilisation is limited by our continued confinement to Earth. Until we break the bonds of Earth's gravity, we are stuck in a system of diminishing returns. A space based civilisation can support numbers and harness resources that are orders of magnitude greater than anything we will ever accomplish stuck here on Earth. Whilst even a space faring civilisation may face limits to technology due to physics limits, scale effects mean that those limits will apply a lot sooner if we remain stuck here.

Terraformer · 2024-10-09 11:23:34

The difficulty of and resource intensity of (fast) interstellar travel, coupled with the sheer abundance of our own solar system, would seem to work against interstellar colonisation for resource reasons. That leaves fringe groups who want to settle it for ideological reasons -- and fringe groups are usually not that well resourced (see the Expanse's Mormons for an exception).

Slowboats and island hopping otoh, that could be different. But also far far slower. A civilisation expanding at 0.01% of the speed of light could settle the entire galaxy in about... 10 billion years.

Settling the solar system, that seems to be something within our technological capabilities. We can still have our space opera future

Calliban · 2024-10-09 11:59:23

The Expanse (minus the ring gates) could be a fairly accurate representation of what human civilisation will look like a few hundred years from now.

There are some plot holes. Why would belters be so poor and downtrodden in a situation where fusion provides enough energy to propel ships to 1000km/s and cross the solar system in weeks? And where sunlight is available full time and can be concentrated with foil-thin mirror? Why would they be short on water when Ceres is made from frozen mud down to its core? Why are there 30bn people crowded onto Earth, when they have fusion powered torch ships that can take them into space for the same cost as an airline ticket and there are cities on the moon that could mine all the materials needed to build massive space colonies?

It is is a sci-fi at the end of the day, so plotholes are expected. But a lot more based in reality than Star Trek, B5 or the Star Gate franchise. It takes the time to factor real physics and human psychology into its plotline. The future is human beings doing what human beings always do. Going into space did not turn them into superior beings. They kill each other with nukes and railguns instead. Actually, as well as killing each other with AK47s. But what human beings are and how they compete with and fight one another doesn't change just because we got better gear. The series gets that right.

Technology is another thing I think it gets right. There are fusion drives, robotics and impressive medical technologies. But the tech you see is a development of what we have now and is not qualitatively different. Rockets are still rockets, even if the drives are hotter. There are stealth technologies that aren't that different to what we have now. There are no warp drives, transporters or technomagic. The ring gates are a departure from reality. The protomolecule is advanced alien nanotechnology which is on the edge of real world feasibility. But most of the tech is familiar even though it 300 years ahead. I think real life will be like that. Come back in 1000 years and a chair is still a chair. Things are still bolted together and we will need spanners to tighten the bolts. There is a realness to the tech in Expanse that other sci-fi misses.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-10-09 12:06:07)

Terraformer · 2024-10-09 12:06:01

The Cost of Interstellar Flight Old Centauri Dreams article.

The calculations suggest that it *might* become economically feasible/acceptable to launch flyby probes in a few centuries, *if* our economy keeps growing at a steady rate. I don't think that assumption is justified. At some point there's a limit to human consumption, simply because there's a limit to how much it's possible for us to consume. Who's going to tile Mercury in solar panels for antimatter production if there's little demand for antimatter? Barring some breakthrough propulsion like (subluminal) warp drive with absurdly low energy requirements, I don't see there being enough drive to leave the solar system for a long long time, and even then not particularly quickly. The universe has been around for billions of years it can wait a few more million.

RobertDyck · 2024-10-09 13:08:34

Faster than light communication:
Quantum entanglement works by entangling a pair of subatomic particles or photons. Once entangled certain properties must be opposite. A pair of electrons will always have opposite spin. If you alter the spin of one, the other will change it's spin instantly. There is zero time delay. It's a mathematically exact number, exactly zero time. It doesn't matter the distance, propagation delay is always exactly zero time. Even over interstellar distance. In 1930 a paper published by Albert Einstein, Dr Podolsky, and Dr Rosen known as the EPR paper (their initio) tried to disprove quantum mechanics by saying this is absurd. But other have responded by saying this is brilliant! The EPR paper was based on the assumption of the principle of non-locallity. However that principle has been proven false so quantum mechanics is consistent. Good thing since quantum mechanics is required for modern electronics to work. So now it's an engineering design to develop an instantaneous communicator. Technically instantaneous is not faster than light. Speed is distance divided by time, real distance in zero time is a division by zero error. Quantum entanglement works without anything travelling across intervening distance.

Warp drive:
Nothing can move in space faster than the speed of light. But there's a loophole. Space itself can move at any speed. Warp drive works by contracting space in front of the ship, and stretching space behind it. This moves a bubble of space forward. The ship does not move relative to the bubble of space it is embedded within. Because the ship is not moving relative to the bubble, there is no time dilation.

Miguel Alcubierre wrote his doctoral thesis in 1994. It was amazing! He reverse calculated General Relativity. His initial paper required an object the size of Jupiter in front, and another object behind of equal mass but made of an exotic type of matter called negative matter that no one has been able to prove exists. This took warp drive from completely impossible to completely impractical. That was progress. Recently Dr Sonny White has published papers of how to energy optimize physicist Alcubierre Drive to be practical. His design would require a ship the size of Skylab, and no exotic matter. We launched Skylab so this sounds a lot better. He received funding from NASA and wrote two papers, linked below. Since he received funding from DARPA and built a laboratory experiment to make a static warp bubble. It worked. The bubble was microscopic, but it's a start. The warp bubble was confirmed by a laser. The catch is a ship would require so much power that only a nuclear fusion reactor could produce that much. A fission reactor would be too big and heavy. No one has developed a working fusion reactor, so more work is needed. Meanwhile Dr White is working on warp drive, powered by electrical power mains on land.

Warp Field Mechanics 101
Warp Field Mechanics 102:Energy Optimization

tahanson43206 · 2024-10-09 17:50:34

For RobertDyck re forward guidance....

I appreciate your optimism in the face of the kind of realistic thinking that Calliban's recent posts suggest are likely to appear in a forum like this one.

It's been a while since UFO fever swept the US, but every now and then unexplained observations are made, and at long last it appears the US Military is taking these reports seriously.

The occasional occurrence of unexplained phenomena are a helpful reminder that there is a lot we do not know about the Universe.

On the ** other ** hand, Calliban's recent observations about the state of development of human knowledge seem well considered (to me at least).

A parallel supporting argument (as I am recalling Calliban's writing) is that we need a larger population in order to increase chances of an Einstein or similar genius who might be able to understand aspects of the Universe that are beyond current human capability.

There is a wild card on the scene .... AI is making astonishing progress. There is good reason to worry about how that evolution is going to unfold, but one option is that the kind of genius we humans might produce every billion births or so might occur in a processor complex somewhere.

(th)

Calliban · 2024-10-10 03:16:06

tahanson43206 wrote:

A parallel supporting argument (as I am recalling Calliban's writing) is that we need a larger population in order to increase chances of an Einstein or similar genius who might be able to understand aspects of the Universe that are beyond current human capability.
There is a wild card on the scene .... AI is making astonishing progress. There is good reason to worry about how that evolution is going to unfold, but one option is that the kind of genius we humans might produce every billion births or so might occur in a processor complex somewhere.
(th)

AI could eventually be useful in interpreting physics data and helping to extend our theories. A larger population could also be useful in producing more geniuses and also more resources for experiments.

But our problem is more fundamental than that. The universe is huge by our standards, but still finite. There are a limited set of physical laws governing things that take place within it. There is a limited amount of knowledge to be discovered about it. Every new discovery reduces the number of things that remain to be discovered. In other words, science is not an infinite process. There will come a time when it reaches a conclusion and we run out of new things to discover. As incredible as that may sound, we are not far away from that point now. The physics that we have is not complete, but it provides an extraordinarily accurate description of most of what we see in the universe. What we know, certainly outweighs what we don't know. If there are 10 chapters in the story of the universe, we are already half way through chapter 9. What remains to be discovered is high hanging fruit, difficult to explain or probe without enormous resources.

Human inventions work within the framework of physics. There is a mythology surrounding technology that tells us it will continuously advance, becoming more complex until we are litteral gods, something akin to Q continuum in the Star Trek story. But that mythology is false. There are limits to the benefits of complexity. There are limits to how far technology can advance within the finite framework of physics. It really doesn't matter how clever we are or how clever our AI machines become. There are limits to what we can do within the framework of physics. There are resource limits that are yet more stringent within ultimate physical limits. If it takes a particle accelerator the size of the solar system or an artificial blackhole to allow us to exploit an exotic law of physics for our benefit, then that is certainly off the cards for humanity in the near term and maybe forever.

But the ultimate point is that there are limits to how far technology can advance even if we had practically infinite intelligence and resources and we are approaching those limits. And those limits do not appear to allow god like powers such as travelling or communicating faster than light. Some things really are impossible and will simply never be provided by any amount of technological development because the physics of our universe doesn't allow them. And physics, like the universe itself is finite. There is not an infinite amount to discover. And there are a finite number of ways that we can operate within the framework of physics. That limits the ultimate scope of technology.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-10-10 04:10:35)

tahanson43206 · 2024-10-10 06:23:49

For Calliban re topic and post #8

First, in this post, I want to emphasis that I am ** not ** disagreeing with your thesis! This post is intended to remind our readers that Great Britain has a history of announcing that everything that can be learned has been learned.

That is ** not ** what Calliban seems to be asserting. I am hoping that Calliban's thesis will receive the kind of careful, thoughtful attention with which it is offered.

Long ago I read a report of a famous, distinguished, highly decorated British scientist asserting that everything that could be learned had already been learned. That report may even be apocryphal, but my recollection makes it seem authentic. While Calliban's thesis is not the same, it rang a bell.

I asked Google to see if it could find the example from history, but it came back with a summary that catches the spirit of my memory...

AI Overview
Learn more
…
While not explicitly stated as a national policy, the idea that "everything that can be learned has already been learned" is sometimes associated with Great Britain due to a historical perception of intellectual arrogance, particularly during the British Empire's peak when they were considered the leading scientific and cultural power, potentially leading to a sense of complacency and resistance to new ideas from other cultures.
Key points to consider:
The Royal Society's motto:
The Royal Society, a prestigious British scientific organization, has the motto "Nullius in verba" which translates to "on the word of no one" - emphasizing the importance of verifying information through experimentation rather than blindly accepting authority.
Historical context:
During the 18th and 19th centuries, British scientists and thinkers made significant contributions to various fields, which could have contributed to a perception of intellectual dominance.
Criticisms:
This perception can be seen as a stereotype and is often used to critique a resistance to new ideas or a lack of openness to diverse perspectives within British academia or society.

(th)

tahanson43206 · 2024-10-10 06:32:50

For Calliban re thesis ....

While RobertDyck has shown us an optimistic outlook that is likely to be held among a small part of the human population that has a propensity toward optimism, the thesis you have advanced certainly seems solid. I think odds makers in the UK or the US would put good money on your proposition.

On the other hand, the fact that such assertions as you have made have turned out to be wrong provides a small space for a small bet to reap great rewards.

The advance of human knowledge will be dependent upon (somehow) avoiding the ravages of human ego caused destruction, increasing the population to give intellect a greater chance of random distribution, and increasing education for the entire population.

Kepler was working as a low paid educator when he worked out the path of the planets as ellipses, which was counter to the teachings passed down (in error) for centuries.

The optimistic outlook of RobertDyck may yet prove correct, but I don't think there is a odds maker alive who would put money on it.

(th)

Calliban · 2024-10-10 06:58:24

TH, the idea that technology has limits will likely not sit well with people that believe in continuous improvement. But the premise that I am proposing has nothing to do with intellectual arrogance. The 19th century physicists only thought they knew how the universe worked. In the case of modern physicists, the assertion is not hubris. Quantum mechanics and General Relativity really do explain how the universe works. It is getting tough to find any anomalies that are not explainable within the framework of known physics. This is a growing source of frustration for phycisists. The expansion of the universe is one such anomaly. Dark matter is another. But every year, the list grows shorter. The pace of new discoveries is slowing for this simple reason that there remains less to discover than there was before. This is a logical fact. The universe is not infinitely complex so far as the laws of physics is concerned. There is a limited amount to learn about the way it functions. And whilst our knowledge is not complete, we already understand it quite well. There may well come a time when our understanding is complete and we have a theory of everything.

Given that technology operates within the bounds of physics, it follows that technology cannot keep growing more sophisticated forever. There will continue to be new adaptations as people develop new tools for new environments. But the sort of technology growth that we saw between 1800 and 2000, is not something that can go on forever. It is in fact already slowing down. If this premis is true, the technology of humans living 1 million years from now (assuming that happens) may not be vastly different to what we have today. It will have developed within the bounds permissible by physics and there may simply be no scope for it to develop beyond a certain point.

John Horgan, author of 'The End of Science' offers an interesting, somewhat contrarian view.
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/my-d … of-science

Last edited by Calliban (2024-10-10 08:07:12)

tahanson43206 · 2024-10-10 11:45:54

For Calliban re topic ....

Like the topic just created by RobertDyck, about fusion of atoms, your new topic provides opportunities for learning as readers engage with your ideas.

I expect that humans will investigate the implications of the nature of matter, and I expect that the way in which humans express the state of "living" may change.

The purpose of this post is NOT to dispute or even to question your arguments about technology.

The purpose of ** this ** post is to simply observe that in the space of a single human lifetime, humans have come to understand that what we think of as "matter" is a collection of little energy packets, within which little waves of "something" bounce around in small boundaries.

I am hoping your topic here, in the Science topic, might inspire at least one member to do a bit of research, and contribute a post or two about the current understanding of the nature of matter.

The Higgs Boson has only recently been confirmed to exist, after it was postulated decades ago.

(th)

RobertDyck · 2024-10-10 19:24:06

Be very careful. Society has collapsed many times. After ancient Rome, technology fell dramatically. The only reason we retain much of the knowledge from before the Roman collapse is Muslims retained scientific knowledge. Aristotle, Pythagoras, Heron of Alexandria, all were retained by Islam. Emperor Constantine ordered a single book of scientific knowledge to be written, summarizing an entire library into one book. His hope is that one book would survive the coming Dark Age.

That wasn't the first collapse, it was just the latest. The Bronze Age Collapse: Minoa had bronze made of copper, arsenic and antimony. The result was lighter than steel, although the same weight as solid bronze. As hard and strong as high carbon tempered steel. And it was stainless. Considering steel hadn't been invented yet, Minoan soldiers had a great advantage. All other nations of the Mediterranean used copper arsenic alloy, which was much softer. Furthermore Minoan swords were double cast: core copper with little arsenic and no antimony making it strong and tough, would not break, but soft. Skin of the sword had high arsenic and high antimony, giving it a razor sharp hard cutting edge. Minoa also had running water to every house using troughs built into cobblestone streets. And they had flush toilets: each toilet had a bucket used to flush. Not as advanced as a modern toilet, but more advanced than anything ancient Rome had 2,000 years later.

The Great Library of Alexandria was burnt on purpose. How much great literature and history was lost?

Fall of the Akkad empire in 2154 BC (4,177 years ago). The Akkad conquered the Sumerians and absorbed their writing system and culture.

We could go on. The belief that we hit the peak means fall back is inevitable. Civilization is not static, it either grows or collapses. Belief that our system has hit a limit is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Our population growth is slowing, will soon stop, but food production continues to improve. But more than half of agricultural land is marginal, would not support anything more than subsistence without industrial inputs. We have those inputs: nitrogen fertilizer is necessary for any crop of canola, on any land. Marginal land requires nitrogen and potash. It also requires tractors, combine harvesters, and trains to transport to a grain terminal that can dry it with either natural gas or propane. Fruit requires refrigeration to prevent spoilage. If our industrial economy collapses, all that industrial food production collapses with it.

Optimism isn't a luxury. It's necessary for life.

Terraformer · 2024-10-11 03:09:33

Only someone from Faustian civilisation could have made that remark. We must believe in wormholes otherwise we'll collapse? We don't need blind optimism to keep ammonnia synthesis going. Tractors will keep working regardless of whether or not its theoretically possible to replace them with antigravity based drones.

Feeding people false hope of a Star Trek monofuture, OTOH... not having our "optimistic" fiction grounded in reality has done a lot of damage to our culture. People get it in their heads that a few square metres of solar panel can power an apartment block and then get mad when someone wants to cover a hillside in panels. Then they despair when they learn their "solarpunk" fantasies will remain fantasies. Or get mad when you mention the concept of embodied energy in response to artwork of steel and glass and concrete towers....

Calliban · 2024-10-11 04:56:51

I don't think fantasy is necessarily harmful so long as people understand that it is make believe, with no grounding in reality. It is entertainment and nothing more. The trouble is that a lot of people don't take it that way, especially if they aren't very clever. A lot of people get sucked in by fantasy and think they can turn the real world into the object of their fantasies. It doesn't work that way. This is how idealists end up ruining the world. They try and force it to accord with some kind of internalised fantasy. The result is always a distopia that falls far short of what they intended, because fantasies are simplified idealisms and by definition cannot be turned into plans that are implimented in the real world.

Star Trek is a fantasy in every way. Technologically, it is impossible. Economically and sociologically, it is a rehash of the communist fantasy on a grander scale. A galaxy-spanning, tolerant, one party state, in which numerous aliens who look a lot like us and who all speak English, don't even see their differences and live together in harmony, embracing each other and copping off with each other. Money was abandoned and considered archaic and degenerate. Instead human beings 'work to better themselves and each other', whatever the hell that means. Star Trek also reinforced the mythology that technology and science were endless treadmills. We start as amoeba and advance until we are gods, as opitomised by the Q-continuum.

The whole thing was an attempt to manifest the ultimate Jewboy dream, the expression of what they ultimately want to see goyim society turned into. The obvious impossibility of it and the way it had already failed numerous times in the real world by the 1960s, didn't dissuade Roddenberry and the other producers. Maybe because he thought it would be received and understood as entertainment. Maybe because he wanted to influence people to put it into action and didn't care about the consequences. Either way, a lot of people took it to be a template of what we should be turning the world into.

The problem is that it has about as much in common with reality as Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. There is just no part of it that can work in the real world. Some of the outcomes are harmless, like Sonny White blowing a few million trying to develop warp bubbles. But a lot of people took the whole sociology side of Star Trek to heart and wove it into their personal idealisms. That may have breathed fresh life into communism in western countries and fed such destructive ideas as multiculturalism. That side of things has been enormously harmful.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-10-11 05:18:15)

kbd512 · 2024-10-11 09:31:58

Nowhere is it written that humanity or technology must progress or regress to any significant degree, merely because we haven't achieved some previously obscure advancement or improvement to X or Y or Z. Humanity operates in cycles. Each cycle achieves some measure of progress towards something that part of humanity is fixated on over that period of time. So long as there is not a complete societal collapse, the cycles continue. Vanishingly few people alive today know enough to make a vacuum tube or a cotton gin or samurai sword, but how relevant is that "functionally lost" knowledge to humanity's progression or even regression? What are we even progressing to?

With all the wars, famines, plagues, and other calamities that have befallen humanity over many tens of thousands of years, humanity is still here. Over time, our technology and ability to manipulate matter, machines, and the environment around us has only increased, but not all at once, not for everyone at the same time, and not in the same manner from any arbitrary point in time. Whether that type of advancement took place faster or slower than a specific person arbitrarily thought it should is a yet another question. If some part of what we knew will be lost to history or rediscovered a year or a century from now is largely a matter of what presently garners our attention. That doesn't mean the present fixation will go on forever, or is useful in the long term, nor does it mean that gaining or losing that fixation will be a net benefit or net negative.

In its own unique way, modern human civilization is still very much a "last man standing" survival horror show. It's not quite as destructive as thermonuclear warfare, but how destructive it seems will be highly dependent upon where you live. I seriously doubt the people living in Israel or Gaza enjoy the same quality of life that we do. We have people living in heated homes surrounded by finely manicured lawns while another group of people in the next town or country over are burning animal dung or wood to cook their dinner in a mud hut or tin shack. Some of them are perfectly happy living that way and have no intention of changing anything. This goes straight back to what they prioritize or have fixated on. It's less a reflection on any single person or group of people than it is about dramatically different results stemming from the combination of education, environment, and culture which affect our apparent progress, towards or away from some idealized end-state, in numerous different ways.

You have to either be deliberately obtuse or fixate upon a very narrow range of events, contentious issues, or intractable problems to believe that we haven't achieved stunningly rapid technological and even social progress over the past century. We're not "regressing", merely because a far greater chunk of the fundamentals of science or technology have been explored or discovered for the first time. It's a sign we lived through a period of time where that was even possible.

It simply wasn't possible to mass produce microchips 50 years ago the way we make them today by the tens of millions. The fact that successive generations of the chips may be less impressive when compared to the prior generation is less a reflection on our progress than it is that all things have fundamental limits (edit: material and energy limitations- a basic nod to "material" reality). 50 years ago, nobody knew what a quantum computer was. We have those now. If you were to transport a person 50 years forward in time to where are today, technologically speaking, they'd probably ask you what you were complaining about after picking up their jaws, upon witnessing the stunning computing power of modern chips. If a wristwatch today is more powerful than a Cray Supercomputer of the 1980s, but the next generation of chips that go into making the watch are "only" 10% more powerful than the last, it's not a sign that we've "peaked", it's a sign that our tech has become a master class in how to make a tiny low power machine absurdly powerful when it will most likely only be used to tell the time, despite the fact that it could plow through the sort of simulation and modeling that the owners of those supercomputers of decades past could only dream of, in their own time.

I don't think we've "peaked" at all. We're just getting warmed up with the new generation of energy / food / medicine production, computing, AI, modeling / simulation of all engineering domains, 3D printing, and the list goes on. We also have gigantic interplanetary rockets twice as powerful as a Saturn V, fully reusable, operating at a minor fraction of the Saturn V's cost. What more does everyone here want? We can only drive at so many different solutions at one time. The best is yet to come, but all good things come in their own time. Patience is still a virtue.

The only universal limit on technology is the human imagination and acceptance that when physics forbids one way of solving a problem, there's always another unexplored option waiting to be accepted as the solution.

Last edited by kbd512 (2024-10-11 09:36:50)

Calliban · 2024-10-11 19:38:14

kbd512 wrote:

I don't think we've "peaked" at all. We're just getting warmed up with the new generation of energy / food / medicine production, computing, AI, modeling / simulation of all engineering domains, 3D printing, and the list goes on. We also have gigantic interplanetary rockets twice as powerful as a Saturn V, fully reusable, operating at a minor fraction of the Saturn V's cost. What more does everyone here want? We can only drive at so many different solutions at one time. The best is yet to come, but all good things come in their own time. Patience is still a virtue.
The only universal limit on technology is the human imagination and acceptance that when physics forbids one way of solving a problem, there's always another unexplored option waiting to be accepted as the solution.

That statement is fundamentally false. I will explain why.

Firstly, human technology has very definitely peaked since the 1960s. Peaked does not mean halted of course. But there is a definite and noticable slowing of pace. What we are seeing now is refinements, rather than fundamentally new technologies. Microelectronics are the significant outlier that have seen great progress in the past three decades. But this is now reaching physical limits. A transistor cannot get smaller than a single atom. This is a good example of how physics imposes ultimate limits that are simply impossible for us to cross. This isn't a problem that results from failure of imagination. It is a constraint imposed upon us by the fundamental nature of matter. It is not negotiable or traversable. It is an ultimate impasse, a hard limit that no amount of optimistic thinking or inventiveness will get past. Not now or at any point in the future.

The same is true of many other things. There are limits to the ultimate strength of materials. The strength of any new material that we develop in the future, will be constrained by the strength of electrostatic force between protons and electrons. There are limits to the melting point of materials, that ultimately come from the same place. It isn't a coincidence that our strongest materials have high melting points. There is a fundamental speed limit to the universe. Limits to achievable energy densities. These aren't things that new technologies can get past. Indeed, technology is constrained to forever work within them. We will never be able to build warp drives if doing so requires energy density comparable to a black hole. It isn't possible to build things like that out of materials that we can use. Likewise, the Heisenburg uncertainty principle tells us we can never build a Star Trek style transporter. It is impossible with technology we have now and we know it will remain impossible with any technology that we may develop in the future. We will never have Star Trek style tractor beams, for the simple reason that standard model physics doesn't allow us to produce beams of gravitons.

The laws of physics are finite. There are only so many ways that particles can interact. This tells us that no area of science can be infinitely complex. The more we discover, the less there remains to be discovered. Given that technology works within the bounds of physics, it follows that there are a finite number of permutations that we can develop. Technology can continuously adjust to new circumstances, but it cannot grow infinitely complex or capable, because it can only operate within the bounds of the physical laws of the universe. This tells us that the huge growth in new technology that we have seen this past 200 years, is likely to be a historic, one-time transition rather than being characteristic of a continuous state. Technology is still developing in its complexity, but this is showing diminishing returns. The 1950s bought us jet engines, for example. The 2000s brought us new and improved jet engines, with better efficiency. It didn't bring us compact micro-fusion reactors. The laws of physics constrains what we can build.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-10-11 20:12:19)

RobertDyck · 2024-10-12 03:59:11

The future will not be exactly "Star Trek". Predictions of the future are never perfect. For one thing, once a prediction is made, people will work to avoid problems identified by that prediction. So the prediction itself changes the future. There are also positive features: Motorola said the Star Trek TOS communicator inspired their StarTak flip phone. It was a radical improvement for its time. The original Star Trek pilot "The Cage" was criticized for using a normal metal clipboard, so starting with the second pilot "Where No Man Has Gone Before", the used an electronic clipboard. It was thick, and the prop was an "Etch A Sketch" toy in a fancy frame, but it inspired modern tablets. In Star Trek TNG they introduced thin tablets and smaller hand-held tablets. Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) was inspired by the hand-held version. PDA was merged with cell phones to become the modern smartphone.

Star Trek Enterprise is a disk with flat level floors. That is not how spacecraft are built today, and using rotation to produce artificial gravity makes the ship look radically different. In fact, if you want to study real life physics, gravity is not a force, it's an effect caused by a time dilation gradient and distorted dimensions of space. Those distortions of space-time are caused by the mass of a planet. Think of it this way: if an aircraft flies a level course, gravity is consistent. Speed is distance travelled divided by time: d/t. If you increase distance travelled per unit time, that increases speed. Most people think of it that way. But what happens if you reduce time? Time dilation reduces time as you fall deeper into the gravity well. Reducing time causes speed to increase. That causes you to accelerate as you fall down. So creating artificial gravity on a ship without using rotation, requires a time dilation gradient. The only way to cause a time dilation gradient is warp drive. So "gravity plating" described in Star Trek would have to be a special application of warp technology. That requires a hell of a lot of energy. You could reduce the volume of space the artifiacal gravity works over, and potentially reduce energy required. That means something in the ceiling, with strong support beams connecting the floor generator to the ceiling generator. So artifical gravity only works between them. That still requires a special application of warp technology. Frankly, I don't see it happening any time soon. Star Trek used "artificial gravity" because it meant the ship could be built in a recording studio in Hollywood.

However, I still argue for ever continuing advancements in technology. A couple advancements we need right now: reverse aging, and artificial womb. A medical treatment to make you young again would allow individuals to remain productive members of society, part of the workforce, for much longer. We have a birth rate crisis, this is one solution. Another solution is to make housing more affordable. Many couples will not have children unless they have a home with a yard. They feel they just can't raise a family in an efficiency apartment. Speculators have driven up prices of houses. We need to drive prices down so young couples can afford a home where they can raise a family.

Calliban · 2024-10-14 05:51:50

Observations from the New Horizons probe confirm that no new physics is needed to explain the amount of background light in the universe.
https://youtu.be/4SZHy54vyrI?si=-c98ms6tV2fEYhgq

Increasingly, what we observe in nature is well predicted by our theories. The LHC confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson. Its mass was almost exactly what was predicted by the standard model. Recent measurements of mass of the W Boson, are also exactly what was predicted by the standard model. There seems to be very little room for new physics beyond what is already understood. Our model of the universe, whilst not complete, is certainly approaching completion.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-10-14 05:52:56)

Calliban · 2024-10-23 15:38:32

The Nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to a group of scientists who developed AI software that is capable of accurately predicting protein structure. It is even possible to design proteins with specific shapes to fit specific applications. Some of these do not exist in nature.
https://youtu.be/5i2U67TVsRI

This is an incredible achievement that would have been considered sci-fi until a decade ago. It could herald a new era of designer drugs and even artificial organisms. But it also tells us something else. To be able to accurately predict the shape of something as complex as a protein, our understanding of atomic physics must be very close to being complete. Even subtle errors in our understanding of orbital structure and bond length would throw the results off. For such a model to work, there can't really be any unknown physics remaining at the atomic level.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-10-23 15:40:56)

New Mars Forums

Announcement

#1 2024-10-09 10:28:04

A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#2 2024-10-09 10:42:39

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#3 2024-10-09 11:23:34

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#4 2024-10-09 11:59:23

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#5 2024-10-09 12:06:01

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#6 2024-10-09 13:08:34

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#7 2024-10-09 17:50:34

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#8 2024-10-10 03:16:06

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#9 2024-10-10 06:23:49

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#10 2024-10-10 06:32:50

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#11 2024-10-10 06:58:24

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#12 2024-10-10 11:45:54

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#13 2024-10-10 19:24:06

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#14 2024-10-11 03:09:33

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#15 2024-10-11 04:56:51

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#16 2024-10-11 09:31:58

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#17 2024-10-11 19:38:14

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#18 2024-10-12 03:59:11

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#19 2024-10-14 05:51:50

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

#20 2024-10-23 15:38:32

Re: A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox - A Universal Limit on Technology

Board footer