WMN: t3_1p0cwf_t1_ccxifgf

[TITLE]

I believe we have reached a sort of wall in technological advancements and that every technology that is possible has been achieved. CMV

[vincentkun]

I believe that as we stand, science has reached point where everything that can be invented is already and that all that is left is simply to refine, perfect and make technologies more widely used. I believe things like space colonization and those working fission(fusion?) plants will never be possible. I believe progress in computing technology has also hit a massive wall. I also believe that we will never be able to develop more efficient batteries. Just to name some examples. What I mean is, when I try to imagine to the future, say 50 years from now, I do not imagine anything to do with space, I do not imagine there is a cure for cancer, I do not imagine petabyte computers nor quantum computing. What I imagine though is people more in tune with technology, computers used more and more in classrooms for example. More jobs are automated by machines as well. But, still using the same technologies that exist today, maybe more refined, but still fundamentally the same thing. What is considered impossible now, will not become possible in the future, because we have the knowledge to know what can and cannot happen. In other words, has technology reached some sort of peak? Edit: I hope I explained myself properly, this is just something I was thinking deeply about during a Sociology class. But I have felt this way for a couple of years now.

[Wackyd01]

30 years ago I was a little kid, I used to go to the arcade because that was the only place to play video games. I remember one time I went and there was this amazing new game called "Dragon's Lair", it cost like $1 to play but it was incredible at the time. Last night I downloaded it and played it on my phone. When I was a kid we didn't even dream we'd be playing games on a phone and we thought graphics would never get better after the first Nintendo came out. No offense but you're insane if you think that technology won't advance like crazy in the next 50 years, most likely in ways that we can't even think of right now.

[Duffalpha]

People have been saying that forever. There was a huge sensation in 1899 when it was alleged the commissioner of the patent office demanded the office be shut down since there was "nothing left to invent." You use the iPhone as an example of declining iterative improvement. Well we can all agree that the iPhone was a huge leap ahead of the iPod. Well the iPod was released in 2001 and was still being produced with the same iterative improvements until 2009 (when it became an iTouch). I think you are just confusing the life cycle of a device with a slowing of innovation. Every iPhone has been an iPhone. I'm sure once *it* has been out 9 years, there will be another shocking leap forward. With 3D printing, quantum computing, new understandings of biology, etc there has never been a more open environment for invention. The barriers of entry for fabrication and prototyping are collapsing. You are seeing people practice genetic engineering in their basements. Guys 3D printing new devices while their wives cook in the next room. Computer processing power is continuing to increase exponentially... if anything there has been, and will continue to be, more invention than ever before.

[vincentkun]

I've read a couple of articles that talk about computing growth and how it has actually slowed in terms of growth. A better example than the Iphone would be our cars, they are still using the same basic technology, sure electrical cars have been having some sort of a boom lately, but still, that technology already existed.

[VivasMadness]

I really don't think so, there's really a lot of room for improvement in the battery department, which is in my opinion what is really dragging us down technologically, hell compared to most of our gadgets they seem primitive. Just an anecdote: When GM entered the automotive game it generated a monopoly around fuel to win market over electric cars (yes there were electric cars at the time) this led them to fail economically and only reappear recently Imagine battery technology now if we had used electric cars for 100 years, just a thought Plus we are just starting to understand what graphene is capable of! Hell the US military probably already has technology to plunge us into a new age of modernism

[gamergirl316]

I choose to politely disagree with you. Nothing is impossible. It was once thought impossible for humans to fly, now we have airplanes. If you tried to explain the internet to someone from the early or mid-1900s, everyone would look at you like you're insane. I believe that in the future, we will have new technology that you can't even imagine. I don't know when that will happen, but it could. Anything is possible.

[vincentkun]

But now we have a much, much wider knowledge of how things work, in terms of physics and chemistry. To put an example, we know for sure that an object can't go faster than the speed of light, I do not think that's something that can be proven false in the future.

[Crayshack]

I firmly believe that we will one day be able to send something faster than the speed of light. Just because we don't know how to do it now doesn't mean we won't later. Also, [we do have hypothetical methods that may work as an FTL technology.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White%E2%80%93Juday_warp-field_interferometer) They are only in the early stages of research and currently seem too impractical, but refinements in the method and advancements in power generation might one day make it possible. Your great grandchildren might think of taking an FTL flight the same way you think of taking a trans-Atlantic flight (I imagine that once upon a time your great grandfather would have thought of a trans-Atlantic flight the same way you now think of FTL).

[vincentkun]

With that FTL tech, you would not be violating the laws of light speed, but you would be violating the laws of going the past. It actually requires time travel to the past to be possible in order for it to work. This also poses some other problems, for example, if FTL tech was possible, that means that another species that might have evolved in other planets, much more advanced than us would have discovered it before us. Assuming we as humans are nothing special in the universe, that means that at least a couple thousands of these species have discovered it at least billions of years before us. The amount of time that has passed means that at least a couple of these species would have reached every single star in the universe. Chances are, at least a couple of them would have seen us, and I heavily doubt that. As such I believe that IF there is a way for FTL to exist, it would require you to first get to the desired location and place some sort of gate, or make some sort of metaphorical train tracks to get to that place. This would of course require you to get there at sublight speeds first. Which as well, would require energy generating technologies that we do not have.

[Crayshack]

Not seeing any signs of alien life on Earth is hardly evidence that FTL is impossible. We could be so boringly average of a planet they didn't bother doing anything with us. We could be inconvenient for reasons that will remain incomprehensible to us until we actually achieve FTL. It could be that the universe is young enough that other species that have discovered FTL have not yet had the time to spread to all of the stars. We could be lucky enough to be the first to discover FTL (Having never seen alien life, we have no way of knowing what the average pace of evolution is. We could have evolved incredibly fast.) Or even what I consider to be the most terrifying idea of all, we could be alone in the universe and members of the only biosphere in all existence (unlikely, but still technically possible). Keep in mind that lack of evidence for something is not evidence for the lack of something.

[vincentkun]

Thing is we have to assume that we are nothing special in the universe, it is a basis with which we can theorize, so I believe the we are by no means the only members in the universe. On the other hand this helps validate your reasoning that we are uninteresting to other species and as such they see nothing worth stopping here long for. But if species have been with this technology at least 1 billion years, it is safer to assume that thousands go to the tech, and at least dozens might have visited us, and at least one would have found something worth stopping for here. Maybe colonization, gathering energy from the sun, or whatever reason. It could be that the universe is young enough, but if no species have had the time to get here with FTL travel, and asumming thousands of species have achieved it in this galaxy alone, then it must be a very limited form of it. Maybe they only find a way to reach 100%(technically not FTL) or 99.9999%(definitively not FTL) of light speed, which means there is no possible way they could have gotten here, and that would be a valid reason. I find this topic very interesting and fun to discuss.

[caw81]

[STA-CITE]> What is considered impossible now, will not become possible in the future, because we have the knowledge to know what can and cannot happen. [END-CITE]But we *don't* have the knowledge that new things cannot be invented in the future. We don't know if artificial intelligence is possible, we don't know. We don't know if nanotech is possible. We don't know if moving-video tattoos is possible.

[vincentkun]

Nanotech is actually something that exists and would fall into the category of refining technologies. Same with AI. Those things are not considered impossible right now. An example of something we truly consider impossible is the fact that no object can go faster than the speed o light.

[Amablue]

You've set up an impossible scenario. That's a fundamental constraint of the universe. Few things are going to be truly impossible unless they run up against the fundamental constraints of physics. Flight might have been considered impossible by some, but really it was a just an engineering problem to be solved. The fact that some animal few was proof that it was possible under some conditions. Everything in technology is just engineering problems. The invention of new types of AI is definitely new technology, not just refinement. From what it sounds like, every possible improvement I can pose are just refinements. Are self driving cars a refinement, or is that something new? Are humanoid robots that can walk and navigate human environment new technology? Are consumer grade space shuttles new technology? I don't think you've posed a meaningful way to differentiate between a refinement and a new technology. In fact, I think there's no such distinction. All refinements are new technology.

[vincentkun]

I understand my mistake, I should have phrased the thread better than I did. Somehow I lost track, yes new AI would be new technology and so would developments in nanotech. Part of what I believe is that we will never get AI smarter than humans for example.

[Crayshack]

[STA-CITE]> we will never get AI smarter than humans [END-CITE]The human brain is estimated to hold about 2.5 PB. It is simply a matter of building a computer with that processing power and the proper protocols for it to learn on it's own (the second part already exists). While we are not yet close to that processing power, we are steadily building more and more powerful computers and it is only a matter of time before we reach that point.

[vincentkun]

In terms of AI I do not believe that the bottleneck will be the processing power as much as the actual programming. Having a computer with 2.5PB is only one of the steps, building a program that will use those 2.5PB will be the hard part in my opinion.

[Crayshack]

We wouldn't have to code every bit of it's thought process and behavior, we would only need to give it protocols to learn for itself. [We have already made rudimentary AI that are capable of doing this](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)), it is easy to imagine us making more and more efficient systems over time.

[vincentkun]

That's actually quite interesting. I still think that we are decades away from having one, but now it doesn't look impossible. Get one. ∆

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[Crayshack]

I agree that we are most likely decades away from an AI that can rival a human mind. It has been a pleasure debating with you.

[Amablue]

Why? What is it about a human mind that's fundamentally impossible or infeasible for a computer to simulate it?

[vincentkun]

Nothing, it may or may not be possible. I just do not see it happening. There is no current AI even remotely near human levels of intelligence, or with anything close to being a conscience. The amount of processing power and other considerations would have to be too huge, not to mention the actual programming. Maybe such a program that can think for itself, and then, think about its own thoughts cannot exist.

[Amablue]

[STA-CITE]> There is no current AI even remotely near human levels of intelligence, or with anything close to being a conscience. [END-CITE]How do you know this? Google among others have some pretty interesting projects with AI going on. I mean, they have machines that can listen to and understand human speech, and form an understanding of it good enough to translate it into other languages. They were not hardcoded with any grammar rules, they did it all by learning. A lot of people consider understanding language to be one factor necessary for 'understanding' or consciousness of some kind, and that's clearly doable. [STA-CITE]> The amount of processing power and other considerations would have to be too huge [END-CITE]Even if that were true, which it might not be, then it's just a matter of time until we have computers that are powerful enough. Or we can just invent a new type of hardware all together (hey, a new technology!) that doesn't have the constraints we run into with the traditional computers we have today. But maybe we don't need to simulate everything about a brain anyway. We just need to isolate the processes that are necessary to create what we see as intelligence, and replicate those. The hard part here I think is just understanding how the brain works (which we are already make a lot of progress on!), replicating it with software at that point would be relatively easy. And even if computers aren't and are never powerful enough, we could just run the simulation really really slowly, and have it improved over time. [STA-CITE]> not to mention the actual programming [END-CITE]Meh, just an engineering problem. Those always fall down with enough time and manpower and cleverness thrown at them.

[Crayshack]

50 years ago, people would have had no ability to imagine stuff like smartphones, laptops, hybrid cars, and many other things that we take for granted. Even if you only look back just 10 years there has been massive advancement in information technology. From what I can tell, it seems like the rate of technological advancement has been accelerating and shows no sign of ceasing.

[vincentkun]

Yes but 50 years ago there was a rapid technological growth. Rocket Science was booming for example, computer science was bringing something new every day, there were clear signs of massive technological growth at the time, we are talking about the 60's - 70's 50 years ago.

[Crayshack]

There still is massive technological growth today. When I was a kid (15 years ago) most computer files would be measured in kB, and a file in MB would be huge. When I bought my first computer for myself (5 years ago) I got an average sized hard drive which was 60 GB. When I upgraded that computer (3 years ago) I got the smallest hard drive I could find included at 500 GB. My current computer (less than a year old) has a TB of hard drive. That is only one aspect of one type of technology. Memory (general and dedicated graphics), CPU, and network connections have advanced in a similar way. I would not be surprised if it becomes possible to buy a computer 15 years from now that has a PB of hard drive and a memory measured in TB.

[HighPriestofShiloh]

My phone is more powerful than the new laptop I bought 5 years ago. My watch is more powerful than the computer I bought 15 years ago.

[SirJefferE]

[STA-CITE]>>I believe that as we stand, science has reached point where everything that can be invented is already and that all that is left is simply to refine, perfect and make technologies more widely used. [END-CITE]I'm a little confused by your use of the word 'invented'. Reading through the rest of your posts it seems like you mean something closer to 'discovered' or 'theorized'. Something like a battery, for example, was invented thousands of years ago, does this mean that new and more efficient types of batteries don't count as a technological advancement because they're 'refined' and not 'invented'? What if it's a completely new type of battery, or one using a radically more efficient method of storing the energy? With what limited information on batteries I have, I still recall reading news story after news story about new research and studies coming out on better batteries. There's a whole lot of research going on in things like [Carbon Nanotubes](http://www.nanomagazine.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&id=1160:carbon-nanotube-technology-produces-up-to-tenfold-increase-in-lithium-ion-battery-power) that provide vast amounts of power compared to current batteries. Computer controlled cars are also getting bigger, and yet I believe there's still a ton of room for improvement there. Consider if we were to automate *everything* on the road. Collisons and other accidents would go way down, so low that we might start to wonder why we're even driving around a few tons of metal just to get us from A to B. Cars might get smaller, lighter, they could be roomier because we wouldn't need things like a dashboard or a steering wheel. We might not even need to look out the window at all. Imagine reclining back in a lounge chair while in your 'car', facing another passenger who is also reclined and relaxed, having a conversation while you commute to work or whatever. Imagine the entire thing is powered by solar energy, both from the top of the car and from electric charging stations set up throughout the world. Would you consider this type of transportation system 'new' or just 'refined'? [STA-CITE]>I believe things like space colonization and those working fission(fusion?) plants will never be possible. I believe progress in computing technology has also hit a massive wall. I also believe that we will never be able to develop more efficient batteries. Just to name some examples. [END-CITE]I probably shouldn't have broken this post up into chunks, because I've already addressed the batteries part to some extent up there. Space is tricky, but we are currently putting a *very* minimal amount of money into it and we're still making pretty huge strides. I don't know that we'll ever break out of our solar system, and even colonizing mars is a *huge* step, but the basics of the technology is there, and while we'll need to 'invent' or 'refine' it more, I haven't really seen studies that indicate that it's impossible. I'm not sure about fission or fusion plants, but I'd rather see us perfect solar technology, and that is another thing that has been making [pretty big advancements](http://cleantechnica.com/2013/05/15/caution-wet-solar-power-new-affordable-solar-paint-research/) the past few years, and there is still a great deal to go there. Again, I don't know if that's the kind of thing that will convince you. If someone creates a new and efficient method to do the same old thing (collect solar energy), do you consider that an invention or a refinement? Does the distinction even matter? [STA-CITE]>>What I mean is, when I try to imagine to the future, say 50 years from now, I do not imagine anything to do with space, I do not imagine there is a cure for cancer, I do not imagine petabyte computers nor quantum computing. [END-CITE]Just last year we landed the most advanced rover that has ever been on Mars. Did you watch that and think, "Okay, that's it. We can't possibly do anything more." ? I'd kind of get where you're coming from if nothing had happened these last five or ten years, but every single month (Every week even) I see something new and exciting, something that, given a few years, might change *everything* about certain ways of life. As someone else said above, [Moore's Law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transistor_Count_and_Moore%27s_Law_-_2011.svg) is still holding up, and has no indication of slowing down. It took [51 years](http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/18/amazing-facts-and-figures-about-the-evolution-of-hard-disk-drives/) from the introduction of harddrives for the size to reach one TB. Only two years later 2TB drives were available. These days you can get 4TB personal computer drives. Is there any research at all available that indicates we're approaching a cap? It seems an arbitrary thing to believe for no reason at all. Cancer is still big, but there's interesting things going on there as well. I'll admit again that my research here is pretty limited, but [this chart](http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2010/browse_csr.php?section=1&page=sect_01_table.03.html) for example shows the U.S. Cancer Death Rates from 1950s until now. The mortality rate has gone down across the board since then. Still, that's the last 50 years, maybe we're at the end of it. [Why, then](http://www.cancer.gov/newscenter) are there new studies out every single month about some new diagnostics, treatments, anti cancer compounds, gene variations, etc etc that may help us understand and better treat cancer? [STA-CITE]>>What I imagine though is people more in tune with technology, computers used more and more in classrooms for example. More jobs are automated by machines as well. But, still using the same technologies that exist today, maybe more refined, but still fundamentally the same thing. [END-CITE]'Fundamentally the same thing' is tricky to me. Are smartphones new? They're just fundamentally the same thing as computers and phones, which have existed for the last sixty to a hundred years. Sure they have cameras, networking, gps, etc built in, but all of those things *existed* a hundred years ago. Show my smartphone to a person in the early 1900s though and he's going to be blown away. Will he see it as a 'new' invention or will he just say, "Oh I see you've refined a lot of technology there." Again, I can't really see how the distinction matters. Things that we were not able to do then we are now able to do. In the future there are things we cannot currently do that we will be able to do. [STA-CITE]>>What is considered impossible now, will not become possible in the future, because we have the knowledge to know what can and cannot happen. In other words, has technology reached some sort of peak? Edit: I hope I explained myself properly, this is just something I was thinking deeply about during a Sociology class. But I have felt this way for a couple of years now. [END-CITE] In some cases, you may be right. It's looking pretty likely that there are some set limits we cannot possibly overcome (The speed of light, for example). We're note one hundred percent certain on this, but we're pretty damn close to it. But there are very *few* things that we consider impossible, and hundreds of millions of things that we just don't know how to do yet. Things that haven't been discovered, haven't been theorized, maybe people have thought of it and just plain been wrong. What makes this specific time period special? I haven't really seen a 'wall' in any one field of technology. What research has been done to show that it's right ahead of us? Sorry for rambling a bit, I should probably scroll back and reread and edit and so on, but I've got to go for now. TLDR version: I really can't see where you're coming from, and I'm not sure any recent research in any field backs up your views at all. But I will admit that I am a little fuzzy on what exactly your views even are.

[vincentkun]

Interesting read, and also I didn't explain myself properly so your fuzziness is completely understandable. To be honest my problem is that I considered a lot of new technologies as "refinements" instead of the what they were. In other words, when I wrote the OP I thought of the smartphones as a refinement of cellphones and not as new technology. I was fundamentally wrong when I wrote the post. My true intention was that we have reached a peak and though we would continue to get new "refinements"(new technologies) in things we already had, we already had obtained the type of technologies we will be using for centuries. For example, sure we would send better and better rovers to Mars, but we would never be able to send astronauts because the technologies(different engines, faster travel, cryogenics maybe) to get them there and back would never be developed. Of course after reading all of the posts I got a sense of things that are being developed.

[SirJefferE]

Technology evolves. Almost every single technology is a refinement of another. When you think of it that way, your post appears to be something along the lines of, "I believe we have reached a wall in evolution and that every species possible has been achieved." A lot of species have been 'invented' for lack of a better word, but if you trace them back far enough, then really, they're all just refinements of the same single celled organism. A hundred million years into the future, I'm sure there will be better, worse, different, species. They'll all be the same thing, just refined to fit the current environment. General relativity isn't new. It's just refined from Newton's law of universal gravitation. Newtons laws weren't new either, he was influenced by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and more. It's the same all over. Evolution, technology, science, books, movies, stories of all kinds. There is nothing 'new' in the past few thousand years of history. Everything is influenced by everything else, everything continues to be refined, works continue to be built upon, and discoveries based on those works continue to be made. Why would that suddenly stop?

[Antimutt]

In the last century we picked the lowest hanging fruit of technology. There is more yet to be found, but it's getting tougher more quickly than it has been. Much of the principles of 20th century science were broached at the beginning of that century - quantum physics, relativity, radio, x-ray crystallography etc. Which means some people back then thought what you think now, that progress would subsequently consist of refinements & that a grand unified field theory (of everything) was within grasp. They were partially right, there was a whole century mostly of refinement. But now that is over - holes and gaps in the old theories are being found. Fusion power: will come, but some associated tech may not qualitatively advance - we may still be bolting a steam engine on the side to get power out of it in 50 years. Battery: A [BEC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose_einstein_condensate) can have unlimited mass, charge the initial particles and you've got orders of magnitude more storage. Meta materials: We've only scratched the surface with graphene laminates. Carbon atoms can be put together in uncountable new forms - heard of [carbyne?](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163997-carbyne-a-new-form-of-carbon-thats-stronger-than-graphene)

[vincentkun]

∆ "In the last century we picked the lowest hanging fruit of technology." One for you because this was the post that explained both why I think we have reached the limit and also why we haven't.

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[alecbenzer]

Why do you believe this?

[vincentkun]

Multiple reasons, to name on of these lets take Iphones for example. Every new iteration is basically the same thing, whats new are refinements and gimmicks. Cars for example have been using basically the same technology for a long time now. Computers were evolving quickly until recently where they are evolving at a snails pace because of multiple technological walls that cannot be overcome.

[SirJefferE]

What walls? Computers at still advancing fairly quickly, and I haven't really seen any evidence that they can't go further.

[RegressToTheMean]

You should really look at [Moore's Law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law). While the doubling capacity is likely to slow, it is by no means going to hit a wall. As processers become smaller and more powerful, things like nanotechnology will grow at a rate that the processors do. This type of technology also has the possibility on a macro scale as well - one example is the ability of 'stacking' on semiconductors. One piece that is just really starting to grab some traction is human interface. There has been some success with machine human interface and blindness. As technology progresses the likelihood of cybernetic parts for humanity will also increase. In fact, it's one of [Google's long-term goals](http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57600765-93/what-google-glass-aspires-to-be/) We are a long, long way from hitting a technological wall.

[Crayshack]

10 years ago [this](http://www.fiercewireless.com/special-reports/palm-sendo-these-are-biggest-handset-flameouts/sierra-wireless-voq) was the state of the art smartphone, a far cry from what the smartphones of today are capable of. Cars have recently undergone a massive revolution with the refinement of hybrid-electric cars and advancements in safety technology. Computers continue to advance quickly, and I have no idea what technological wall you are talking about. Everything indicates that [Moore's Law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law) is still accurate and will remain so for some time, if not indefinitely. Some people (including myself) believe that technology is advancing faster today than it ever has in the past.

[acordr12]

You say that like apple is trying to make the most complicated advanced piece of technology they can possibly create. But they aren't. They aren't an R&D lab, they're a company trying to make as much profit as possible and they've found a very effective way of doing this. In fact apple's iphone strategy is making a very simple but very effective product. They could pack more innovative features in but probably choose not to.

[Amarkov]

Maybe every new iteration of the iPhone is the same thing simply because there have been there have been 7 iPhones in the 5 years since they've been out?

[McKoijion]

[STA-CITE]> "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943. [END-CITE][STA-CITE]> "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876. [END-CITE][STA-CITE]> "While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility." -- Lee DeForest, inventor. [END-CITE][STA-CITE]> "Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax." -- William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, British scientist, 1899. [END-CITE][STA-CITE]> "There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." -- Albert Einstein, 1932. [END-CITE][STA-CITE]> "Everything that can be invented has been invented." -- Attributed to Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899, but known to be an urban legend. [END-CITE]And for good measure, Arthur C. Clarke's Three Laws: [STA-CITE]> When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. [END-CITE][STA-CITE]> The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. [END-CITE]> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[Rubin0]

Here is a list of emerging technologies. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies I think it's pretty clear that there is still much left to be accomplished.

[SuperBobbis]

It's also good to note for people who keep saying this. During the 1880's (85, I believe) a man once said the same thing. The very next month toilet paper was invented.

[paperclip1213]

Seeing flying car and jet pack on the list just made me want to die of happiness, but of course, the desire to use one in my lifetime kept me alive! :O

[vincentkun]

This is actually very interesting, though reading most of them, there seems to be some pretty massive walls in order for them to be viable. Still, this helps prove that I'm wrong in my assessment.

[HighPriestofShiloh]

You should respond to Rubin0 again and award a delta.

[vincentkun]

∆ This one, just read all of those and found them interesting. I no longer can see myself thinking that there will be no more advancement after reading all of those.

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[kataskopo]

People believed sort of like you in the 1800. They were as wrong as you are, and people believing this thing in 1000 years will be as wrong as they were. See also: A short history of nearly everything, by Bill Bryson.