30 years after this picture was taken we had jet fighters and nuclear bombs...

I've been feeding advanced technology to a secret cabal of politicians and CEOs for 1 and 1/2 centuries. You guys are almost ready for the big one, but you're not quite there yet.

t. alien

So nuclear bombs were ready by 1901? Nice cover up

And 30 years ago the notion of having a computer 1000 times stronger than the supercomputers at the time which could fit into your pocket would be absurd

Underrated

Then why hasnt aircraft design changed since the 80s and ship design changed since the 60s?

Because we have produced very good designs for those things. The basic design of a hammer hasn't changed in a very long time either, but that is not a metric for technological progress.
The vast majority of the progress has been made in circuitry and computation. The progress we have made in these areas is absolutely staggering once you begin to understand what type of undertaking it has been.

^this

I just pulled a computing device that in the 60s would have been bigger than the room I'm sitting in out of my pocket, tapped its glass screen (no buttons) a few times, causing it to send a radio signal to a tower several miles away, which bounced that signal up through the atmosphere into space to a satellite, which then bounced that signal all the way back down to a satellite dish connected to a hub station that converted that signal into digital data and then sent it over a fiber-optic cable to a computer hundreds of miles away. All that, just so I could call you an idiot.

You idiot.

Honesty though, read some older science fiction and they were projecting that not now, but even decades and centuries in the future we'd still be using massive room filling vacuum tube computers to do simple ballistics calculations. Giant computers far less powerful than the phone you have in your poctet right now. The whole concept of personal computers, let alone the Internet and massive worldwide real time connectivity was such a paradigm shift it didn't even occur to people to speculate about.

Yes, there is some hope that soon technological progress as a whole will get out of the realm of bits and back to the realm of atoms. The trouble is, though, that materials science can't progress infinitely, there are certain things that simply are and aren't physically possible. More giant technological projects (real mass space travel, etc.) haven't been stopped by a lack of theoretical scientific knowledge per second but rather by the engineering challenges and economic considerations.

In contrast, much advancement in computer science can be made through sheer theoretical improvements in efficiencies in mathematics and programming. That said, Moore's Law may soon break down as we become physically unable to fit more circuits on smaller chips. Only programming efficiencies can then create progress unless we get to quantum computing, but then you're in crazy singularity territory anyways.

>Moore's Law may soon break down
Heresy.

Thank you ayy lmao

The laws of physics mostly. We can put more effort into science but the usefulness of science depends on things outside our control.

Althou it may sound preposterous, it depends on whom is it that is answering the question.

I will heavily rely on the thesis of a ''very popular'' book that came out some years ago, Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson; to provide a really short answer: inclusive political and economic institutions have allowed the processes that drives general progress.That by itself has allowed to have, so to say,an historically high number of people chasing their interest—which can be to either discover or to create means and ways to further enhance human productivity. The inclusive political and inclusive economic institution have put a stop the very popular practice of destroying innovation by not allowing, to use a term coined by an economist of the ASOET(Austrian School of Economic Thought), the processes of Creative Destruction that usually follows the implementation of newer forms of doing the same than before but more efficiently. What this means is that, and I'll once more cite Acemoglu's book, and add as well a bit of the information regarding this topic on The Economy on One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt; is that the new technology has escaped being destroyed or rejected because it could disturb the general order of things already in motion. As, if I recall the name correctly, Queen Elisabeth told one of the early innovators of the spinning wheel, if his invention were to take place, and it displaced so much population out of their bushiness, how would she avoid riots or disturbances to the order of things during her reign? Of course, we have seen such actions not only on England. One way or another, the process we call Creative Destruction has been historically ''prevented,'' taking with it the innovation and much of the benefits we get from it. It goes without saying that research(scientific research) has been absolutely needed, but by itself, while really important in the process, is simply not enough to allow the general progress.

Number of players have decreased. USA, EU, China. How can you imagine war between 2 of these empires? It is very expensive and give advantage to third side.

Also, bear in mind that the Industrial Revolution had a great impact on our current ways of living. The Industrial Revolution allowed for the innovation that would later fuel the changes that we have seen up to this point.

While many people may readily say it was ''science,'' I will have to say that it seems that it was, by itself, as I took the liberty to say before, not enough. Not being afraid to do science, and being allowed to invent things for your benefit seem to have had an effect of, so to say, motivation to continue the endeavour. Had we been living on a time and space where we would be chased or killed, and research banned or destroyed, it would have been nearly impossible, without the consent of the ruling classes, to have had such progress in such a low amount of time.

I hope that answer the question.

Wtf aircrafts and ships are vastly more efficient now due to advantages of Simulation and numerical solving fluid dynamics.

Your use of whom in the first sentence is incorrect so I'm not going to read the rest of your posts

>What made technology progression speed up insanely fast in the early 20th century
The extraction of huge amounts of the cheap and abundant energy source that we call oil.
>and then slow way back down again?
Did it really slow down?

well played

/Thread

Motivation is everything. Even money in a prosperous society is not as effective a motivator as the prospect of your society being wiped out.

>that one woman holding a mobile phone

>That said, Moore's Law may soon break down as we become physically unable to fit more circuits on smaller chips.
It already has. 14nm process node was delayed by about 6 months, and 10nm node will be delayed even more. After that, we might get a few more nodes from EUV, but with each process node costing more than the last, don't expect them to arrive in a timely fashion.

>Moore's Law may soon break down

Already happened in 1995

We will silence the nonbelievers.
Computation isn't finished until we make transistors out of strings.

Current aircraft have myriads of things to improve. Why dont aircraft cost as much as cars. Why dont we have supersonic airliners even if the technological base exists? Why dont we have hypersonic shuttles? Why are ships still running on bunker oil and are still as fast as they were 100 years ago?
Your reasoning is like saying in 1984 that the commodore computer is a very good design and we dont need to improve it.

Ww2 and the cold war.