🚀 go-pugleaf

> Maybe this is all too much "pie in the sky" (no pun intended :-),  
130 years is
> much too short to evolve technologies to do this sort of stuff,  
witness  what
> could be viewed as comparativly slow progress in maned spaceflight  
in the last
> 20 years (still that's probably a function of the spending). So  
this sort of
> stuff is more like 500 years off in the future. 

> 


You are guilty of the classic fallacies of extrapolation. The first  
fallacy is an overestimate of short term advance. The second is the  
underestimate of the long term. Both are due, in part, to linear  
thinking, straight line extrapolation. Technological capabilities and  
knowledge are accumulating exponententially. If you make a linear  
extrapolation in a particular field, you will tend to "draw a line"  
of some slope that seems "reasonable". But the problems invariably  
turn out to be more difficult in your field than you actually  
believed.  So the exponential will for some period of time grow  
slower (lesser slope) than your line, but when it finally does cross  
it...

I think the effect is due to the tendency to analyze technology in  
terms of a single field rather than that of the whole of human  
knowledge. There is an exponential because of the unpredictable  
interactions between areas of knowledge. A discovery in surface  
chemistry leads to a new chip that allows an instrument that lets  
physicists study an effect that leads to a new instrument that lets  
biologists unravel new secrets of the mind... and so on.

The capabilities of 130 years from now are really and truly outside  
the realm of science fiction. We can't extrapolate that far ahead at  
the current rate of advance. The exponential is rising so fast now  
that knowledgeable projection and hard science fiction are almost  
indistinquishable and cover the same time frame: no more than 30-50  
years in the future. My own feelings are that 2020 is about the limit  
at which things start getting very strange: the exponential will be  
essentially vertical with respect to human perceptions of time. Note  
that as Arel Lucas pointed out in a recent article in Cryonics, the  
size of a computer memory cell can be projected to be at the level of  
a couple atoms by that time at the latest, And that is based on a  
curve that is essentially unchanged since 1900. 


In 2126 we'll be able to do just about anything we care to do with  
that oversized snowball. As to what that might be, I fear my crystal  
ball is bit cloudy today.