Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

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> Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation.

Yes, when you have low regard for human life and the environment you can move quite quickly.

> The insane amount of progress in a short period does seem to have slowed.

The phone I carry has more computing capability than all of the computers used in the Apollo program combined.

I’m able to reliably establish video calls with people on the other side of the planet while walking my dog.

My photos are grouped by person using facial recognition.

Shooting 120 FPS 4K video is built into my 200 gram phone (20 years ago you rented a camcorder from blockbuster the size of a briefcase to record effectively 320x240 onto a VHS tape).

The text contents of the library of congress can fit onto a micro sd card the size of a fingernail that costs less than $100.

The pace of technology innovation is astounding. It’s moved so quickly that we’re disappointed when the exponential growth of transistors slowed down.

And that's just tech. Materials science has moved dramatically. Just look at how planes, cars are built today.

We're entering the age of fully dynamic production lines. 3d printing's true strength here is not printing the object, but the molds.

Medical science, genetics specifically. We've come a long way, but this field is still like computing was in the 1940s.

We barely understand genetic expression as a whole process, eg how the entire genome is effected by modifications, and changes.

Yet when we do, the changes will be astounding. The end of most disease, the ability to use organisms to do our bidding, nanotech isn't going to be metal, but instead, bio.

We're about to set boots on Mars, in a decade we'll likely have permanent residency there. Our first new planet.

With that comes the potential to move industry to space, mining asteroids, power generation, and more.

There are endless, massive changes coming, we're merely in a period where they are all coming together.

The next 50 years will make the last 50 look glacial...

> And that's just tech. Materials science has moved dramatically. Just look at how planes, cars are built today.

Batteries, man. I am constantly astounded at how much power you can get out of a battery today. The fastest production car (0-60) ever made runs on one.

Batteries are a massive materials science success story. We are less than a decade away from 1000 mile range electric cars that do 0-60 in sub 3 seconds. These were Bugatti Veyron numbers a decade back, and that thing had a fuel efficiency of 4mpg.

Exactly. Look at mRNA. Nobody expected vaccines to come so fast, and be so good.

> Just look at how planes, cars are built today.

To drive that point home, the metal in a new car did not exist a decade ago. To someone not intimately involved with materials, that was mind-blowing

What specific metal are you talking about?

Are we talking America or globally? Because you're listing a lot of things that are now more correctly thought of as Asian innovations if we look at manufacturing and know-how.

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