Technology is so unbelievably primitive compared to biology. They have to heat air to 800C to replicate photosynthesis! And they don't even get carbohydrates out of it.
Makes sense, our tech is a couple billion years behind.
Makes sense, our tech is a couple billion years behind.
I don’t know man, I think that’s pretty advanced technology.
We went from room sized transistors to nm sized ones in less than a century. No way we will need a billion years to catch up.
There's no reason to assume exponential type improvements. That's not how the world works.
Did we read the same article? This was a test. The full-scale version “would produce oxygen at a rate equivalent to several hundred trees” with close to an order of magnitude more efficiency “because a bigger machine can run at lower pressures, saving energy on compression.” There are better reasons to expect exponential improvements than not.
I just don't see any of your opening statement being even close to correct given the context. There was even significant progress in space travel and fusion in the last 50 years (e.g. first reactors being net positive after startup and reusable rockets with commercial space flights).
You see this all over the place, modern guns aren’t multiple orders of magnitude improvements over guns built 100 years ago. But they are orders of magnitude better than the absolute earliest guns ever built.
So, when looking at a prototype the question isn’t can it be improved but by how much can it be improved.
“Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
Moore's Law is the prediction that the speed of computer processors doubles every 18 months.
The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel (and former CEO of the latter), who in 1965 posited a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit,[a] and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41%. While Moore did not use empirical evidence in forecasting that the historical trend would continue, his prediction held since 1975 and has since become known as a "law".
The speed of processors actually increased much faster than the number of transistors on a chip until recently. Smaller transistors used to mean both faster switching speeds and the ability to get more done per instruction cycle. The difference between the days of a 4 bit Intel 4004 and a 32Bit 486 was vast.
Not sure why you needed to rip them apart for words that you put into their mouth.
I should probably qualify my "first transistor" statement; the device I was referring to is the first prototype created at Bell Labs in 1947. The first transistor that someone could actually buy to build a circuit out of came out a year later and was only a little larger than today's through-hole mounted transistors. They did get used to build early minicomputers, before integrated circuits took over.
> Building something useful out of that would end up comically large.
The transistors are MicroSD-size, not RPi-size, but still, it has been done:
Which could be easily accomplished by specialized bacteria dispensed to that planet's atmosphere. Yeah. Technology is billions of years behind.
Most extremophiles we’re aware of tend towards high temps or if low temps, in the context of extreme high salinity and water presence. Which don’t line up with Mars much.
We’d have to be managing the environment they grew in, which makes it hard.
The underlying issue of course being energy gradients and biochemical availability of that energy. Life ‘eats’ to survive, but if the only energy gradients are feeble and biochemically hard to access, it’s not a good environment for life as we know it.
To me, this is not "generating its own electricity". The device is still an incredible accomplishment, even more so because it's operating on Mars. But it doesn't generate its own electricity. They still need to connect it to a separate energy input to run the reaction.
I want to clarify this just in case anybody skimming the comments gets the impression that chemically splitting the CO2 into CO and oxygen gas somehow produces enough energy to sustain the reaction without external input.
As far as I know, nobody tried
Meanwhile,humans were able to solve that problem in a fraction of the time that evolution would take.
It's fair to say that we're millions of years behind the curve when it comes to creating usable energy from sunlight, however. That's an indisputable fact.
One would say humans cannot solve it faster than evolution since humanity < evolution.
There's no way this is scalable. Whatever innovation we produce here, has to be super light and super small enough to be economical.
We absolutely need a world changing type of locomotion one that isn't medieval like the one we use and pride in.
If there's an alien race that has discovered locomotion via warping the space around it (sort of like a bubble formed around an object under water allowing friction free movement) then our solution would be funny to them.
"So you dig up this dinosaur juice, you then, chuckles, light it on fire to push a tiny payload on top of it to put stuff in space?"
"Then your hope is to weaponize it so you can fight better wars and colonize other planets to dig rocks and ship it back home?"
All of this must be amusing and depressing to an alien race that has mastered space travel and then some.
We had cryogenic rocket engines in the 60s [1].
Climbing a very good rope. I think this option is the most medieval.
Using a huge launcher brings to mind trebuchets.
An electric plane can give you a higher platform but I'm skeptical of that getting fast enough to be the bulk of a launch.
Antigravity magic? I guess that's not medieval, but I'd argue that magic is in some ways quasi-medieval.
Rockets are likely the least medieval option.
You mean big explosions targeted at the right side? If the Dark Ages had that, they would be lit!
The goal is to send just enough resources that settlers can then create more of the products they need using the resources present on Mars. If you can (for example) figure out how to cultivate Mars soil to make it hospitable to Earth plants, you could turn Mars into a net exporter of food.
All of this is theoretical of course, but it's not implausible to assume that there's a "tipping point" past which inhabitants of Mars are self sufficient or can even export things to Earth.
At a guess, 23.19
However you don’t need the latest process node to produce most electronics. And integrated circuits are probably the last thing you’d produce off world.
By the way, hydrolox is not dinosaur juice. Methane would be but insufficient specific impulse is a problem.
And as for ETs being peaceful zen wizards, the fundamental problem of resource scarcity would seem to be universally applicable. It's this resource scarcity that causes species which are good at competing to develop. So it seems likely that any species intelligent enough to become technologically advanced would have a history of belligerence similar to ours.
Thinking aspirationally about what sort of species we should strive to be is great. But I find the belief that, across the universe, humans are specially anti-progress to be a little silly. The laws of physics are universal.
The development of life took a few billion years to get to where we are now, so if for some otherwise equivalent civilization that highly random process took 0.1% faster or slower, then that makes for multiple million years of difference in development.
If we encounter another civilization, then it would be a wildly implausible coincidence if they happened to be close to us in technological level - say, just a thousand years or so; a more advanced civilization would be much more advanced - and we can see just how much things change in just a few centuries of technological development.
It's fallacious to presume that we -- or any other species -- will automagically find ways to beat the lightspeed barrier, but it's also hubris to presume that our current understanding is the most "correct" that it can be. Could there be some new sea change in our understanding of the world, that allows for things general relativity considers impossible or incoherent?
My understanding of the "peaceful zen wizards" trope was that if you've got the technology to cross the unimaginably big [0] gulfs between stars, let alone the gulfs between inhabited stars, you concomitantly no longer want for resources or territory in any way that civilizations of our Kardashev type [1] understand them. What's the point of belligerence, culturally, [2] at that point? And if you do want territory and mining and extraction and whatever, why not use a combinatorial explosion of Von Neumann machines? The only reason to send actual people would be to say hello to the locals and look around.
[0] cf. Douglas Adams' intro to THGttG
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
[2] I acknowledge that humans are genetically belligerent, but we can just choose not to be, especially in conditions of plenty. The fight is close, but culture ultimately beats genetics. I present, by way of example, the condom.
Who's to say that this advanced alien race didn't have the same pains (or worse!) when they started their space program?
> There's no way this is scalable.
There is - we need to stop shipping devices from Earth's gravity well.
I wouldn't get too hung up on the "dino juice" side of the equation. Global extraction is enough to fly a couple million of the biggest rockets every year and that's only counting dino fart extraction. Add in equivalent energy from dino juice and dino... cookies? and you'd be looking at somewhere above ten million rockets every year.
Fossil fuels are about the most scalable and scaled enterprise on the planet. They produce most of the energy to feed, house, and transport billions of people.
Technology just optimizes for different things than nature. Otherwise the lander would have just carried a couple gallons of water and some algae.