Proportions mod: So confusing!

[geoschmo]

Very true. However there is often a difference between pure scientific discovery and technological advancment. The greats that you mention and others like them are exceedingly rare. Most of technology and invention is a gradual process of hard work and experimentation that is built on the work of these greats. "Standing on the shoulders of giants". And often great intuitive leaps have been made by otherwise obscure researchers that never did anything truely notable before or after their "one great discovery".

The great theoretical physics done by Einstein and others uncovered the principles of atomic power, but it was the grunt work done by many labs all over the world that put the theories into pratical applications like nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Whether or speed of advancment in this grunt work is linerly related to the number of people working on the problem is debatable. Likely reasonable arguments could be made on both sides. I am not sure if it's possible to ever know for sure, even for past discoveries, much less predict future ones.

Don't get me wrong though. I am not trying to make the case that Proportions somehow "has it wrong". I am simply engaging in a philisophical discussion.

I tend to take a much more abstract view of all of this stuff in SE4 anyway, rather than try to shoehorn it into a strict realistic view. I see research in SE4 as being the more practical application side of things. It's the R&D. In many cases "more money" is exactly what brings about innovation.

Geoschmo

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
This "debate" is really funny.

Graeme Dice, no offense, but you have completely missed almost all of (if not all of) PvK's points, and you are insanely wrong about how advanced humans will be in a few centuries.

I debate for the sake of debate, whether or not I truly agree with a position. I also don't think that it's that far off in the future where we will be able to send off an automated factory to a nickel/iron asteroid, and have it produce just about anything from the materials present.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by oleg:
30 years ago we were on Moon. Where are we now ?
Nay, progress is greatly overrated.[/QB]

Right now we are about as far from getting a man to Mars as we were from getting a man to the Moon when Kennedy committed the States to it. In other words, we could have the technological capability to get a person there and back again within a couple of decades if we decided to do it.

[Mylon]

I dare claim that we have the technology to do it now. It's just that lifting up enough people, supplies, and fuel for a 6 month mission may prove a little more costly than what anyone would be willing to bear. The problem usually isn't what's possibe, but what is practical. SEIV seems to casually ignore this as you can easily run your empire into bankrupcy without rioting of any sort, much less being "relieved" of command for poor performance.

[ October 24, 2002, 06:36: Message edited by: Mylon ]

[Phoenix-D]

SE4 also has different races; personally I would be a bit peeved if all the races used the type of behavior you're talking about. In certain races, and in others under the right circumstances, you *wouldn't* get riots from no production.

PHoenix-D

[Fyron]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
I debate for the sake of debate, whether or not I truly agree with a position. I also don't think that it's that far off in the future where we will be able to send off an automated factory to a nickel/iron asteroid, and have it produce just about anything from the materials present.

A factory cannot produce just any old thing. It can only produce what it is designed to produce without being completely retooled. A single factory capable of producing anything will probably never be possible.

[dogscoff]

Right now we are about as far from getting a man to Mars as we were from getting a man to the Moon when Kennedy committed the States to it. In other words, we could have the technological capability to get a person there and back again within a couple of decades if we decided to do it.

...

I dare claim that we have the technology to do it now.

I read a book a while agao by Arthur C Clarke. Can't remember what it was called, but it was looking at the possibility of going to Mars and terraforming it etc etc.

Anyway, in this book, there was mention of a project conceived just after the 2nd W War by one of the nazi rocket scientists. He had laid out plans and costs for a trip to Mars using 1940s or 1950s technology! He would have lifted a hideous amount of hardware into space using bigass rockets, then used more bigass rockets to send a fleet of 12 ships to Mars.

He described the costs of things by comparing them to military campaigns, and decided that a trip to Mars could have been done for the same price as a "small war".

Now this guy clearly wasn't quite screwed on tight enough, and hardly anything was known at that point about the effects of zero-G and survival in space so the mission might well have failed for those reasons, but I imagine his maths would have been sound as regards moving the necessary amount of mass the required distance.
With what we know now there's no doubt we could get ppl to Mars if someone was just willing to cough up the cash.

Maybe if we could persuade certain world leaders to refrain from starting small wars, the human race could actually do something useful.

Not sure where I'm going with all this, but it was an interesting book...

[geoschmo]

[quote]Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:

A factory cannot produce just any old thing. It can only produce what it is designed to produce without being completely retooled. A single factory capable of producing anything will probably never be possible.

This could be an issue with symantics. It may be possible very soon (<100 years) to create a small automated "factory" that can produce anything we set it up to produce, but not everything without being retooled as you say. But it could produce a wide range of finished goods without being retooled. The same robots for example could be reprogrammed to build cars or pickup trucks with very minor programming changes. While switching to make 3 piece suits will be a little more difficult.

Also, given another 100 years in the process of laser modeling and you will have automated processes capable of a truely astonishing range of flexibility. Currently it's only used for rapid protoyping and what not, but it's not too far from being able to produce usable assemply line parts. Not quite a matter replicator ala Trek, but not far from it.

Also, there may be truely no limits to what can be done if we are able to come up with some practical nano-technology.

Geoschmo

[oleg]

[quote]Originally posted by geoschmo:

quote:

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Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:

A factory cannot produce just any old thing. It can only produce what it is designed to produce without being completely retooled. A single factory capable of producing anything will probably never be possible.

This could be an issue with symantics. It may be possible very soon (<100 years) to create a small automated "factory" that can produce anything we set it up to produce, but not everything without being retooled as you say. But it could produce a wide range of finished goods without being retooled. The same robots for example could be reprogrammed to build cars or pickup trucks with very minor programming changes. While switching to make 3 piece suits will be a little more difficult.

Also, given another 100 years in the process of laser modeling and you will have automated processes capable of a truely astonishing range of flexibility. Currently it's only used for rapid protoyping and what not, but it's not too far from being able to produce usable assemply line parts. Not quite a matter replicator ala Trek, but not far from it.

Also, there may be truely no limits to what can be done if we are able to come up with some practical nano-technology.

Geoschmo

---

If we can make a factory that will produce anything then it will certainly able to produce copies of itself. Then humanity will cease to exist. You say it will be possible very soon (<100y) ? Geee, next generation is the Last one.

[oleg]

I guess we should wait and see. Certainly, humanity is not a pinacle of evolution.