Re: Progress

On Jul 16, 8:53 pm, "Keith F. Lynch" <k...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Forty years ago today, the first manned mission to land on the moon
launched.  (And sixty-four years ago today was the first nuclear
explosion, in New Mexico.)

Has progress slowed down?  The 40 years through 1969 gave us
answering machines, antibiotics, computers, contact lenses, cryonics,
fiberoptics, fluorescent lights, freon, helicopters, integrated
circuits, jets, lasers, nuclear explosives, nuclear power, nylon,
organ transplants, photocopiers, radio astronomy, radar, satellites,
supersonic flight, teflon, television, transistors, unmanned probes
to other planets, velcro, videotape, and of course a manned landing
on the moon.

The 40 years since then have given us the Internet, CD and DVD
players, cell phones, DNA fingerprinting, and several medical
technologies that increase life expectancies slightly at enormous
expense.

As much as I like the Internet, that's not much of a comparison.

Nonetheless, personal computing and mobile computing has allowed
for a lot of choices for how people deal with the world. Using 1969
tech
to try to mobilise popular uprisings would have been kinda useless.

Further, the rate of technological progress is neither uniformly
linear,
nor is it linearly visibly so. Many of the items on your 1929-1969
list
are of technologies easily understandable by many people. But, many
of the changes since 1969 are far more complex, and thus, are not
very accessable to anywhere near as many people.

Examples: Going from props to jets is so clear a change that anyone
can grasp it in a second. But, going from turbojets to much more
efficient and quiet fanjets is not a clear change to people who are
not
well versed with specific aircraft propulsion backgrounds. Yet, such
fanjets not only are what brought the costs of jet travel down such as
to make it a more mass method of travel, but it makes living near an
airport far easier to take.

In addition, I heartily disagree with your ignorant description of the
progress in medicine being "several techs that increase life slightly
at enormous expense." Ask anyone who is living with AIDS now,
what they think about the major leaps in their lifespans over the last
20ish years.

The list at:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/upgrade/2078467.html?page=4

Offers a good list of improvements that include in the last 40 years.

Hell, given your whining about cars, and the carnage from them, you
should
be the first person to trumpet this:

-One third of the drop in road traffic deaths in England over the past
two
decades is due to improvements in medical technology, new research
says.
As a result of the improvements around 700 people a year who would
have died 20 years ago in crashes in England and Wales survive, the
study says (published online in advance in Accident Analysis and
Prevention at http://www.elsevier.comwww.elsevier.com).-

{...}

-"In recent decades, extraordinary advances have occurred in many
areas of the health sciences, including genetics, body imaging,
microsurgery, transplantation, and in the technical ability to
sustain
life. Treatment of traumatic brain injury has also undergone
significant
advances over the last 30 years, including the introduction of
clinical
tools such as CT [computed tomography] scanners, which were
introduced in the 1970s," says the report.-

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1169360

So, we can safely add medical technology to the ever growing list
of topics that You. Don't. Know. Jack. ***. About.

Oh, and the last 40 years have seen pretty much everything on your
prior to 1969 list vastly improve, too. Try to build and launch a
Magellan
probe to Saturn in 1969...

Sheesh.

I don't mind curmudgeons, but they should be *informed* curmudgeons.

Oh, and on the Apollo 11 front, NASA has found the master tapes of
the video transmissions from the Moon on that flight, and apparently,
Spacecraft Films, which has issued a lot of great DVD sets of the
flights of the early days of the US space program, is waiting to get
their hands on this new footage, for a new release of Apollo 11.

Andre
.

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