Dingfelder
Well-known member
I wouldn't get too enamored with or carried away by the idea of amazing technological advances. Changes in battery technology come slowly and there are still plenty of problems. As to solar, it may continue to make headway, but is likely going to have to be heavily subsidized to do it, as it is in Germany and elsewhere. In China, touted as a world leader in solar, they are still building coal plants, and I just saw a video by ADV China recounting how some Chinese installations were fakes. Elon Musk's plan to solarize homes only has a few homes solarized, the cost for one of the first was $100,000. The owner doubts he'll ever get his money back, and Musk is emphasizing how durable the solar tiles he's making need to be ... which he is not at all sure about. Meanwhile, he continues to have trouble with his electric vehicles.
Advances come, but the pace of innovation in many areas has slowed down a lot. Materials science is a good example. Often there is a breakthrough that is utilized for many years, and then we spend a long time waiting for the next one. Very few new antibiotics are coming out, for instance, and those that we have, we are wasting the utility of on an industrial scale, routinely giving them to livestock and, in China, on almost any doctor's visit for any ailment. We may soon have none effective and be back to dying of any random cut. What are we doing about it? Pretty much nothing.
Where, though, have we made an innovative and hugely influential change? In propping up the old way of doing things, via fracking, that is, getting oil from shale deposits. It has dramatically increased the level of oil America produces. This is not something that will push us toward solar more quickly.
Pie in the sky is nice and all, and the pace of change has increased, but what may be true for, say, advances that come about from the application of high-powered computing don't necessarily come about for fields that don't depend on it nearly so much. And even if something like solar power did, you couldn't bring it into practical and popular use overnight. Or in ten years either.
This proposal is all a pleasant dream. And I think that's the point of it -- to get people excited and thinking about positive change. But it's so wide of the mark economically and scientifically that there is no practical point to it for now.
Will we plod on? Yes we will, and hopefully in good directions. But we don't need this proposal to do it. By making yet more promises that politicians can't possibly keep, it may not actually be very positive at all. We need our politicians to be useful for something besides promising things they can't possibly deliver. And besides delivering dueling versions of their own brand of nonsense and then asking us to pick one.
I find all the nonsense gets dispiriting, rather than uplifting. I'd much rather politicians had their feet held to the fire about real things than be encouraged to treat us like children and feed us stories.
Advances come, but the pace of innovation in many areas has slowed down a lot. Materials science is a good example. Often there is a breakthrough that is utilized for many years, and then we spend a long time waiting for the next one. Very few new antibiotics are coming out, for instance, and those that we have, we are wasting the utility of on an industrial scale, routinely giving them to livestock and, in China, on almost any doctor's visit for any ailment. We may soon have none effective and be back to dying of any random cut. What are we doing about it? Pretty much nothing.
Where, though, have we made an innovative and hugely influential change? In propping up the old way of doing things, via fracking, that is, getting oil from shale deposits. It has dramatically increased the level of oil America produces. This is not something that will push us toward solar more quickly.
Pie in the sky is nice and all, and the pace of change has increased, but what may be true for, say, advances that come about from the application of high-powered computing don't necessarily come about for fields that don't depend on it nearly so much. And even if something like solar power did, you couldn't bring it into practical and popular use overnight. Or in ten years either.
This proposal is all a pleasant dream. And I think that's the point of it -- to get people excited and thinking about positive change. But it's so wide of the mark economically and scientifically that there is no practical point to it for now.
Will we plod on? Yes we will, and hopefully in good directions. But we don't need this proposal to do it. By making yet more promises that politicians can't possibly keep, it may not actually be very positive at all. We need our politicians to be useful for something besides promising things they can't possibly deliver. And besides delivering dueling versions of their own brand of nonsense and then asking us to pick one.
I find all the nonsense gets dispiriting, rather than uplifting. I'd much rather politicians had their feet held to the fire about real things than be encouraged to treat us like children and feed us stories.
