On 14 December 2014 at 09:48, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List < [email protected]> wrote: > > > > For heaven's sake, by 2100 we'll have full Nanotechnology and Quantum > Computers at our disposal, or rather the human race's AI successors will. > Global warming is small potatoes. > I do hope you're right, however predicting the future has proved extremely hard in the past. It doesn't look like my son will have a hoverboard by next year, and I'm still waiting for underwater cities and clothes made out of bacofoil. (And nuclear fusion, teleporters, stasis fields and psychic powers.)
We don't know if nanotech can work as Drexler, Kurtzweil et al suggest - it may only be possible the way life already does it, where you get big bags of molecules to bump around and rely on the statistical certainty of collision. That doesn't build many diamond hulled spaceships. And we don't know if quantum computers are scalable - decoherence appears to be fairly rampant in the warm world we inhabit. So "global warming is small potatoes" IF all the wonders of science fiction come to pass, but history suggests at least some of them won't. It also suggests that unexpected things may happen - nuclear bombs and, computers, for two obvious examples - and that expected things may happen with enough political will and huge efforts (people in space - probes on other planets - people on the Moon, etc). But the latter don't live up to the of expectations SF, and the former exceed them. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
