Science/technology plateaus

Funglegunk

Just something of interest to me*: is there a current example of a technology still in wide use that is unanimously accepted to have reached it's absolute limit? I don't mean because of things like cost or usefulness, but because the technology simply can't go any further.

Moore's law is expected to reach a limit when it comes to miniaturisation of transistors, but other methods will allow the continued growth of processing power (multiple processors, spintronics etc.), so computers will keep getting faster.

But perhaps something else in wide use, lets say milk pasteurisation or something, has reached it limit?

* I'm a technology layman, feel free to correct my terminology, knowledge and/or basic premise!

Gurgle

The pencil - hasn't changed in decades, possible centuries.
Others: paper, ballpoint pen, radio, calculator, digital watch

All objects that can't really be 'improved', though they can be replaced...

I guess it depends on your interpretation, if something does exactly what it was intended to do then how do you make it functionally 'better'?

The internal combustion engine went for a long time with little change though now its in another improvement stage driven by a need for better efficiency and emissions.

Capt'n Midnight

A mature technology is a technology that has been in use for long enough that most of its initial faults and inherent problems have been removed or reduced by further development.

When it comes to sending humans into space the Russians still use a modified 1950's ICBM.

Materials technology is improving. One example from the past was a excavator with a 5 ton capacity. Stronger steel meant that they could make a lighter bucket and offer essentially the same machine but now with a 6 ton capacity.


Let's suppose you figure out a way to save 1c on a metal stamping, problem is unless you save enough to pay for €30,000 worth of dies and the costs of designing it and storing new parts and possible downside if it turns out to have problems. Sometimes it's not worth making a small improvement.

mikhail

Gurgle wrote: »

The pencil - hasn't changed in decades, possible centuries.
Others: paper, ballpoint pen, radio, calculator, digital watch

The process for creating the 'lead' of the pencil from graphite dust is less than 200 years old, and I wouldn't be surprised if the mix has been played around with since. The wood used in the casing has changed with changing supply (once-popular woods were overworked). You'd be surprised how much the pencil has changed. I don't know, but I imagine paper has had some changes too - modern paper is thinner, stronger, more flexible, doesn't contain trace cyanide from processing, has less acid so it doesn't yellow so much, etc.

The last three you mentioned have all seen their base technology change. Take the radio: first there's the move to transistors, gradual miniaturisation of those, and then the digital stuff starts appropriating functions which used to be analogue (from station selection to demodulation). Finally, you get digital radio, with encrypted feeds only subscribing users can unscramble, complicated transmission schemes to deal with multi-path fading and a whole host of propagation problems and to shoe-horn as many stations into the same bandwidth as possible, all received by a device which can handle all of that. Sure, basic AM and FM schemes are still in broad use, and basic receivers still work, but the cutting edge is elsewhere.

I'd suspect clockwork clocks are your best bet - once they reached high precision for naval navigation in the 18th (?) century, I could believe that not a huge amount changed. I could be quite wrong though.

Capt'n Midnight

Funglegunk wrote: »

But perhaps something else in wide use, lets say milk pasteurisation or something, has reached it limit?

Fresh milk lasts a lot longer than it used to do when I was young, it's drinkable up to two or three times longer.

Capt'n Midnight

mikhail wrote: »

I'd suspect clockwork clocks are your best bet - once they reached high precision for naval navigation in the 18th (?) century, I could believe that not a huge amount changed. I could be quite wrong though.

You have to take into account the requirement for the object rather than the object.

There is no point in making a super accurate clock, like the Denmark Clock, when you can buy a GPS for a fraction of the cost that will tell you the time with far greater accuracy and gives you a position more accurately than you could calculate from any clock yourself.

Co-ax cable, like TV cable reached a pinnacle with heliax and then was replaced by new technologies like microwave links and fibre optics.

Diesel aeroplane engines with exhaust turbines are more efficient than jet engines, but you can fly higher with a jet, and the air is thinner there so less drag so overall the diesel isn't the best choice.

http://www.ateliera.dk/olsen.htm Clock with 15,448 parts
it's running a little slow because the oil was degraded by sunlight

In August 1995 Atelier ANDERSEN began the task of dismanteling the clock. The 11 works were dismantled in sections, taken apart and cleaned. Each part was numbered. Every bronze or brass part was gilt to recreate the original finish, with 5 micron fine gold coat giving a yellow brass-like colour. Some shafts were coated with a special mixture of nickel and teflon, which reduces friction. Small, invisible ball-bearings were mounted on almost every rotating axle.

You can get a USB GPS posted to you from Hong Kong for €22, so you can imagine how little it costs to integrate GPS into modern devices.

The clock also contains the slowest moving part which tracks the precession of the earth, turning once every 25,753 years.

bonkey

Funglegunk wrote: »

Just something of interest to me*: is there a current example of a technology still in wide use that is unanimously accepted to have reached it's absolute limit? I don't mean because of things like cost or usefulness, but because the technology simply can't go any further.

No.

I'm not trying to be witty or anything...but no...there is nothing we can poitn to and say the technology simply can't go further.

If I really had to pick something...I'd go with fibre-optic cable and superconductors. Both of those are obviously flawed exmaples because of the limits that the materials put on things like cable flexibility etc. but in some regards, they are pretty close to being "at the limit".

AFAIK, we don't even have theoretical models of what could offer superior performance in either case.

bleg

ENVELOPES!!!!!!!!!!!

Capt'n Midnight

bonkey wrote: »

No.

I'm not trying to be witty or anything...but no...there is nothing we can poitn to and say the technology simply can't go further.

If I really had to pick something...I'd go with fibre-optic cable and superconductors. Both of those are obviously flawed exmaples because of the limits that the materials put on things like cable flexibility etc. but in some regards, they are pretty close to being "at the limit".

AFAIK, we don't even have theoretical models of what could offer superior performance in either case.

There are some limits.

Bond energies set an upper limit to properties of passive materials.

Then again some limits aren't limits. The limit for making semiconductors was thought to be the wavelength of the light used. They used interference patterns to go to fractions of a wavelength and of course used shorter wavelengths too. But if you go too small there are limits too and problems. Cosmic rays and radiation hazards magnify and you have to add more ECC and control circuits and all that stuff.

Not too sure if you go too small will you have enough doping atoms in the features of semiconductors

Gurgle

I guess it comes down to semantics. At some point you've stopped improving the old 'thing' and started making a new one.

cavedave

There are many technologies that peaked some time ago and have disimproved in quality since.
Many of the crafts that were highly skilled before the industrial revolution and since then have declined. Wool spinning is mechanised now and the overall quality of the wool is lower. Same with barrel making and many other crafts. Mind you these mechanisations resulted in much cheaper goods. So you have a lot cheaper wool now just not as good quality.

cooperguy

The car steering wheel hasnt changed much!

Capt'n Midnight

cooperguy wrote: »

The car steering wheel hasnt changed much!

The steering steering wheel in my first car did NOT have
air bag
smaller size (no power steering)
as much padding as current ones
integrated radio controls
a way to adjust it's position

But in fairness the wheel is a design classic and the patent on it was revoked last year. Seriously

El Siglo

cooperguy wrote: »

The car steering wheel hasnt changed much!

Well we went from this kind... which usually impaled the driver on the steering column during a crash, to this kind...

cavedave

This article makes the interesting point that most of the big improvements happened between 1920 and 1970

My grandmother died at age 79 on the very week they landed on the moon. I believe that when she was young she lived in a small town or farm in Wisconsin. There was probably no indoor plumbing, car, home appliances, TV, radio, electric lights, telephone, etc. Her life saw more change than any other generation in world history, before or since.

So unless nanotech, biotech or some weird singularity effect due to memristors and atom scale transistors should we expect more great improvements in living standards?

Ireland developed even quicker than most of the world. We missed out on most of the industrial revolution and rural electrification happened post war unlike most countries.

Also much of the world still lacks electricity, sanitation etc. So just using current technologies we could vastly improve current average standards of living.

Capt'n Midnight

Most adults in the world now have mobile phones, many of these are second hand and people use them for text because the cost of voice is so high.

Improved production and transport means you can have a USB bluetooth dongle posted to your house from China for about 15 minutes work at the minimum wage.

A lot of products are mature, we've had microwaves and freezers for a long time but consumer goods have never been so affordable and with some exceptions (notably Hard Drives :mad: ) have never been so reliable.

Since the 70's we've had massive improvements in the internet, Fiber To The Home is standard in anywhere that really cares about the benefits of the internet, each home could have more bandwidth than the internet as was back in the 70's. LCD has replaced CRT. The Postal system is used to bypass the middleman, letters now go by email. The Pay Packet is a thing of the past. Physical media for music and video account for a tiny % of what people consume.

Politicians and engineers don't seem to understand history and so we have cycles, Trams are back in fashion again. People get up set about air travel and the CO2 it uses, when Air Conditioning for servers probably uses a similar amount of fossil fuel.

In the computing world there are a lot of improvements waiting in the wings even if all technological development stops. Re coding will improve many apps, using existing technology we could easily move from Intel to ARM, the latest mobile phones can run for a week on a single charge AND have more processing power than an earlier top of the range PC.

If you want to surf the internet you can do on a PC that someone else is throwing out. I can remember getting 5p deposit back on coke bottles. Something with thousands of times more memory and processing power than all of the original US early warning system is worth less today than an empty bottle was. And the really crazy thing is that if you use the computer a lot then it can actually be cheaper to buy a newer one than pay for the extra electricity used by an older one !

Johnny_Coyle

The chemicals used in gunpowder is a thread candidate.

Capt'n Midnight

Johnny_Coyle wrote: »

The chemicals used in gunpowder is a thread candidate.

Not really, more for legal reasons than anything else.

You need a license to even use fireworks here. The oxidising agent is not on sale here even though it's freely available in other countries.

The history of how they used to extract the chemicals in the past from latrines is interesting enough but I suspect that is not what you want to hear about. Progress is good when you consider the sorts of jobs people had to do in the past.


please read the charter about staying on topic

Oddly enough gunpowder is still used for blasting in some situations because of it's slower pressure build up,

Capt'n Midnight

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. But often the necessity is for economic reasons, if you make a change you can patent it or market it or make it cheaper.

The Americans say "if it works it's obsolete" but that's more about marketing than about usefulness.

Even things that seem to be the same aren't
Pencils are now made from recycled newspapers instead of wood.


Yes we have reached limits on some technolgies but there are still incremental benefits available from others. Airliners still fly at the same speed as the late 1950's Boeing 707, the podded jet engines and swept wings all being 1940's German technology. But today's airliners use less fuel.

The XB70 shows how close the Americas were to developing a Mach 3 airliner, obviously they could not do a Mach 2 airliner, that wasn't just good enough. But only later was there the realisation that if they went three times as fast you would need far fewer of them to cover the same schedules and R&D costs would be a larger part of the cost of the planes. There was also a slight issue with noise levels on the ground which meant that you could only fly over uninhabited areas.

So yes you can build a Mach 3 airliner but it isn't economic or practical.
Note: the Blackbird spy plane was never going to be commercial, pure titanium, space suits, hundreds of millions of dollars per year in support costs, needing mid air refuelling etc.
The XB70 instead only had a few % of titanium, crew could wear shirts, it's a great might have been, except that there was no need for it.

Airliners are no faster than in the late 1950's but today we have videoconferencing, and in the future we may speed up delivery of goods too. You can download films and music, you can print books on demand. 3D printers mean you can print out objects. In much the same way the internet allows you to bypass the middle man, in the future you may be able to bypass the delivery man too. Star Trek replicators are SciFi but having a device in your room that will create simple objects isn't.