We are witnessing a new scientific 'Golden Age'

Discussion in 'Science' started by alaskan_sol, Jan 17, 2012.

  1. alaskan_sol

    alaskan_sol Member

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    I'm just an arm chair, discovery channel scientist type of guy. No credentials or Phd's here. But its hard to ignore the massive flood of big discoveries going on right now in just about every field of science.

    And now that the Internet is very close to completely wiring up and connecting the planet, I can only see this accelerating.

    Hold on to your hats boys and girls, its going to be a wild ride :popcorn:
     
  2. marbro

    marbro New Member

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    I agree! I just hope we dont kill ourselves in the process.
     
  3. botenth

    botenth Banned

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    Google is the biggest authority.
     
  4. DarkDaimon

    DarkDaimon Well-Known Member

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    And yet, the creationists are still trying to insert their religion into our science classes, the deniers are still trying to discredit global warming and Animal Planet's new hit show is about trying to capture Bigfoot.

    I think we still have a way to go. :(
     
  5. robot

    robot Active Member

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    The pace of change is growing and has been growing for a long time.

    Creationists have been around for a long time. Until Charles Darwin and a few others they were the only opinion on the matter. Now they are a small vocal minority.
     
  6. DeathStar

    DeathStar Banned

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    I hope this golden age results in a weapon powerful enough to wipe out the whole human race, and that such happens within the century.
     
  7. Panzerkampfwagen

    Panzerkampfwagen New Member

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    It's said that science learnt more in the last 20 years than it did in all of human history before that.
     
  8. robot

    robot Active Member

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    How do you measure how much we know?
     
  9. oldjar07

    oldjar07 Active Member

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    Bull(*)(*)(*)(*), how come people are paying more in real money for gas and energy than they were 20 years ago then? Maybe there is some exciting stuff being researched, but I think things have really slowed down since the cold war. Most of the stuff being researched hasn't seen practical application, either. The only way I'd agree with your statement is if cold fusion turns out to be real or something else that is similar.
     
  10. Panzerkampfwagen

    Panzerkampfwagen New Member

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    Wow.......... so we don't know more because you're paying more for a product?
     
  11. oldjar07

    oldjar07 Active Member

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    I'm not going to judge that until I see practical applications. Yes, computers are accelerating at a fast rate, but what good is that going to do us right now? People just have more entertainment, but no time to enjoy it. I'd say the mid 20th century was the fastest acceleration with science. You had the atomic bomb, jets, nuclear power and science, lasers, a lot of progress in medicine, first computers, space race, etc. I actually think progress has been at about its slowest pace for the past 200 years. Hopefully that just means a lot of basic science is taking place now and we will see practical application soon.
     
  12. oldjar07

    oldjar07 Active Member

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    What's the point in knowing more if there is no use for it?
     
  13. perdidochas

    perdidochas Well-Known Member

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    We may be paying more in real money for gas and energy than we were 20 yrs ago, but we are paying about the same as we did 30 yrs ago......

    We are creating a lot of scientific knowledge, and our technology is increasing rapidly. I have a smart phone (Iphone 4). With that phone, I can access a world of information in about 5 seconds. I can access the card catalog of the library of congress while I'm walking in the park. It has a GPS built into it that allows me to determine my location on the globe within about 20 feet. I'm overwhelmed at how much our society has changed technologically in my 46 yrs of life.
     
  14. oldjar07

    oldjar07 Active Member

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    Exactly what I just said in that entertainment and communications may be progressing rapidly. You could spend your time with your phone actually learning something and make a more efficient energy source, etc. But how many people actually do that? Instead people spend all of their time on message boards or Facebook. So, these phones are probably impeding progress rather than helping it. Energy makes the price for EVERYTHING cheaper. I don't call paying more in real terms for energy progress.
     
  15. perdidochas

    perdidochas Well-Known Member

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    Are we paying more in real terms for energy?

    In terms of gasoline, we are paying more primarily due to supply and demand, as our supplies get lower and demand increases, prices rise. Has nothing to do with scientific progress, but economics.
     
  16. oldjar07

    oldjar07 Active Member

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    It has everything to do with scientific progress. If we had a better energy source, supplies would be a lot higher and energy would be a lot cheaper. Economics is almost solely determined by scientific progress.
     
  17. fifthofnovember

    fifthofnovember Well-Known Member

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    Oil used to be alot easier to get out of the ground. We have to keep advancing technology just to keep up with the decline in oil supply. No amount of knowledge is going to cause oil to spring into existance. True, we could and should be using other forms of energy, but that's not going to happen until economics dictate that we have to. SOOOO, paying more for gas is actually a good sign. It means we will have to use something else soon, and you can then start to see that advancement which has been going on but has not yet been put into practice.
     
  18. Someone

    Someone New Member

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    Yes. The technological singularity proposal seems closer than ever. There's some potentially revolutionary technologies in computing that are going to hit in the relatively near future. This will have trickle-down effects in the rest of the sciences, greatly expanding the pace of new research.
     
  19. Someone

    Someone New Member

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    So-called "big data" is changing the way the world looks at... just about everything. Computing is moving from a set of technologies that serve as tools to a set of technologies that serve as intelligence enhancement. Up until now, computers have mainly just enabled human thinkers to perform work more quickly; this latest wave of computing technologies will enhance the user's ability to think about problems. It's a fundamental change of perspective. Large data sets are becoming increasingly less difficult to work with, expanding the scope of research dramatically.

    Not even close. The 21st century has so far definitely been a scientific golden age. The pace of new developments and research is dramatically higher today than it was in, say, the 1980s, which was itself much faster than the 1940s. To use the futurist concept, we are quickly approaching a technological singularity. The next wave of technologies will be oriented in the direction of improving human intelligence and decision-making--the core foundation of a push towards posthuman intelligence (though I think it is very likely that it would be an organizational sort of intelligence, not some all-knowing AI sort of situation).

    We've had more medical progress in the last 10 years than in the fifty years before it. Medicine today is radically different from medicine fifty years ago, to say nothing of a century ago. Stem cells and genetic therapy have completely changed the game. No one fifty years ago would have even thought of attempting something like a skin gun, or actually growing new body parts to replace damaged organs... as we can do today for an increasingly wide array of organs.

    Certainly, there were a great many megaprojects in the 20th century... but today that has been replaced by a more quiet and distributed sort of research. Rather than focusing immense effort into a handful of projects, we as a society devote far more resources to ubiquitous research. Revolutionary technologies are pretty commonplace these days. Radical concepts that would have been science fiction in the 1990s are reality today--especially in medicine, computing, and material science.

    No way. This is definitely a scientific high point. It may not be directed at huge national megaprojects, but it's certainly far more ubiquitous and effective today.
     
  20. Someone

    Someone New Member

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    Turns out that people work better when they enjoy what they do and have copious free time. Productivity peaks at roughly 35 work-hours a week.

    Not even remotely true.
     
  21. DeathStar

    DeathStar Banned

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    And food also; you forgot that.

    Anyways, the answer to your question is simple: Malthus' Law.

    But of course a lot of braindead people will deny that Malthus' Law is obviously true.
     
  22. jhffmn

    jhffmn New Member

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    I can't remember the exact statistic, but I think more human life has occured since the beggining of the twentiethy century than the entirety before it. So it's easily arguable that in the last 100 years we've more than doubled our knowledge.
     
  23. DeathStar

    DeathStar Banned

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    Who's "we"? Most people don't know jack (*)(*)(*)(*) about anything other than pop music and pop culture and video games and (*)(*)(*)(*)ty (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)bag movies like "Fast and Furious" and what's going on in their corner of Facebook.
     
  24. Panzerkampfwagen

    Panzerkampfwagen New Member

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    Nah, that's made up. It's thought that between 60 billion and 110 billion people have ever lived.
     
  25. oldjar07

    oldjar07 Active Member

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    Computers have been advancing at about the same rate for 60 years. What makes this point in time so special? Yes, I believe there will be a technological singularity, but I don't think that will happen for at least another 30 years. Of course there will be trickle down effects as computers get more powerful, but I haven't seen much progress yet that resulted from computers.
     

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