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dysfunction
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**\\\"(random passer-by): What if we already had the Singularity? What if humanity went through its period of apparent asymptotic scientific and technological development between 1940 and 1975, and now we\\\'re on the other part of the S-shaped curve, where we think we\\\'re getting closer and closer to that flying-car-and-silver-jumpsuit future, but never quite get there? Military aircraft topped out at Mach 2 plus a fraction. We went to the Moon forty years ago and haven\\\'t been back. Even CPU speeds have flattened out at a hair over 3 G Hz in the past 5+ years. What if we\\\'re not ever going to get flying cars, or O\\\'Neill habitats at L-5, or cities on Mars? What if?\\\"
Combat aircraft topped out at around Mach 2.5, but the experimental X-43 reached just short of Mach 10 in 2004. Mach number isn\\\'t really applicable to spacecraft, but the Helios 2 probe did the equivalent of around Mach 200 (~150,000mph).
Not returning to the Moon has more to do with lack of political will than technological ability. While manned spaceflight has stagnated, unmanned missions have gotten bolder and more successful by leaps and bounds, pioneering the use of ion propulsion and, recently, solar sails.
Gigahertz in CPUs refers to clock speed, not a true measure of performance. A better measure of true performance is instructions per second, which depends on a combination of the clock speed and how many instructions can be executed per clock cycle. A Pentium 4 at 3.2ghz from 2003 does about ten billion instructions per second; a modern Core i7 at the same clock speed does about 15 times that. That\\\'s about four doublings in about seven years, in perfect agreement with Moore\\\'s Law, which predicts doublings every 18 months. FLOPS, or Floating Point Operations Per Second, is another useful measure; in 2003 one gigaFLOP cost 82 dollars, while in 2009 it cost about 50 cents.
Flying cars are [[AwesomeButImpractical awesome but impractical]]. You can build one from a kit for the price of a luxury sedan, but you\\\'ll need a pilot\\\'s license and an airport to fly it.
The exponential growth is continuing. It could end pretty soon (though I doubt that), but it certainly didn\\\'t end in 1975.
Combat aircraft topped out at around Mach 2.5, but the experimental X-43 reached just short of Mach 10 in 2004. Mach number isn\\\'t really applicable to spacecraft, but the Helios 2 probe did the equivalent of around Mach 200 (~150,000mph).
Not returning to the Moon has more to do with lack of political will than technological ability. While manned spaceflight has stagnated, unmanned missions have gotten bolder and more successful by leaps and bounds, pioneering the use of ion propulsion and, recently, solar sails.
Gigahertz in CPUs refers to clock speed, not a true measure of performance. A better measure of true performance is instructions per second, which depends on a combination of the clock speed and how many instructions can be executed per clock cycle. A Pentium 4 at 3.2ghz from 2003 does about ten billion instructions per second; a modern Core i7 at the same clock speed does about 15 times that. That\\\'s about four doublings in about seven years, in perfect agreement with Moore\\\'s Law, which predicts doublings every 18 months. FLOPS, or Floating Point Operations Per Second, is another useful measure; in 2003 one gigaFLOP cost 82 dollars, while in 2009 it cost about 50 cents.
Flying cars are [[AwesomeButImpractical awesome but impractical]]. You can build one from a kit for the price of a luxury sedan, but you\\\'ll need a pilot\\\'s license and an airport to fly it.
The exponential growth is continuing. It could end pretty soon (though I doubt that), but it certainly didn\\\'t end in 1975.
