de Grey entry on The Edge
GEEZ! I am a lazy sod! It's been almost a year since my last post. This blog costs me just $53.81/year so it's not too bad I suppose. Plus, I value my time more than my money.
However, I feel the need to respond to Aubrey de Grey's entry on the current Edge poll about What will Change Everything? Apparently, de Grey has read my blog!
In this post, I point out that de Grey's argument about accelerating aviation requires that there be new breakthroughs in 1990 and 2010. De Grey responds that:
"But to make my aviation analogy stick, I of course need to explain the dramatic lack of progress in the past 40 years (since Concorde)."
His explanation is that "we haven't developed them because we couldn't be bothered, an obstacle that is not likely to occur when it comes to postponing aging."
Basically, his argument is that the will to invent is a sufficient cause of technological acceleration and since avoiding death is a never-ending source of will, it's cure is inevitable. De Grey's argument apparently extends to engineering stars to prevent them from going supernova! I wonder, won't we also have the will to go back in time to rescue dead relatives? Is time travel inevitable?
It is true that having the will to invent is necessary for technological advancement; the perfect example being the moon landing. If the Soviets hadn't beaten us into space I doubt we would have ever bothered to land men on the moon. There would've been no need to one up them. However, having the will is just the beginning.
We live in a universe that is governed by laws of physics that limit what is possible. Real-world phenomena are the result of many complex interactions that defy simple prediction. Therefore, most limits are unknown until they are discovered by experimentation. We simple don't know what technologies will or won't work until we actually try to invent them.
Is it true that the aviation industry just couldn't be bothered to develop anything new? That doesn't sound like them. I interviewed with GE Aircraft 10 years ago and they seemed to have a lot of R&D going on. Mainly on thermal barrier coatings.
Maybe a better explanation for the decline in progress is that all technologies eventually run into problems that can't be cheaply solved and so no one wants to pay for them anymore. The technology then becomes a commodity.
De Grey believes that there are inevitable technical solutions to every problem we will ever encounter, like cookie crumbs leading us out of the forest. He bases this belief on absolutely nothing. Not even a Ouija board.
However, I feel the need to respond to Aubrey de Grey's entry on the current Edge poll about What will Change Everything? Apparently, de Grey has read my blog!
In this post, I point out that de Grey's argument about accelerating aviation requires that there be new breakthroughs in 1990 and 2010. De Grey responds that:
"But to make my aviation analogy stick, I of course need to explain the dramatic lack of progress in the past 40 years (since Concorde)."
His explanation is that "we haven't developed them because we couldn't be bothered, an obstacle that is not likely to occur when it comes to postponing aging."
Basically, his argument is that the will to invent is a sufficient cause of technological acceleration and since avoiding death is a never-ending source of will, it's cure is inevitable. De Grey's argument apparently extends to engineering stars to prevent them from going supernova! I wonder, won't we also have the will to go back in time to rescue dead relatives? Is time travel inevitable?
It is true that having the will to invent is necessary for technological advancement; the perfect example being the moon landing. If the Soviets hadn't beaten us into space I doubt we would have ever bothered to land men on the moon. There would've been no need to one up them. However, having the will is just the beginning.
We live in a universe that is governed by laws of physics that limit what is possible. Real-world phenomena are the result of many complex interactions that defy simple prediction. Therefore, most limits are unknown until they are discovered by experimentation. We simple don't know what technologies will or won't work until we actually try to invent them.
Is it true that the aviation industry just couldn't be bothered to develop anything new? That doesn't sound like them. I interviewed with GE Aircraft 10 years ago and they seemed to have a lot of R&D going on. Mainly on thermal barrier coatings.
Maybe a better explanation for the decline in progress is that all technologies eventually run into problems that can't be cheaply solved and so no one wants to pay for them anymore. The technology then becomes a commodity.
De Grey believes that there are inevitable technical solutions to every problem we will ever encounter, like cookie crumbs leading us out of the forest. He bases this belief on absolutely nothing. Not even a Ouija board.
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