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Comment Threads

• Dirk Bruere commented on The present in deep history
  "Innovations that are tried, abandoned, then rediscovered..." The one I always see, as an engineer, is the "optical transistor" or equivalent. It appears about every 5 years and has done so since the 1970s. The article usually ends with the statement that optical computers will "one day" be 1000x as powerful as what we have now....
• RDSouth commented on The present in deep history
  Granting of overly broad patents is a serious problem, and I've read several articles about it. If nothing else, it will only happen once because anything that was previously covered will now be "prior art" once they expire. So, soon we will be able to wear the color blue and the crips won't be able to sue us....
• RDSouth commented on The present in deep history
  Space travel by humans for it's own sake does indeed fit the description. It's a marker, a way of proving you've made it, an ostentatious display of affluence, or at least profound commitment to space. SUPERFLOUS DIGRESSION It shouldn't happen until robots have built up an extensive industrial base, nothing like The Martian should ever occur. The leap is big, as was the leap to The New World, but with less purpose. Once you're out there, you're out there. A city on Mars wouldn't be that different from a city in America. People get up in their house, drive their...
• Heteromeles commented on The present in deep history
  The thing about working machine-guns is that they require comparatively huge amounts of gunpowder, which in turn requires comparatively huge amounts of fixed nitrogen. While there were machine guns (like the Gatling gun) before people started artificially fixing nitrogen, at the same time there were also guano wars, where countries fought over who got to mine the layered crap under seabird colonies, in part for the guano fertilizer for their crops, and in part because they needed the nitrates in the guano for gunpowder to feed their wars. The British managed to circumvent this nitrogen shortage because the Ganges River...
• Moderator Alan commented on The present in deep history
  Alright people, this thread seems finally to have run out of steam and is now closed. (It was not only the longest thread ever, it was almost 60% longer than the previously longest.)...