The final frontier?

Today is the thirty fifth anniversary of the first moon walk by the lunar crew (the Eagle) of Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. We stayed up late into the night (uhh, defective memory — the moon walk started at 10:56pm EDT, it just felt really late as a child) to watch the moon walk on the family black and white television; my mom, sister and I all curled up together under a blanket on the couch.

I can think of only two everyday technologies that seemed quite possible then and yet continue to elude our grasp today...

• Automated, flying cars.
• A permanent space station.

So what didn't we have back then? Well, Tang for one. OK, that's a bit silly, so let's try to be a little more serious...

1. How about solid state electronics?

   The wholesale replacement of discrete electronics components (coils, caps, resistors, transistors et al.) with solid state (which led to everything having a CPU and an EEPROM or ASIC) was just beginning.

2. More than 5 or 6 channels?

   Around bigger cities you had the three major networks and maybe a couple of UHF stations. Maybe. No PBS or public radio (yet).

3. Refrigerators the size of cars.

4. Cars the size of buses.

   We don't have as many buses today... draw your own conclusions.

5. Tone dialing (and a rotary dialing mechanism).

   Anyone remember party lines? For that matter, phones we can own are cool too.

6. Dick Tracy watches!

   Seriously, everyone these days has a phone that does everything Tracy's watch did and most of what a Tricorder did. Or a PDA, or set of glasses and lately, maybe a watch.

   Consumer satellite communications and all the rest of the wireless stuff was a direct outgrowth of the space program.

   Unwired communications have yet to really make the societal changes that they're going to (or maybe they already have and I'm too dense to see it).

7. Radios the size of a finger nail.

8. Pretty much everything and anything digital.

   Yeah, we had computers. I saw one at Princeton in '71 or so. An Apple ][ had more going for it 10 years later. No one outside a few labs on the east and west coasts had heard of a video game.

   The next Xbox is rumored to have contain three (3!) 3.5 GHz PowerPC CPU cores along with a GPU and associated wizardry.

9. Alternate energy sources.

   OK, not so good here. Wind farms and solar panels are pretty cool though.

My summary:

Communications have made enormous leaps forward, but only because regulation was imposed to create competition where none existed. Where we would be with a still whole AT&T? That's a terrifying thought. The remains of the split, the former Baby Bells have not only regained considerable power, they often seem to have the upper hand. It's depressing. We now lag Japan and Korea by a considerable margin in deployment of high speed 'wired' technology. We'll likely be followers for some time to come.

The Japanese were on the verge of a total end run on miniature electronics when a few Americans accidently leapfrogged the race to create functional unit, assembly type electronics (the wonderful world of Op Amps, FETs and TTL) by creating ultra stupid, single 'chip', general purpose processors. For the most part, instruction based logic is cheaper than gate logic. For the rest, a hoard of custom chip set developers owe their living. It's a race that won't stop any time soon and has benefitted us all.

Anything we could buy then, we can buy bigger today (unless it's electronic or land).

Our transportation and energy capabilities have gone no where.

Todays freighters, trains and big rigs are just about as big, just about as inefficient and wasteful as they were 25 years ago. We shave money by automation (minimize people) where we can, but it's still a grossly inefficient system. The only significant advance I can think of in this area is FedEx (and I still don't quite get it, maybe the competition stunk) who created a complex, seemingly over expensive system that beat competing delivery systems in time and cost.

Energy is where I really get heartsick. We chucked nuclear power. We won't pay for the development of other fuel technologies. So we're stuck raping the land (and oceans) to gather coal and oil, and finding ways to artificially create friendships for more of both. We've got some gas too, and we're busily suckling that teat for as long it lasts. Petroleum has an endgame, it is not unlimited. We're not only dependent as an energy source, but as a raw material. If we don't find another energy source, the later portions of this century are going produce wars we can not imagine.

Posted by Dave at July 20, 2004 11:57 PM