A lot of people talk about how wide-reaching the technologies spun out from NASA in the Apollo Era were; whereas I see the research that goes into making chips smaller has an equal if not greater reach. Considering how widespread the modern IC is these incremental improvements need to become more and more novel, to the point where entirely new approaches need to be designed to combat the limits of physics itself.
Yeah, the Apollo program was a huge consumer of the first generation of ICs, with most of the rest going to the Minuteman ICBM so another space (briefly) application.
> The weird thing, in a sense, is that tech that seems close to nanotechology and nanomachines exists simultaneously with extremely mundane tech.
As a tangent, I think it's a time for reminder that life itself is nothing but molecular nanotechnology that we didn't invent and don't control yet. There are already nanomachines all around us, and we're all made of some. So whenever you use a piece of tech with an organic component (whether dead or alive), take a moment to ponder the extremely advanced nanotechnology involved ;).
Nails are cheap. Anything fancier saves you two minutes at a hideous cost per minute. Flying cars have that problem on top of being inefficient and unstable.
If people wanted to burn money on certain super futuristic products, there would be more of them. But they've been judged not worth it.
> I'm still hammer nails into the wall to support my coat hanger rod
There are glues for this nowadays if you want but personally I don't mind the screw or nail. Screws and nails are a 'good enough' solution for the problems they solve and anything else would have to be much better to really compete. The glue exists, you can buy it but it has a shelf life and does not have the same shear resilience that a screw or a nail would have.
Technology should first and foremost solve a problem.
Flying cars would create as many problems as they would solve, we barely manage with two dimensions, three would be a lot harder especially with large numbers of vehicles in the air. I don't see that working at all from a physics perspective but if we do somehow get it working to where it can compete favorably with regular vehicles on cost then it will require central traffic control.
I think nanomachines are still purpose-built for solving small problems, and haven't been particularly useful outside the medical field yet because 'scaling is hard', in this case being enough to have noticeable effects. Seeing a household similar to The Jetsons' is still a ways off in my eyes.
Nanomachines are hardly being built at all from what I can tell - I doubt if any have progressed far beyond laboratories.
Meanwhile, micro-machines are everywhere these days - MEMS accelerometers and gyros and SAW MEMS microphones are in every cellphone made, every smartwatch has similar features, DLP TVs have actually gone out of style but were micromirror devices, MEMS barometers and altimeters are cheap and commercial drones commonly have one or more, MEMS cell sorters and biochips are actually being used in production medical labs, the list just continues on for ages...
(I could go on a long aside about the households comment, but I'll save that rant for another time. Suffice it to say, we're doing jack shit with technology in homes, and that alone is hugely depressing. Innovation in that space seems to be sorely limited to what you can bring in and plug in to a socket, rather than disrupting home designs to better fit what our technology is actually capable of pulling off today - just look at the absolutely pathetic state of residential air conditioning, vs what can be done with passive cooling and occupant-aware HVAC systems.)
I think the problem there is the churn. If you built a 'smart home' ten years ago, it would be worse than useless now. I do think we're due a shift away from 110v outlets everywhere, but I think a house that's in keeping with the technical possibilities will have to wait until those possibilities have stabilized.
> If you built a 'smart home' ten years ago, it would be worse than useless now.
I know this is nitpicking, but still: I disagree. I think that home would be more useful than a smart home built today, because basic sensors and actuators today are very similar to those of 10 years ago, they talk over the same protocol (you screw your LED bulb into the same socket you used to screw an incandescent one into before), and most importantly, none of that was tied up with third-party Internet services. Consumer IoT of today is complete garbage because every vendor wants to be a platform, and doesn't want to interoperate with anything else. Back before IoT was a thing, home automation stuck to standards.
If humans live another thousand years and avoid a major dark age which drags our tech level below a point from which we cannot bring it back up again, then we’ll probably still be hammering nails into our walls.
> A lot of people talk about how wide-reaching the technologies spun out from NASA in the Apollo Era were;
A lot of people spin nonsense about that.
Consider the hoary myth that integrated circuits are a spinoff of Apollo. What actually happened was that the early Apollo program ordered a bunch of chips from the early vendors and helped qualify them. They didn't invent ICs, they didn't make ICs, they weren't even the biggest market for ICs (that was the Minuteman II missile, which made many more computers w. ICs than Apollo did.)
