These sorts of things look like inspirational posters and suffer from survivorship bias. Many more ideas failed than succeeded.
We also seem to think that no one learned from all that experience. We can see the things that made something once thought impossible work at scale. We all know these stories. So we’re more primed to be wary of just being negative.
I’m all for spending money on this, but it could turn out certain breakthroughs are needed and we don’t know when or if they will come.
I do have times when I look at my phone and think about the first "computer" I touched. I'm still amazed sometimes of how tech changed since I was 6-7 years old(talking almost 40 years)
I'm no fan of lab growing anything because or banning people from raising animals or having food plots because those that make the food make the rules. That being said... I wouldn't be suprised to see, in 2-3 decades, something taking off in that regard. All it takes is one stroke of genius and a ton of elbow grease to change it all.
> Those of us in the computer industry can well remember when "640K should be enough for anyone."
I can remember the urban legend, but there seems to be no solid evidence that it was ever actually said, let alone believed by anyone. The saying is normally attributed to Bill Gates, but he denies ever saying it, and tells how he was pushing computer makers to include even more RAM.
When 640k was all you could reasonably buy as a consumer, it had to be enough for anyone if you wanted to own a computer at the time. It was never thought of as some fundamental limit that could not be broken or utilized in larger quantities, however.
We literally cannot imagine what the future will bring. I'm still waiting on my flying atomicar.
I think it will end up being necessary to make food this way, and that we'll figure out how to do it (Soylent Green, anyone?).