Whoever wrote this post doesn’t understand why we got to the moon thirty years ahead of schedule. The key to understanding that is the fact that we haven’t been back in almost forty years. If it was on a similar curve to the other examples, we’d have colonies on Mars by now.
14 thoughts on “Was Moore’s Law Inevitable?”
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Well could say if we weren’t done in the 8 years and the 2 presidencies that it was, it would still not have happened yet. Don’t think the lack of NASA or a space program would of spur a private space industry much sooner and might of delayed it. Would the Carmacks, Musks still be investing millions in private manned space with out Apollo or NASA? Think only one who might still be in it would be Branson.
The landscape has changed alot in 40 years that NASA is now in the way. Would Spacex or Amadillio be even able to survive 25 years ago with the state of technology.
Until Constellation, there never was an effort to go back to the Moon. Space exploration isn’t just determined by technology but also by the political will to use it.
He made the mistake of using an outlier with Apollo. The rest of the essay is fascinating.
The author was entirely off base when he said that innovation would have continued in a fully communized world. Political decisions create the framework within which innovation is allowed to flourish. The Air force’s curves on spaceflight would have continued had it not been for a political decision in the 1960s not to pursue nuclear-powered spaceflight.
A culture and political system that allows innovation to flourish and build on its successes is a historical anomaly. Living within it, it’s hard to see how rare it is.
I was just about to make that point about the cancellation of the nuclear rocket engine. It looks like that more than anything is what has stymied our progress in space, and it suggests that our progress will be slow until we finally decide to go ahead with it.
That’s a hell of an article. I haven’t read it all yet; I just skimmed the second half.
Many of the things he compares are the same. Price per transistor, price per MIPS, whatever. Even in the case of hard disks, contrary to what he seems to think, disk heads are made using lithographic etching. All of those advances have been driven by photolithography.
There have been some advances in these areas which were not photolithography driven. Once or twice a decade someone comes up with a design idea which improves performance. For hard disks this would be GMR heads or perpendicular recording. But these things are much less reliable than what you see in these charts.
Atomic power for atmospheric propulsion would only have been useful if we either dropped radiation standards, or developed improved materials. Materials science does not improve at the same rate as transistors scale down. I doubt we would see fissionables in regular any time soon use even if the radiation standards were relaxed and proliferation concerns were ignored.
Considering all the legal and whatever concerns I can only see the military using it. But the military does not seem to be interested. They can already blow up their enemies using the ICBMs they have. Which is a bit of a shame because mass drivers for orbital bombardment have so much potential.
I suspect we will only see these things after we become an interplanetary species. Rather than before.
I can see sticking with chemical engines to get to and from Earth orbit, but there is no reason not to use nuclear rockets in space.
Wodun, the difference between the VSE and Constellation, learn it.
You are missing the point Trent. Maybe it is a knee jerk reaction to someone using the word constellation.
If you want to say that the act of writing the VSE is an effort to return to the Moon, that is fine. I would argue that the program that sprung up to meet the goals of the VSE was the real effort because there was action being taken and metal bent not just words on paper.
Either way, the two took place fairly close to each other and the point of my post still stands if you substitute VSE for Constellation.
Trent, why do you think there hasn’t been a Moore’s Law type of effect with space related technologies? or do you think there is? or just bored and trolling comments sections?
I can see sticking with chemical engines to get to and from Earth orbit, but there is no reason not to use nuclear rockets in space.
Sure there’s a reason not to use them: there’s nothing in space that would be worth doing even if we had them.
There’s nothing anywhere as far as people are concerned until people arrive and start doing stuff. Once we have a dozen thriving settlements there will be plenty worth doing and faster travel between colonies would be expected and improve the quality of life.
@Paul D.: In a sense, there’s nothing worth doing here on Earth, either. We all die alone.
“Why? Why does anybody want to go anywhere? Why did the bear go round the mountain? To see what he could see! I’ve never seen the Rings [of Saturn]. That’s reason enough to go anywhere. The race has been doing it for all time. The dull ones stay home – and the bright ones stir around and try to see what trouble they can dig up. It’s the human pattern. It doesn’t need a reason, any more than a flat cat needs a reason to buzz. Why anything?”
— Hazel Stone, _The Rolling Stones_ (Robert A. Heinlein, 1952)
Materials science does not improve at the same rate as transistors scale down.
This is a key point. There is no other field of human inquiry that advances at the same rate as photolithography improvement.
A good example is energy density. The Model-T got 12~21 MPG, nearly as good as many cars on the market today. Cars have improved in a number of ways since then, but for fuel we haven’t discovered anything better than gasoline in the century since then.
Same with planes. Once the DC-10 came along it’s been incremental improvements since.
But even Moore’s Law has met its match – the power density law. Have you noticed how they don’t advertise increases in clockspeed anymore? There’s a reason for that: there haven’t been any worth mentioning for nearly a decade. Instead the chips just keep getting smaller without increasing in power, so that we have iPads that can outperform a PC from 15 years ago, but “full” PCs today can barely outperform PCs from 5-10 years ago on tasks that normal users might do. Only highly paralyzable tasks, like video encoding, show any improvement from our modern “quad core” systems.
A few decades of Moore’s Law has spoiled us into thinking that technology comes along in predictable ways at predictable rates. It does not. Ray Kurzweil is going to be disappointed.
Hell, if things had taken a different turn we would have had colonies on Callisto and Enceladus by now. Orion got canned just as it was getting started. Thank von Braun and his V2s writ large for that.
Apollo was a dead end that cost humanity fifty years – and counting. Maybe it was a dead end necessary for political reasons, but it was a dead end nonetheless.