Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

We've done things that seem like magic to some hunter-gatherer; that doesn't imply everything that seems like magic to us will come true. (does anyone have a catchy name for this fallacy?)

The boundary between things we know to be possible and impossible is in fact stronger now, because (for most of the events in this timeline) we're now basing this knowledge on the laws of physics.

Sidebar: future events that derive solely from thermodynamics don't really have a get-out-of-jail card; deflecting some of the others would require us to meaningfully harness much larger amounts of energy at the scholar system scale, bootstrapping that sort of thing would require multiple jumps of a few orders of magnitude which might be solvable as an engineering problem, but is economically dicey when we're already squandering the fossil fuel dividend on our current, unsustainable needs. That is to say, please solve politics or economics before dreaming of magitech.




Based on what we believe the laws of physics to be, which isn't yet a fully settled question.


Sure. Quite possibly we'll just see refinements at the edges of what we have access to (because at most scales, physics is already very accurate) rather than outright revolutions.


We still know almost nothing about 80% of the matter in the visible universe. Ordinary matter is less than 5%. Physics has some explaining to do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: