The situations are still very different; following the exponential growth of travel speed (the article's graphs leading to interstellar travel) would need something like a wormhole generator or a warp drive.
- A space shuttle with a warp drive powered by a captive black hole (or whatever) needs huge industry or government levels of cash; anyone with a few hundred dollars, a cloud computing account and an internet connection can look at brain scan data and write software tests, or join in protein folding distributed experiments.
- The kind of engineering to create a skyscraper sized machine needs Lockheed-Martin size factories and hundreds of specialist component makers, and a lot of metal and employees. Poking at cell-sized biology can be done in a small room by one or two people, a small machine and a single UPS delivery of supplies.
- There's not much profit in building a space station. There's a lot of profit waiting for reconnecting severed spinal columns, converting atmospheric CO2 into oily hydrocarbon chains powered by photosynthesis, searching email by intelligent context understanding.
Yes we can't do either, but outdoing current computing ability seems much closer - more people have the opportunity, more people have the incentive, there are many more avenues of approach, and we know it's fundamentally possible - than outdoing current rocket engines. Closer, and more useful.
- A space shuttle with a warp drive powered by a captive black hole (or whatever) needs huge industry or government levels of cash; anyone with a few hundred dollars, a cloud computing account and an internet connection can look at brain scan data and write software tests, or join in protein folding distributed experiments.
- The kind of engineering to create a skyscraper sized machine needs Lockheed-Martin size factories and hundreds of specialist component makers, and a lot of metal and employees. Poking at cell-sized biology can be done in a small room by one or two people, a small machine and a single UPS delivery of supplies.
- There's not much profit in building a space station. There's a lot of profit waiting for reconnecting severed spinal columns, converting atmospheric CO2 into oily hydrocarbon chains powered by photosynthesis, searching email by intelligent context understanding.
Yes we can't do either, but outdoing current computing ability seems much closer - more people have the opportunity, more people have the incentive, there are many more avenues of approach, and we know it's fundamentally possible - than outdoing current rocket engines. Closer, and more useful.