this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
231 points (86.9% liked)
Technology
59300 readers
4818 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How much of this is based on reality and how much is based on Star Trek wanting a mechanism to be able to communicate between star fleet and the Enterprise?
I think entirely Star Trek on this one. Although, if we ever want to move* faster than light, it’ll almost certainly require a science or an understanding of nature which we don’t even have theoretical concepts of in 2023.
We use ions for a bunch of stuff like Li-ion batteries and various other chemical engineering marvels on a daily basis. I wonder how new is the idea of ions anyway?
Wikipedia has this to say: “Svante Arrhenius put forth, in his 1884 dissertation, the explanation of the fact that solid crystalline salts dissociate into paired charged particles when dissolved, for which he would win the 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Arrhenius' explanation was that in forming a solution, the salt dissociates into Faraday's ions, he proposed that ions formed even in the absence of an electric current.”
We’ve built so much on top an idea that’s only about 139 years old. Before that, it must have been pretty difficult or even impossible to explain large parts of chemistry we use every day.
I wonder how would you imagine the future of chemistry in the early 1800s? Could you imagine that nowadays we leach gold from a mineral that doesn’t even look golden at all? Could you imagine that we can pull aluminium from rocks that don’t even look metallic in any way? Could you imagine that we use it to build all sorts of things like cans, door frames and airplanes? What about surface coating of materials to give them corrosion resistance, different colors or scratch resistance. In the past 139 years we’ve done all sorts of absolutely wild things with ions.
If you start studying chemistry in 2023 you’ll probably hear about ions during the first lecture and later you’ll build all sorts of wonderful things on that bit of information.
Thanks for this. I have similar thoughts as to some people's definitiveness about our understanding of the universe and its speed limit.
The thing is, we don’t know is the speed limit is a hard problem.
Maybe will struggle with it for centuries or maybe we’ll find a way to avoid the problem within the next 130 years. Maybe we’ll find a way to bend space so that you don’t really need to travel very fast. Maybe wormholes become a viable option. Maybe we’ll build hyperspace gates or something like that.
Or maybe none of that is viable and a thousand years later we’re still struggling with the speed of light wishing there was a way around it.
At some point, microbes and immunology were a complete mystery. People dying after surgery was a hard problem and nobody knew how to fix that. Turns it, all you need is ethanol and penicillin, but we couldn’t even imagine it at the time.