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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7604 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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I wonder if there might actually still be, even in our modern world, some major intellectual insights that future generations, once those insights have appeared, will think of as relatively low-hanging fruit and wonder why it took so long for their ancestors to come up with them, and wonder why their ancestors did not come up with them given that they already had every necessary bit of knowledge to come up with them, and maybe only lacked some spark of genius.

Some examples from history:

  • Calculus - You can teach this to any decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, but, while there were some remarkably close predecessors to it in ancient Greece (the method of exhaustion), it was not formalized as a rigorous concept and method until about the 18th-19th centuries.
  • Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".
  • Free markets - It seems at least plausible these days to many decently intelligent people that free-ish markets (too much freedom in markets has its own problems but...) serve as a good communicator of economic information, and that this can help relatively free market economic systems at least in some cases to outcompete central planning (there are many other factors involved of course, but this is one of them...). I'm not aware of anyone having had this kind of hypothesis until a few hundred years ago. But it's the kind of idea you can explain to a decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, it's not something that requires mountains of highly specific knowledge to grasp.
  • Natural selection - The idea that the combination of survival pressure and reproduction will over time cause better-adapted entities to out-reproduce worse-adapted entities is so logical that one can demonstrate the truth of it through pure mathematics. But as far as I know, it did not become a popular explanation for the evolution of living beings until about 170 years ago, even though people 2000 years ago were both familiar with so-called artificial selection (breeding of livestock and so on) and probably had the intellectual background to understand the concept of natural selection mathematically (people who were advanced enough mathematics thinkers to create something like Euclid's Elements certainly had the raw brain-power to model natural selection mathematically, if a certain spark of genius had struck them).

It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.

I have a feeling we'll find some cancer cures that make us go 'doh'. Growing organs in vitro will probably take a breakthrough that seems obvious in retrospect. I'm guessing there's probably a few breakthroughs in nuclear technology, or power transmission, which will be in the same category.

I hope we get wireless power transmission like Tesla always dreamed of. Would also make space exploration easier.

Personally I think we'll find a more dense fuel for space travel at some point as well.

Wireless power transmission is very much already a thing, you do it with powerful microwaves.

The issue is any suitably powerful and efficient means of wirelessly transmitting energy is indistinguishable from a death ray should some unfortunate soul happen to stumble into the emission cone.

WOAH I had no idea! You just blew my mind.

Can we do it efficiently though? Is the only problem the danger?

Its nowhere near as efficient as just using a conductive cable certainly. IIRC its something like 50% efficient in a lab, so probably half that in real applications. You have to have a really, really good reason for not just running a power line for it to be worth it for high power applications.

The FCC actually approved charging via WiFi a few years ago, but its limited to maybe 1 W at most, not too many commercial applications at the moment to my knowledge.

But yeah, the lowered efficiency and substantial safety risks are the barriers at the moment. Maybe that will change in the future.

wireless power transmission like Tesla always dreamed of

Tesla's dream of wireless power transmission was mostly just him going senile / developing schizophrenic symptoms. His earlier inventions that he made his fame from relied on the same laws of physics that were well known by then to make such long distance wireless power transmission inherently extremely inefficient (there's a reason any modern "beamed power transmission" concepts use parabolic antennae and microwave wavelengths).

We probably have different views on what schizophrenia is.

Feel free to substitute a better term for "clear detachment from factual reality on some issues where the person was before well aware of the reality". Tesla's idea of wireless power transmission fundamentally cannot work because of the interaction of inverse square law and Maxwell's equations. Tesla, having invented the AC induction motor, was well aware of those equations and his inventions relied on them. Thus to later pivot to "No, that's actually bullshit and I'll just transfer power wirelessly without direct beaming" is a sign of either that or generally losing his wits (ie. senility).

As @TeknOSheEeP mentioned, you can beam power but that's fundamentally the same as just pointing a giant flashlight in one direction, only using microwaves in the hope of better conversion efficiency. A key fact is that it relies on a tightly directional beam, something which requires wavelength much shorter than the dimensions of the transmitter. Otherwise you've just built a plain old radio transmitter which (again because of inverse square law) are extremely inefficient as far as the receiver power goes.

We already have wireless power transmission, you can charge your phone etc wirelessly very easily these days

Yeah but my understanding was that it's extremely inefficient over anything past like a couple inches?

Not over space distances.

Depending on the charger you can actually wireless charge a phone with a 1cm air gap between the charger and your phone.

And if you want to see wireless power transmission over long (many meters) distances then this MIT demo is basically the best out there I know of, even though technically it's to show dipole radiation and not power transfer. Also it's a very good demonstration that you don't need to have a complete circuit for electricity to flow.

Most people, even the scientifically inclined, have absolutely zero idea of how electricity really works. And yet their vote counts just as much as mine... (yes I am salty about this)

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