A Contemplation on Progress Across One Lifetime

 In three days, if all goes well, the Artemis II rocket will lift off to send people around the moon.  It will be the first time in 52 years that we have launched people beyond low earth orbit, with the highest mission orbiting about 875 miles above the earth.  Artemis II will replicate the 1968 Apollo 8 mission, circling the moon without landing, at 240,000 miles from Earth.

Just a few days ago was the 100th anniversary of the first liquid-fueled rocket launch.  Robert Goddard’s rocket weighed ten pounds and reached an altitude of 41 feet.  It made me think about the changes that a person can see over a lifetime.  Changes in the era between 1900 and 1970 were particularly striking.

In 1967, 41 years after Goddard’s rocket, the U.S. launched its first Saturn V rocket.  The Saturn V weighed 6 million pounds; 600,000 times more than Goddard’s rocket.  Saturn V reached an altitude 32,000,000 times higher than Goddard’s rocket.  The Soviet Proton-K was a comparable rocket.  We might also compare the 1977 Voyager 1 space probe to Goddard’s rocket.  Voyager has traveled 2,000,000,000,000 times father than Goddard’s rocket, so far.  So very far. 

You can see similar improvements in aircraft.  In 1919, an advanced aircraft was made entirely of wood, with linen wings coated with cellulose.  It weighed 2400 pounds, could carry a 1100 payload, which included two people.  It had a powerful 250 HP engine and a range of 450 miles at 125 mph.  In 1969, only 50 years later, Boeing flew the first 747 jumbo-jet.  Its engines generated about 300,000 horsepower.  It weighed 358,000 pounds while empty and could carry 377,000 pounds, which could include 366 passengers and 25 crew.  The 747 had a range of 5300 miles and a top speed of 700 mph.  I could compare the 747 to the Wright Flyer of 1903, but the point is already clear.

In the fifty years between 1915 and 1965, we also made advances in blowing up things and people.  The largest non-nuclear bomb ever made was used in WWI, in 1917, with an explosive yield of about 34 tonnes of TNT.  In 1961, forty-one years later, the Soviet Union exploded the Tsar Bomba with a yield of 50 megatonnes, or 1,500,000 times the yield of the WWI explosion.  Soviet engineers actually introduced a design variation to reduce the yield of the bomb by about 50% for testing.  

At some point, we stopped making things bigger, when rockets and airplanes and bombs were big enough.  Instead, we’ve made progress in making things smaller (including packages at the grocery store).  It’s harder to see the scale of the improvements, although it’s easy to appreciate the usefulness of a smartphone.  In 1945, the ENIAC computer weighed 30 tons and occupied 1800 square feet, (larger than our first house).  ENIAC could perform 5000 basic operations per second, which was a huge improvement over earlier mechanical-electrical devices.  Today’s best computer chips are about 8 inches by 8 inches in size, and can perform 63 trillion operations per second.  That’s more than a 50 billion-fold improvement in processing speed at a weight of 2.6 pounds, or 0.00004 times the weight of the ENIAC.

I’m left wondering what comes next.  I did my first physics and chemistry classes with a slide rule.  In my senior year of high school, I got a hand-held device that could multiply, divide and take a square root.  Now, I have a hand-held device that can interpret and answer verbal questions and commands, just like the ship’s computer in Star Trek.  That technology was supposed to be 300 years in the future.  

Somewhere in the world, there are technologies which are only novelties today.  Within 50 years, some of these will have million-fold or billion-fold improvements with revolutionary societal impact.  AI has already produced stunning results, and it just coming up the learning curve.  Leading AI researchers have admitted that they are not sure whether the AI systems are conscious, or not.  I think we’ll see technologies from quantum computing and communications that might seem surreal by today’s standards.  Practical nuclear fusion energy may finally be realized within 50 years.  I would not be surprised to see macroscopic manipulation of time, space or gravity.  Science fiction has imagined such things, and science fiction often precedes actual inventions.  

What else will happen?  One thing that clearly needs improvement is our way of organizing the planet into warring nations and governing.  ff we do not blow ourselves up or ruin the planet, there will be very interesting developments for the next generation.