- Joined
- Nov 18, 2025
I have this idea I call the “tech progress loop.” For roughly the last century, humanity has mostly taken technologies and physical principles we already understand and refined the absolute hell out of them. Phones are incredibly advanced descendants of radio and telecommunication. Computers are an absurd refinement of switching and transistors. Even nuclear power, despite literally splitting the atom, usually ends with us heating water and turning a steam turbine. We discover new things, but then we bolt them onto an architecture that is often 100+ years old.
Historically, humanity seems to enter a new stage whenever we fundamentally change our relationship with energy. Fire, agriculture, steam, electricity, fossil fuels, nuclear power, each one raised the ceiling for everything else. The internet did something similar for information. Suddenly moving knowledge became almost instantaneous and civilization reorganized around it.
My bet, nothing I can prove, just where history seems to point, is that the next comparable breakthrough will be how we generate electricity itself.
If we ever learn to take fission or fusion and efficiently convert the energy of those reactions directly into electrical current instead of using the nuclear reaction to create heat, boil water, make steam, and turn a turbine, I think that changes civilization dramatically. Cheap abundant electricity means more computing, manufacturing, desalination, automation, scientific research, everything.
Maybe I'm wrong. But I really hope I live long enough to see some kid in a museum laugh when they're told humanity once mastered splitting the atom and then used it to boil fucking water.
Historically, humanity seems to enter a new stage whenever we fundamentally change our relationship with energy. Fire, agriculture, steam, electricity, fossil fuels, nuclear power, each one raised the ceiling for everything else. The internet did something similar for information. Suddenly moving knowledge became almost instantaneous and civilization reorganized around it.
My bet, nothing I can prove, just where history seems to point, is that the next comparable breakthrough will be how we generate electricity itself.If we ever learn to take fission or fusion and efficiently convert the energy of those reactions directly into electrical current instead of using the nuclear reaction to create heat, boil water, make steam, and turn a turbine, I think that changes civilization dramatically. Cheap abundant electricity means more computing, manufacturing, desalination, automation, scientific research, everything.
Maybe I'm wrong. But I really hope I live long enough to see some kid in a museum laugh when they're told humanity once mastered splitting the atom and then used it to boil fucking water.