/sci/ - Science & Math

we can't sell everything new that comes out that is useful

Ethics.

We have fMRIs, we've hit the brick wall with Psychology, like 95% of all interesting drugs are controlled and illegal substances.

If we could freely test shit and make medicine, you'd see a revolution in medicine and the theory of the mind humanity has never before seen.

Most new scientific discoveries involve either general relativity or quantum mechanics. So, not much application for that.

>>2791331

The effect of steroids alone would push medicine into whole new places.

>>2791364

The effects of man boob epidemics would also do that.

>>2791293
Also, the private sector has control over inventions, it's no longer smart people working in their attics. Take a look at apple, which has been releasing the same product in different sizes for the past 10 years.

>>2791351
so don't look forward to anything?

what about all that futurist bullshit about nanotechnology and transhumanism

lol

>>2791473
Fucking capitalists.

>>2791293
OP, the last 20 years?
Have you seen computers from 20 years ago?
With the increase in efficiency computers brought us, we might as well have gone through another industrial revolution.

Last 20 years? Thousands of new medicines, gene therapy, dozens of vaccines, cloth weaves that are waterproof so that when you spill your beer you don't get wet, novel methods of synthesizing all sorts of stuff, plastics that are stronger than steel, new semiconductors.... Then there are advances in cosmetics, and in automobiles, aeronautics, and power generation (clean coal tech, nuclear materials tech). Major advances in smelting and refining procedures. Mathematical methods for brewing alcohols more efficiently and with better flavours. Sports gear is not even comparable. Modern paper lasts much longer, looks much better, and is much cheaper... then there is e-ink technology. DVDs. The compressor in your refrigerator uses a completely different design. So does your hot water tank.

You just take all this stuff for granted. Almost everything you wear, eat, sleep on, and masturbate to has been revolutionized in the last 20 years.

20 years ago, we had eight channels on TV. Eight. We'd just upgraded to cable, giving us four extra channels. Buying shelves for your house was a major expense... you couldn't just drop $10 at IKEA. Our car was a monstrous hunk of steel that got boiling hot inside in the summer, and had frost on the inside all winter. The rear windshield was held onto the frame by a sort of tar, which would melt and drip in the heat.

>>2793089

I love you right now.

>>2791293
>mapped the human genome

Do you have any IDEA how hard that was?

The technology first had to be INVENTED to read the genome, and then computer programs developed to piece it back together while getting rid of everything not related (microbe DNA outnumbers your own DNA 99:1 in your body).

Imagine trying to do a jigsaw puzzle, but instead of a picture the entire thing is black until it is complete, now imagine that it is a 3 billion piece puzzle, and all there is only 1 way to put all the pieces together.

>>2793123
>microbe DNA outnumbers your own DNA 99:1 in your body

>>2793089
Fucking this.

>>2793131

My bad, its about 10:1
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080603085914.htm
>The number of bacteria living within the body of the average healthy adult human are estimated to outnumber human cells 10 to 1

>>2793089
Congratulations, you've just become copypasta. I'm using this.

>>2793142
That statistic is absurd.

First of all, the internet was not invented in 1990. The world wide web was, but not the internet. Even then though it has completely changed fucking everything. That and cell phones have pretty much made the late 90s onward a completely different era from the time beforehand. The 70s and 80s are quaint in comparison.

>mapped the human genome
This was fucking HUGE. Not just in the amount of effort it took or the milestone it set in biology, but in terms of ramifications too. Since the genome was mapped our understanding of genetic disorders, traits, and developmental biology has exploded. Now we can map the entire genomes of other species too which is even more greatly expanding our knowledge base. Phylogenetic trees have been greatly rewritten in the past 10 years thanks to these findings.

>yfw the last 20 years is the 1990s

feels bad man

>>2793105
>>2793137
Yay, I was useful!

>>2793147
>suddenly glad I put the masturbation bit in there...

>>2793089
I think people take everyday changes in their stride nowadays and it's only the big stuff that captures the imagination (fusion power etc). We have become very good at internalizing rapid progress as normal. Furthermore, a lot of gamechanging advances start off very modestly, not at all like in science fiction. Roomba is a simple robotic vacuum cleaner, which is a far cry from the helper androids we are waiting for. Yet it represents something new in our houses and potentially heralds as big a change in everyday chores as dishwashers and electric ovens did.

>>2793147
Just make sure you replace some of the less accurate stuff, like us only having 8 television channels. I was watching TV back in 1990 and there were definitely a hell of a lot more than just 8 fucking channels. Maybe if we were talking about 1980 that would be accurate, but not 1990. The thing about DVDs is also misleading. While DVDs were invented in 1995, they were essentially just a higher density CD, a technology that had been in development since the 70s and had already been demonstrated and released in the early 80s. Cars in 1990 were also a lot better than he lets on.

>>2793150
The bacteria in your gut is far smaller then your cells

You would be surprised about how many different microbes live in your gut, most produce enzymes to digest food, without them you die, without you they die.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Microbiome_Project

Interesting fact: these bacteria can swap and acquire new genes like we trade money. People studied the bacteria in people from Japan and found several new bacteria that helps digest the complex carbohydrates in seaweed, but not only that, the bacteria found in most humans had picked up the genetic information required to produce this enzyme as well.

>>2793167
I agree! It's easier to see what is revolutionary after the fact. The cotton gin probably wasn't fawned over in its day, nor was the printing press. It was only a hundred years later, when people had adapted the technology to other uses, that the full impact of these inventions was realized. Or look at calculus, group theory, and formal logic... all were just trivial tools for a hundred years after they were first conceived. Now they factor into our everyday lives in ways that would have been unfathomable to their originators.

>>2793171
You've missed the entire point. The high precision manufacturing technology to produce DVDs or DVD players did not exist in 1991. The necessary materials didn't exist. The information theory (compresison algorithms) didn't exist. There is so much that goes into even simple products that goes unappreciated.

Also, you might have had more than 8 channels, but I did not. Our four channels depended on how good the weather was, too. When cable TV was introduced to my area, it was fucking amazing. And that depended on the invention of a certain kind of signal amplifier, which in turn depended on... well, you get the idea.

Media tech is so much better now technologically but the content is still so bad.
We have hulu, netflix, DVRs with huge storage capacities, youtube, affordable HDTVs
But everything on TV sucks so much ass, fuck.

>>2793196
>Also, you might have had more than 8 channels, but I did not. When cable TV was introduced to my area, it was fucking amazing.
Just because you live in some rural bumfuck town doesn't mean the rest of us were cut off from society. Using your logic high speed internet hasn't been achieved yet because there are still people living in the Rockies that only have 56k dial-up internet as an available option.