Technological progress

What was, will be; and what has been done will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
Something happens that is said: “look, this is new”; but it was already in the centuries that were before us.
(Ecclesiastes 1: 9,10)

Let's briefly go over forecasting methods, of which there are many. There are intuitive and formalized methods. Formalized forecasting methods, in turn, are subject and time series. Formalized time series forecasting methods, in turn, can be divided into statistical and structural models. And all these methods - ultimately - do not work. As my friend Mikhail Klimarev asserts, this is because the future is simply not defined and something out of the ordinary can always happen that will have an effect on the final outcome much more than the current trends with statistical processing.

Today in Oklahoma, only one child out of five (aged 6 to 12 years) can understand by the clock with an arrow - what time it is. All children are accustomed to the clock with numbers. In a pinch, you can ask Siri for time.

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But there is a downside.

“A friend told me that he somehow had a chance to call a taxi with a colleague and philosopher to a branch of Princeton University in New York. The driver, according to my friend, is a kind of bear, his face is not visible because of a stack of long hair. He speaks with them to figure out who they are lucky. Those explain what they teach at Princeton. But the chauffeur wants to know more. And then a colleague, with some irritation, says that he deals with the problems of transcendental perception and epochs (the philosophical principle developed by the German philosopher E. Husserl (1859–1938). According to this principle, one should refrain from judging the subject based on the “naive” world view ) ... and then the driver interrupts him: "Do you mean Husserl?". Previously, a taxi driver who knew the works of Husserl, was a rare instance. Today you can meet a taxi driver who will turn on classical music and ask you about your latest book on semiotics. There is nothing surrealistic in this, says Umberto Eco.

Saturn 5 - American launch vehicle. It was used for the implementation of a manned landing on the moon and preparation for it under the Apollo program, as well as in a two-stage version for launching the Skylab orbital station into Earth orbit. Chief Designer Werner von Braun.

Thanks to this, on July 20, 1969, in the course of the Apollo 11 flight, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. In total, under the Apollo program, 6 successful landings of astronauts were made (the last - in 1972).

Today, these technologies are lost.

One NASA employee best described the Concorde creation program: “Sending a man to the Moon is nonsense compared to the efforts that were spent on launching the Concorde.” First of all, there were political obstacles. To land Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon, the guys from NASA just gave a handful of German rocket engineers a lot of American dollars and began to rest quietly on their laurels. But we did not have German scientists who would build the Concord.

July 13, 1985 Live Aid concert was held, which took place on three concert venues of three continents connected by teleconference. Musician Phil Collins with the help of "Concord" crossed the ocean and was able to perform at both the European and American parts of the concert. He gave an interview in “Concord”, which went on live broadcast of the event, which was watched by about 1.5 billion people in more than 100 countries.

In the 80s, the flight on the Concorde across the Atlantic lasted 3.5 hours, and today there are more than 8 on the Boeing.
“We visited the moon, now we are halfway to Mars. We invented the steam engine and almost immediately replaced it with an internal combustion engine. We overclocked to Mach 1, then to 2. We crossed the Atlantic in 3 hours ... and are no longer capable of it.

Of course, we can go to the museum and look at our old girlfriend. But what the hell is going to the museum to see the future. Except, perhaps, the fact that this is not the future, ”reminds us of Jeremy Clarkson.

Joseph Heller writes in his book “Something Happened”: A well-working vacuum cleaner is more important to me than the atomic bomb, and everyone I know is completely indifferent that the earth revolves around the sun, and not vice versa, or the moon - around the earth, although The pattern of ebb and flow is probably not indifferent to seamen and oyster catchers; who cares about them?

PS Posted in a blog post about " Progress of Science " (in Ukrainian)