And are there natural boundaries and are 3-d space conventional area vs volume concepts relevant if whole new areas open up?
For example there was a relevant fear at one point that if we continued to discover another new chemical element every two decades or so, in a couple centuries no one could possibly know all the elements, perhaps not even name them all. But that growth had a natural border in the triple digit range; no problemo. Of course chemists found entirely new things to spend time on, rather than just discovering new elements.
There may very well be nothing more that can be learned WRT classical mechanics. Plenty of fun quantum and relativistic stuff to learn, but thats not on the "here be dragons" map which is now completely explored for classical mechanics, or as near to completely explored not to matter. Someday those fields will be fully explored and boring and closed to further exploration.
Another interesting topic is eventually stuff is forgotten when its irrelevant. What happens in a million years when most academic activity is reinventing useless stuff thats already been invented, found useless, and forgotten, so how do you stop the backlash from eliminating actually useful knowledge?
Well, a million years is about 5 times the lifetime of our species. Whoever will be reinventing our knowledge will probably be so different from us that this discussion won't make any sense anymore.
A few thousand years ago, somebody probably asked "How will people of the future be able to tell histories once we paint over all the rocks?"
"Whoever will be reinventing our knowledge will probably be so different from us that this discussion won't make any sense anymore."
You're going to make contemporary archeologists cry, saying things like that. And the future ones are likely to be even better at it.
That might make an interesting very long term startup idea, in a million years it may make a heck of a lot more sense to hire archeologists to "discover" new areas for business profit than to hire primary creators to try and re-invent the hard way, the same way the first 345 times "it" was invented. And I'm only slightly tongue in cheek that this is already how contemporary IT works.
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And are there natural boundaries and are 3-d space conventional area vs volume concepts relevant if whole new areas open up?
For example there was a relevant fear at one point that if we continued to discover another new chemical element every two decades or so, in a couple centuries no one could possibly know all the elements, perhaps not even name them all. But that growth had a natural border in the triple digit range; no problemo. Of course chemists found entirely new things to spend time on, rather than just discovering new elements.
There may very well be nothing more that can be learned WRT classical mechanics. Plenty of fun quantum and relativistic stuff to learn, but thats not on the "here be dragons" map which is now completely explored for classical mechanics, or as near to completely explored not to matter. Someday those fields will be fully explored and boring and closed to further exploration.
Another interesting topic is eventually stuff is forgotten when its irrelevant. What happens in a million years when most academic activity is reinventing useless stuff thats already been invented, found useless, and forgotten, so how do you stop the backlash from eliminating actually useful knowledge?
Well, a million years is about 5 times the lifetime of our species. Whoever will be reinventing our knowledge will probably be so different from us that this discussion won't make any sense anymore.
A few thousand years ago, somebody probably asked "How will people of the future be able to tell histories once we paint over all the rocks?"
"Whoever will be reinventing our knowledge will probably be so different from us that this discussion won't make any sense anymore."
You're going to make contemporary archeologists cry, saying things like that. And the future ones are likely to be even better at it.
That might make an interesting very long term startup idea, in a million years it may make a heck of a lot more sense to hire archeologists to "discover" new areas for business profit than to hire primary creators to try and re-invent the hard way, the same way the first 345 times "it" was invented. And I'm only slightly tongue in cheek that this is already how contemporary IT works.