Just how advanced are we in the 21 century?

Question

I know humans has come a long a way but you think by now they build a water proof computer since they coming out with all of these water cooling. What do you think?

Answer 1

"too advanced."

Because it was just plain better in ye olde days without running water, anti-septics, medical science, electricity, personal transport, books, a reliable wage, free-speech and need we mention it - the Internet and the world wide web, the single most important advance in history, benefitting nearly every human endeavour imaginable through the ability to communicate easily.

Water proofing a computer is not a particularly good example of "advancement", all you need do is spray it with a thin layer of molten acrylic and let it dry.  But that would add to the cost, however and it's not really a required feature.

Citing technology and science as the REASON that people kill people is just dumb, people killed people before there was even recognisable rational thought, never mind tool usage.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people and it's always been that way.

Answer 2

We can and do make waterproof computers. They're generally used in submersibles and by divers doing exploratory study, things of that nature.

There really is no demand for a waterproof computer for the private sector, however - it isn't cost-efficient. The cost of producing a waterproof _desktop_ computer far outweighs the cost of simply using common sense to avoid maknig it wet in the first place. This approach works pretty well, too, as most computers when they're finally disposed of did not break down due to a water spill, they broke down due to time and perhaps dust.

<edit> Of course if you really -want- a waterproof desktop computer all that bad, go ahead and knock yourself out. Ask around, you'll find some place or another that would be willing to produce one for you - though the cost is bound to be substantially higher than that of a normal desktop.

Answer 3

face it

we are pee-ons

the universe is huge

and we are still on one small piece of dust

the Earth

Answer 4

We humans..we tend to be self-satisfied with ourselves even with the simplest things. where are the flying cars I ask? other than the telecommunications industry and the Pharmaceutical industry, I don't see any huge advancements.  

Answer 5

We are not advanced until we learn to accept each other. We solve problems by nuking, killing, stealing, or lying to each other. If there are other advanced civilizations out there, the first thing they probably did was unite and fight ignorance, ethnocentrism, and hatred. We are not doing that, were too busy making more advanced weapons to kill others or give them diseases, instead of studying cellular production to avoid those very diseases!!

Answer 6

too advanced.  

Answer 7

Just enough to kill ourselves and incur the wrath of God!

Answer 8

We seem incredibly primitive to me at times, and at other times incredibly advanced.

How amazing a thing a transistor or airliner is. How could humanity ever have collected enough knowledge to make those things?

How silly and simple are the things that can go wrong with transistors and airliners to cause them to fail. How absurdly crude it is to force a giant hunk of metal through the air by burning thousands of pounds of oil.

It depends on my mood.

That has nothing to do with astronomy or space though, does it?

Answer 9

There's more computing power in the digital watch you're wearing than what existed in the whole world just thirty years ago. The first electronic handheld calculator didn't come out came out until 1969 and all it could do was add, subtract, multiply and divide. I'd say we've advanced considerably.

Answer 10

not enough. we still have war. technology is ok but could go more far. we still dont understand everything in nature and cant explain everything. They should have totally water proof ipod or ipod covers so that you can take it into a pool

Answer 11

i don't think we're that advanced

we are our killing ourselves without caring (littering, polluting) it hurts our ozone layer which will eventually kill us

the day human kind becomes advanced is when we can take care of our needs and help the environment at the same time

Answer 12

the problem with waterproofing electronics is not, in the waterproofing, we have the technology to do that.... but when you water proof something, genenrally you also greatly increase it's ability to hold heat.... and computers are powerhouses of heat (or they wouldn't even need water cooling, they'd need a small itty bitty fan and that would be it)

you water proof your components and then you have to add more then the liquid cooling just to keep ti cool.... it becomes redundant...

however, if someone were willing to think outside the box, potentially you could make a water filled computer that would cool just fine, and since everythings submerged in water, you can greatly increase the cooling rate....

but all of that is pretty pointless when you actually stop to think about it.... why bother developing new technology when you stand to gain nearly nothing (wow, so we have a completely waterproof system.... and it stays cool like it's supposed to.. it's not going to perform any better then it would with a normal cooling system... and this method would add hundreds onto the price)

Answer 13

Frank Drake gave a talk (available on the web - but i don't have a link handy) where he talked about what was known 44 years ago vs. what is known today.  He admitted that compared to what we know now, we didn't know much of anything then, and most of what we thought we knew has turned out to be wrong.

We're still on the exponential explosive rise part of the learning curve.  My best guess is that we hardly have a handle on the scope of what we don't know.

But it's been fun riding the rocket.

Very funny.  A water proof computer.  I did get to work on the CDC-6600.  This machine was water cooled.  That's OK, because the water stayed in little tubes, right?  No.  You had to carefully monitor the humidity and temperature and make sure you were above the dew point.  Otherwise the whole machine was toast.  One mistake is all you get.

And yet the machine i worked on was 25 years old.  And it was decommissioned because you could get an equivalent machine for much less than the maintenance costs.  It never did fail.

There are an infinite number of problems to solve.  We haven't come close. But the engineer is interested in practical solutions we need now - not final solutions we'll never outgrow.