I suppose it depends how you look at it.
In our universe, there are physical laws that cannot be violated, and that has certain consequences- though perhaps some of the consequences may be circumvented to some degree. One of those is that we'll never see a true perpetuum mobile, another that we cannot reverse the increase of entropy in the universe as a whole- from which it follows (for example) that a 100% efficient heat engine is theoretically impossible. That's true today, and that will be true in the 32nd century.
That's a pretty wild guess.
I mean, yes, a lot of smart people have faith in that today. But a lot of arguably much smarter people thought that matter could not be energy and the most fundamental of particles would be found at deterministic locations.
Finding convenient laws is one of the chief tasks of science. Typically, the laws are fundamentally wrong - they have a region of applicability and fall apart at the edges that either are of little practical relevance or are damned difficult to study. If anything, there's a pattern there: whatever we come up with, it will
always be wrong, because it always has been.
We already know that conservation laws, the most fundamental and powerful of our tools, are mere guesses, and at best we can dig up a more fundamental (if also more esoteric and narrow-scoped) conservation law to excuse our initial blunder, and then another, and yet another.
That's a house of cards. But the point of science is that each card is so small and incremental that even if a hundred thousand fall, the whole pile will only shift a little bit. Yet the shifts may well matter, especially on the equally puny human scale. And, as mentioned, kill hundreds of thousands. Or perhaps make billions stop believing in what they see, and start buying new faces and lives.
Perhaps even more fundamentally, there are mathematical theorems (that have been proven) that tell us some of the things mathematics won't be able to do, now or in the 32nd century- which also may have consequences for devices.
Now that's more believable. Nature will always pull a fast one on us, but mathematics is our own doing, and generally won't stretch into doing something we can't imagine (although there have been plenty of exceptions to that in history, too).
But arguments about computing, based on how Turing thought computing would happen, will probably be invalidated in a jiffy when we simply come up with a new way of computing. Mathematics has been reinvented often enough, and most assuredly again will be.
It's just that I believe there may be certain absolute upper limits they might not be able to exceed, just as in our real world. Or, barring such upper limits, even some really hard technology 'ceilings' they might ultimately break through, but perhaps not in 500 years time.
Well, there's empirical evidence of that. After all, they
haven't made progress. And with "they" we can refer to the Feds of DSC or to every other corporeal alien that's explicitly stuck with the same subpar gear our heroes are.
Also, I don't believe technology truly is exponential. It only behaves that way as long as it doesn't run into one of these barriers. Any specific real-world technology usually follows an S-curve. Starting slowly, then starting to rise exponentially in efficiency as it matures, then the increase of efficiency slowing down again as it begins to stall against the limits of diminishing returns of further developments. For example, in 1900 we could probably build much better steam engines than in 1800. However, I doubt that the difference between a steam engine built in 1900 and one in 2000 would be as large.
Then again, it sorta is: after 1900, there were absolutely massive leaps in turbine efficiency, and materials have developed since. The big leap was early on in the century, though.
But the main thing there is that it's not steam that would be exponential - it's technology. Steam didn't just give us steam. It gave us the impetus to create internal combustion engines, nuclear powerplants, and Moon rockets. When a technology wanes and perhaps retires, it usually has plenty of kids on steep ascent...
Why
would we run out of outgrowth options? Many a technology has stalled. Few paths of progress have. If anything, we're short on means to invent new paths. And unlike in Trek, we have no peers, no competing intellect to judge the limits of progress by.
Although we just might find out about such an intellect, at some not too distant point of time. It's just that we already can tell that the things currently remaining unseen and unattainable are so vast and all-encompassing that miracles could easily hide in there.
The most idiotic idea science has ever come up with, the principle of homogeneity, was stillborn to begin with: we came up with it when we already knew the microscopic was fundamentally different from the macroscopic. We simply should know better, and accept that what lies beyond the horizon is unknown. Until known.
Timo Saloniemi
