This is the first generation in many industrialized countries the children are worse off than their parents. Among them is heard frequently disappointed, as that gave them the future they were promised, and the crisis we are experiencing the problem is exacerbated.
But for me the biggest problem is that not only the present generation for the first time live worse than their fathers on average economically. My concern is that at the level of scientific and technological innovation present generation is going through a slow process of creativity . The future I was promised in my childhood and adolescence, not delivered it to me or those born in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
When my grandfather was born, Einstein discovered the theory of relativity and the revolution in physics was complete. When my father was young, the discovery of antibiotics and achieved enormous progress in the fight against bacterial infections. Also invented transistors, which are the basis of all the electronics, and ran from valves to the chips, which are the source of all the computer hardware level. When I was a boy, the man reached the moon and supersonic aircraft developed for commercial use. Then came the mobile phone network. But the future they promised me in college during the '80s never really unlike what many think, I am convinced that progress is slowing. That he was born in 1945 saw for the first 30 years of his life many more changes that he was born in 1975.
When I studied biology in the 80s, it was thought that in less than 20 years would find a cure for serious diseases such as cancer and viral diseases such AIDS. But in the end, medical advances were tiny. In the 80 had already been invented genetic engineering, recombinant DNA, monoclonal antibodies, and promised in a few years all kinds of magic bullets and cures for cancer based on the ability to deliver drugs right where you were needed . But again, at the end of today chemotherapies are still as brutal as ever.
Improvements in terms of life expectancy have more to do with early diagnosis, with the level of nutrition, smoking cessation with or lead a healthier lifestyle. Anyway, not much to do with great cures most lethal diseases. Transplants and were common 30 years ago. For now, the surprise was that we were cured of myopia, but rather secondary uncomfortable in a list of vital health issues.
In terms of energy, and in the 60s there was talk of "controlling the hydrogen bomb" to generate inexhaustible energy. But that did not happen and today the big news seems very trite a person 30 years ago. Topics such as alternative energy made little progress in so many years. Our energy is generated basically the same way that 40 years ago: we continue to nuclear energy and the burning of carbon-based fuels.
The cars, except electronics, are equal. Piston engines still work the same way. Nobody really invented a revolutionary turbine or a motor http://www.arm2teeth.com/ that is original, or a mechanic of 60 years can not understand.
In all these years the only industry that seems to really have evolved is the computer , which has gotten almost all products. The computer is perhaps the only field that if a person educated in the 80s and was not updated, today really not understand 80% of what is happening. But the experience of the people did not change much. In the PCs had 80 Simple, sure, but the beginning was quite similar. I had internet (not yet the www) and that perhaps is the only argument that the future was not a great deception. If I had to cite one area where you really do things improved a lot since the 80 would be in internet thanks to the combination of Moore's Law and Metcalf's Law (the first refers to the speed of development of chips was incredible and the second Internet network effect).
In fact, I made my own career doing internet business. But everything else I think we can conclude that our creativity, which exploded over many decades of the twentieth century is fairly stagnant over the last 30 years.
When I was in college (college in the United States, unlike Europe many careers can study for two years until you choose one), I spent faculty in university studying a bit of everything: chemistry, mathematical analysis, biology , genetics, history, physics, psychology, anthropology and informatics (computer science). My curiosity was inexhaustible. 8 years I was studying (a BA and two masters), and until the end I took my free material to study from law to engineering.
Now my daughter Alexa studies at the same university, in Columbia, and when I see we spent hours looking at books together. She is studying chemistry, biology, mathematical analysis, Eastern European history, the classics, and I studied really no different than what she looks now. Every so often appears something I never heard that fascinates me but very occasionally. I remember my father again fascinated, "when I was a kid we did not have TV when I was a kid we did not have space travel, when I was a kid we did not have jets, when I was a kid we had no air conditioning." For him, life was full of surprises because he lived the glorious era of innovations and discoveries.
But when rs 3 gold I was a kid we had all those things and since then the only thing you can say Tom is special is that we have the Internet. And since I was born my oldest daughter and my youngest Alexa Leo spent 16 years there are many. But the only difference I notice is that Alexa watched videos on TV and Leo see them on Youtube. Everything else, all you have to do with the discomfort of babies being equal. Diapers (dodots) are equal, medicines for children are equally ineffective and yes, came a new vaccine for hepatitis but also spread much more hepatitis B, which is no progress. Yes, there are some issues that are revolutionary, which occurred between the birth of Alexa and Leo as the decoding of the human genome, but the truth is that even today we can make a list of genes, the result seems a telephone in which people are on one side and the other numbers.
When I studied, Watson and Crick was history as were known genes , was known to adenine with guanine (or whatever I can not remember the exact sequences). It was known that DNA makes RNA makes protein. now have the genome but we are still far from understanding how gene serves to do anything . And not only that, when I was studying it was expected that 20 years would come to understand something of the relationship between consciousness and the brain, but we are doing early experiments in which we treat the brain as if we were automobile mechanics, part by part.
What amino acid soup that we would use to test as it had life? was 30 years, and scientists are still trying to prove that dead compounds can create life, and fail.
Now down expectations and do not want to do anything really new in biology, but to use stem cells that do not really understand how to make them do what science does not get performed at the regeneration of tissues or organs.
And with respect to heart disease, in the 80s it was thought that in a few years discover how slow the process by which arteries are blocked at the biochemical level but after 25 years we still do not understand anything concrete about cholesterol and the only advances have come from the original point of view, from plumbing (plumbing) the circulatory system.
Now we get as plumbers to unclog arteries even without understanding where it comes from dirt. At this point, with 48, I start to wonder if the glorious future dominated by science and reason I was promised as a kid really existed.
Turning to other issues, such as entertainment, in the 80s, as I say, except internet, everything existed. You could watch movies at home with videos, something worse than the DVDs, but the same thing. The music sounded much better on vinyl or CDs in MP3 uncompressed or a hard drive. The speakers (speakers) were of much better quality than now. Only screens that were much worse than now, but the house, not in a movie theater.
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