What is our TL?

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Practical fusion power is still 20 years away, same as always.

The main issue with that benchmark is that the original 'twenty years away' prediction was taken out of context, and continues to be taken out of context. In IIRC the 1970s, it was predicted that if we spent huge amounts of money per year on fusion research, we could have practical fusion reactors in the 1990s. Like, Moon Landing levels of money. 'Visible fraction of the US Defence Budget' levels of money. We never did, and so we got what we paid for - a slow trickle of progress for a slow trickle of cash.

In 2033, we could be 'early TL9 (behind in fusion),' if the TL scale doesn't get rewritten before then, but if the slow trickle of money spent on fusion research does not increase significantly (and we don't have an unpredictable breakthrough before then), practical fusion power may be more like fifty years away. If we start spending vastly more money soon, though, it could finally be just twenty years away.

[doctorevilbrain]

I saw a sleeve mounted display on an episode of Swat yesterday.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by doctorevilbrain

I saw a sleeve mounted display on an episode of Swat yesterday.

UT doesn't just want the display mounted on the outside of the garment. It wants the display woven into the fibers of an otherwise completely normal looking garment.

[Pursuivant]

I'll be a curmudgeon and say that we're at early TL8 for most things:

Per B512, TL8 gets you:

Transportation: Satellite Navigation, Single Stage to Orbit spacecraft

SATNAV: Mature & reliable satellite navigation for aircraft and ships, not so much for ground vehicles. For safety, you generally need a human supervising the Nav system.

SSTO spacecraft: Still a pipe-dream for anything other than rockets with very low payloads. Practical SSTO spaceplanes or orbital transports are still a fantasy.

Weapons & Armor: Smartguns, Blinding lasers, unmanned combat vehicles

Smartguns: Nothing practical so far, more due to lack of demand because of a very skeptical and demanding firearms user base than anything else. Plenty of built-in gadgets for rangefinding, low-light visibility, etc., and incremental improvements in bullet design & propellant power, however.

You can also, theoretically, own your very own gauss rifle, but it's more a toy for very rich shooters than a practical weapon.

Blinding Lasers: Technically, yes, but practically a dead-end because of international bans on such weapons and lack of demand. (You can maybe blind the guy with the gun, or not if he's wearing laser protective eyewear, or you can take him down more reliably, at longer range, for cheaper, with a conventional gun. Your choice.) The FAA and similar agencies would also go nuts if such weapons became commonplace. They've already got enough problems with knuckleheads blinding pilots on landing approach using ordinary laser pointers.

Unmanned Combat Vehicles: Mature and getting downright elderly. Not so much robot vehicles, which are limited to cruise missiles, but all manner of aerial drones. Much less demand for ground-based drones, so no proto-Ogres, however. See the current Russo-Ukraine war for monthly advances in State-of-the-Art.

Power Generation: Fuel cells & advanced batteries.

Check & Check. But even the best batteries aren't at the energy densities of TL9 power cells. Fuel cells haven't gotten nearly as much investigation as anticipated.

Medicine & Biotech: GMOs, gene therapy, cloning.

GMOs: Mostly a dead-end commercially due to public resistance, but a huge deal on an experimental level, with technologies like CRISPR allowing scientists to make very precise DNA/RNA edits.

Gene Therapy: Rare and experimental, but beginning to trickle into high-risk high-reward areas of medicine like oncology.

Cloning: Occasionally used at an experimental level, currently a high-end niche market for animals. Cheap (read: automated) cloning hasn't happened yet. Human cloning got smothered by medical ethics issues. The lack of Khan Noonien-Singh and the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s in our timeline confirms this.

Simple "vat-grown" human organs are potentially possible (if you need, say, a replacement bladder).

Commercial "cultured meat" meat protein currently appears to be a place where venture capital goes to die, but potentially has promise for high-end products. (But price for growth media has to drop by orders of magnitude for the technology to take off.)

[warellis]

GMOs are mostly only blocked in Europe from what I recall.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

GMOs: Mostly a dead-end commercially due to public resistance, but a huge deal on an experimental level, with technologies like CRISPR allowing scientists to make very precise DNA/RNA edits.

There are a number of GM crops in commercial use. "10% of the world's arable land was planted with GM crops in 2010." Of course, a lot of that isn't very interesting GM crops but rather things like herbicide resistance or insect resistance. "In the US, by 2014, 94% of the planted area of soybeans, 96% of cotton and 93% of corn were genetically modified varieties."

I hear there's a new trick coming up for the US market. Somebody decided that the legal definition of GMO for labeling purposes requires introducing genetic material from particular kinds of source, so it may be possible to make a lot of genetically modified organisms that don't have to carry the label.

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Simple "vat-grown" human organs are potentially possible (if you need, say, a replacement bladder).

And they're doing serious work on more complex ones, though I haven't heard of them actually implanting them. EDIT: It looks like that may be 'potentially possible' but nobody's done it medically.

[The Benj]

GMO crops have focused mostly on insect-resistance, disease-resistance, and sterility, so you have to buy the seed again every season.

[Willy]

Originally Posted by The Benj

GMO crops have focused mostly on insect-resistance, disease-resistance, and sterility, so you have to buy the seed again every season.

Terminator seeds are illegal under some laws, including EU nations. That doesn´t help much because, while the seeds are now feritile you can place the changes on different genes and the new seed wouldn´t have them all and work as intended.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Willy

Terminator seeds are illegal under some laws, including EU nations. That doesn´t help much because, while the seeds are now feritile you can place the changes on different genes and the new seed wouldn´t have them all and work as intended.

Even non-GMO crop varieties are often not true-breeding, I believe. It's pretty common for the productive seed to be a hybrid.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

There are a number of GM crops in commercial use. "10% of the world's arable land was planted with GM crops in 2010."

The big ones are GMO commodity crops with built-in resistance to particular herbicides and there is increasing consumer, environmental, and grower pushback against such practices.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I hear there's a new trick coming up for the US market. Somebody decided that the legal definition of GMO for labeling purposes requires introducing genetic material from particular kinds of source, so it may be possible to make a lot of genetically modified organisms that don't have to carry the label.

That might not be as corporate evil as it sounds. There are benign uses for GMOs.

The big one is non-transgenic genetic engineering of plants to quickly combine desirable traits from different strains into a single cultivar. It gives you exactly the same effects as years of cross-breeding different cultivars in a fraction of the time with much greater precision. That sort of genetic engineering is harmless and useful.