Just finished watching the movie (again). It's a really good movie! The book was even better.

Now wondering when something like that will happen again? The birth of manned spaceflight.
What's next? I'm thinking (most likely), some propulsion breakthrough.

But don't you think 'something' will happen soon? Some breakthrough that will take us to the
next level (what ever that is). Has to be more than an iPad3 in our future.

I sure hope there is more to look forward to then the next evolution of social networking.

Back on topic. I saw "The Legend of Poncho Barnes" the other night. Great story and you see why all those test pilots respected her so much. Poncho made Amelia Earhart look like a wuss.

Personally, I don't think we will see days like that again . . . perhaps people are more cynical, perhaps it is just that no matter what the next horizon it is, technology will play a greater and greater role, and no matter how much intelligence is required to create it, or courage required to execute it, the technology itself will assume the starring role.

Also the realms of the barely possible are a lot less graspable by the general populace. A lot of people understand going faster, but calculating the correct insertion path for a planet to planet hop, no matter how technically demanding it may be, is just not as intuitive.

On such an epic scale? No. But, what a great movie!!!

Watched a documentary the other day about the breakthrough in manufacturing man made diamonds.Seems they can make a wafer not of silicon but of these diamonds and since they conduct electricity and heat more than ten times better than silicon they reckon a new age might be upon us-"the diamond age".
The benefits are staggering for all walks of life from mobile phones,computers and military use.It obviously will take a good few years to get right but with the limits on the silicon chip-wafer diminishing this maybe the answer.

http://www.investmentu.com/2011/December/synthetic-diamonds-to-replace-silicon-in-microchips.html

Mick.

There is.

Everyone should watch this documentary:

Transcendent Man

The singularity approaches...

lol

Everyone can't I'm afraid as it's only available in USA.

If you have any web-fu skills at all you can easily find this program as a download. I think the whole thing is up on youtube as well.

EDIT: it took me about 15 seconds to find multiple direct downloads of this documentary.