this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
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Probabilistically, sure, but it's not impossible that there has been some piece of knowledge or understanding that's been missing, and that massive breakthroughs are possible once the process is figured out.
I think a fair modern example is LED light bulbs. They are better in every conceivable way than incandescent or fluorescent lightbulbs: they last longer, use less energy, shine brighter, use less toxic materials, and are easy to mass produce. But there were several decades where much of the industry believed that LEDs would never be very useful as a light source because we could only produce red and green, and it was generally believed that a blue LED would be impossible to produce.
Then one guy decided it would be his life mission to invent the blue LED, and the sonuvabitch did it. Now LEDs are the only sensible thing to use to produce light.
It's always possible for this kind of breakthrough to happen, especially in material science where the complexity of how molecules interplay is nearly incomprehensible.
A breaktrough would be needed to electrify ship and flight. Would be great if it is that.
Electrify ship you say?
We’ve seen so many battery breakthroughs in academia in the past decade, it’s about time some of them start to transition into production.
For ships they are rediscoverings sails so that might be enough
LEDs are worse at color accuracy (CRI) which is hardly relevant unless you need it, but it's just to show that even they aren't strictly better than what they replace
CRI is defined as how closely a light source matches the spectral emission of a thing glowing at a specific temperature. So, for a light source with a 4000 k color temperature its CRI describes how closely its emission matches that of an object that's been heated to 4000 k.
Because incandescent bulbs emit light by heating a filament by definition they will have 100 CRI and its impossible to get any better than that. But the emission curve of incandescent lights doesn't actually resemble that of sunlight at all (sorry for the reddit link). The sun is much hotter than any incandescent bulb and it's light is filtered by our atmosphere, resulting in a much flatter more gently sloping emission curve vs the incandescent curve which is extremely lopsided towards the red.
As you can see in the above link, there are certain high end LED bulbs that do a much better job replicating noon day sunlight than incandescents. And that flatter emissions profile probably provides better color rendering (in terms of being able to distinguish one color from another) than the incandescent ramp.
Now, whether or not you want your bulbs to look like the noon day sun is another matter. Maybe you don't want to disrupt your sleep schedule and you'd much rather their emissions resemble the sunset or a campfire (though in that case many halogen and high output incandescent lamps don't do a great job either). Or maybe you're trying to treat seasonal depression and extra sunlight is exactly what you want. But in any case I think CRI isn't a very useful unit (another reddit link).
I find this info interesting, especially the fact that incandescent bulbs do not replicate sunlight. At the same time, I was also trying to keep things simple as just a minute counter point. But I guess I was wrong anyway, and that led bulbs are better in every way than incandescent bulbs then.
And early LEDs had flickering issues w/ dimmers. And somehow they're still way more expensive than incandescent bulbs (not sure about per hour of use, but certainly by unit, which matters when renting).
You can buy high (97-99) CRI LEDs for things like the film industry, where it really does matter. They are very expensive, but can pay for themselves with longer service life, and lower power draw for long term installations.
The CRI on regular LED bulbs was climbing for a long time, but it seems as though 90ish is "good enough" most of the time.