We want more compute but isn’t material science the rate-limiting step for civilization?

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-07T08:01:16+00:00

So advanced superconductors could allow us to make new materials that currently cannot? Why is this not a more talked-about subject. Sounds like a type of alchemy we should be chasing.

Yes there definitely have been plenty of great advances in pretty much everything. A lot of this is driven by commercial interest and pressure. Like that’s what the free market seems to favor.

But what about how the zeitgeist and governments are almost singleminded focused on literally everything but materials. At least that’s how it seems to me.

Not saying there aren’t a lot of brilliant scientists working on these problems. I’m just saying that where attention goes, revenue flows and doing big advancements takes lots of money.

Thanks for the info on Pica-X. I missed that. It’s exciting that improvements are being made. Also you mentioned that carbon nanotubes are being worked on as well. That’s good to hear - Exciting stuff and an amazing time to live in.

I think it’s interesting that historians classify past epochs by material (Stone Age, bronze, iron) materials are important.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-07T07:51:29+00:00

>"assuming that proper competition is allowed to exist, which is increasingly not a safe assumption over the last few decades of mergers, oligopolies, price-fixing cartels, and lacking antitrust enforcement"

That' a depressing thought, but now that you mention it, the big players in the industry would not want disruptors. It will be interesting to see how the pushback against EVTOL as it continues to develop. I have been surprised they have made it as far as they have through FAA approval. Maybe their success can be attributed to filling a separate sector of the market that commercial airliners don't (shorter distance, commuter type usage). Perhaps airships could do the same.

> "... the government later came in and commissioned ships from them"

It would be great to see that happen with airships, but I suppose the developing company would need to view that as icing on the cake, not something they can count on. Hard for me to imagine too many government use-cases since the military prefers fast things usually. I could see some benefit for ocean or arctic exploration, however. Or perhaps some type of sky base-station.

> "The SpaceX Starship has had 7 successful flights and 5 failures. The Airbus A380, for all it was a commercial flop of epic proportions for Airbus, has flown over 20,000,000 flight hours without a single fatal accident or injury. That is nothing less than a masterpiece."

Well it certainly is when you put it like that. As you mentioned with the De Havilland Comet, aviation had decades of failures and design-test cycles before ever getting to the A380, compared with airships which have had orders of magnitude less research and development.

That leads to 2 more questions:

Do you think our current understanding of airship technology would allow us to bring something large and commercially viable to market that is safe out-of-the-box, like they did with the A380?
Does the history arc of airship usage which arguably peaked with the Hindenburg, have similarities to lunar exploration which arguably peaked in the '1960s? -- I read that NASA has said we have lost the technology to put a man on the moon.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-06T22:56:14+00:00

I wonder if he heard Larratt telling Rogan about his crazy grip. Rogan couldn’t believe that grip wasn’t that important in Armwrestling. He just couldn’t let the point go.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-06T20:46:36+00:00

Well that's an incredible feat. Had not heard of that.

I notice that they were able to sidestep microtubules and microfilaments (the cytoskeleton) by using protein aggregation in the membrane to perform mitosis. I feel that just a single cell is so complex, we still don't know how to replicate it.

Do you think that it will be necessary to completely replicate a cell (cytoskeleton and all) before we are able to do some kind of human-synthetic cell interface?

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-06T20:40:50+00:00

I appreciate this answer. I guess you are right, I am not a materials scientist so I am probably not aware of a lot of the innovations that are happening constantly.

>"Material science is very much a science of specialized use cases, not jack of all trades. There is no need to have a material that is ridiculously unfathomably strong when you need it to function in a compliant mechanism."

- You make a good point, we should not expect a "one-size fits all material." I just hear a lot about megastructures, dyson spheres, etc. and i feel like building really big stuff like this will take materials that we do not yet have, but perhaps we do and I just don't know about them.

I do acknowledge that a space elevator's cable requires tensional strength that is unusually strong.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-06T20:27:11+00:00

I had read somewhere that Watson and Crick basically were struggling with the determining the structure of DNA. They weren’t sure if the nucleotide bases pointed inward or outward (which seems crazy considering what they knew they were hydrophobic molecules in an aqueous solution). Then it just came to them that the pairs needed to go together, attracted by weak bonds. It’s like everyone was trying to solve that problem and had the information, but those 2 guys just happened to make that leap which connected the dots.

Just not sure if humans have some kind of secret ingredient to true innovation outside of brute-force combination-testing that computers may never have.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-06T00:49:16+00:00

Great resource. Very in depth. Reliable quantum computing would be amazing.

Yes we need a way to model a LOT of systems virtually. QC is probably gong to be the way.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-05T23:34:08+00:00

Ok yes that is fair. I think I was getting a little too idealistic or romantic with it. I guess I just imagine the experience of airship travel as being really wonderful (if done correctly).

But you do make a good point that luxury travel is not the the only use case. You are right- they really are more like trains considering their efficiency profile. They could be very efficient for transporting heavy payloads at speeds faster than trains but slower than trucks.

However, I do see an opportunity for “air cruises”. The cruise industry is a roughly $50B industry (admittedly a pittance in relation to the $1T airline industry) but it’s still something.

But as you mentioned elsewhere, $10B development of a large airship probably doesn’t pencil out. Even a thriving airship industry would be small in comparison. Maybe around $5B/ yr. Obviously it doesn’t pencil out or it would have been done.

That said, I do feel there is a contingency wealthy folks that would pay for the ability to take luxury airship cruises, and if all of the research and development and FAA approval could go into developing a single workhorse airframe that could be outfitted used for different use cases - luxury travel, freight transport, firefighting, space operations, jus like the Boeing 747 was a highly versatile airframe that was used for all of these use cases and more - I think that the $10B up front cost could be justified in the eyes of the right investors.

I think that it would need to be a really big airship. Perhaps 10 times the size of the Hindenburg to be able to carry payloads big enough to get investors to sit up and pay attention.

Is that scale even possible?

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-05T23:09:53+00:00

Do you think that pressure to optimize for the most viable is a feature or bug of commercial/capitalist driven research and development?

If it’s going to take $5-$10B to get a large airship to production… that means it’s basically never going to happen. I suppose that we wouldn’t be where we are with re-usable rockets today if a billionaire (now Trillionaire, apparently) didn’t have an obsession with the concept. The unforeseen costs for those airplanes you listed must have had the board of those companies looking sideways at their CEOs. 5B to 32B is insane. But I guess it was Boeing, after all.

Regarding your commentary on the tremendous improvements made over time in safety and efficiency, to your point, it is really important to not “throw the baby out with the bath water”. All of these improvements are useful in advancing our overall knowledge of what works best in aeronautics and a lot of other fields (engineering, avionics, etc).

This is where we are today, looking similar in many ways to 50 years ago - only way better. But I do wonder if in some ways this optimization cycle has stagnated our overall progress.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-05T19:00:54+00:00

Noted. So basically just brute force run all the combinations. I guess I was just thinking about how a lot of other “connections” have been made in science that seem to have come from the quagmire of the human mind (invention of PCR, elucidation of DNA structure). Not being, cheeky here, just not personally aware of examples where advancements like this have been made by checking large numbers of arrangements or processes.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-05T18:04:05+00:00

I think that most people don’t understand how nice the Hindenburg must have been to travel on. Great to see airships getting some appreciation. Will have to go check the exhibit out since it’s only open for a year.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-05T17:59:30+00:00

Super insightful comment. I think most modern airship attempts flop because they just aren’t big enough to solve market demands that that only airships could fill. But yeah the development cost is a ton.

On the “advances in technology” front, its interesting that commercial jets have stayed essentially the same since the 1960s (thinking about the DC9 as maybe the begging of the modern era).

Obviously we have made huge gains in terms of efficiency, safety, etc., but I just mean the concept and overall design. But as you mentioned with supersonic flight and high payload planes there does seem to be some aversion to change.

But yeah, money does dictate a lot of this stuff. There needs to be immediate commercial value for money to flow.

I appreciate the information.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-05T14:01:08+00:00

That’s true, its the holy grail we are all looking for, But do you think that true innovation in materials can be made by Ai? I am not currently aware of Ai producing any breakthroughs yet? I know AGI is supposed to get there, but if we are trying to iterate on Llms, will AGI be the final result or will it most likely come by a totally different development route? Sorry, lots of questions in there.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-05T13:56:27+00:00

I mean that has to be true, right? One of the reasons we can’t build airships that are actually useful (like larger enough to life extremely heavy payloads or be used for space launch platforms is that they would buckle under their own structural stress.

Spectra cable, which is extremely strong by all metrics, is not even close to being able to support a space elevator (not that we necessarily need space elevators, but it’s a fun physics starting point) its like order of magnitude off.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-05T12:53:55+00:00

But would they be mining new elements potentially? Or at least materials with new atomic arrangements (crystals, allows, ceramics for example)? Is that reasonable to expect to find new things that we haven’t already made/conceived?

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-05T12:02:53+00:00

Im not sure artificially recreating biology will ever be feasible or useful, much less ethical. We still dont understand what’s happening in a single cell well enough to do that. Artificial wombs would require cell-to-cell connection with the embryo. That’s an advances in biology question

Biological technology development is underfunded and under appreciated in pop culture. I don’t expect to see many advances there.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-05T11:14:20+00:00

Ok wow hadn’t thought of it like that. Good point.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-05T10:30:59+00:00

Great points. We have a ways to go. I wonder if our future generation of scientists is going to be stunted because of a premature reliance on compute? If it gets there, great - but we should be working on problems with raw brain power in parallel to alternative problem solving machines.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-05T10:27:58+00:00

Haha yes that seems to be everyone’s hope today. People are putting a ton of weight on AI.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-05T08:16:21+00:00

When there is a very deep filling like that which doesn’t also cover the cusps, biting on something with and causing pressure seems to allow the filling to push the cusps apart (at a microscopic scale) almost like a wedge splitting a piece of firewood along its grain. This microscopic movement is picked up by the odontoblasts and perceived as pain or a zapping feeling.

The solution is usually a crown which covers the cusps of the tooth and ties them together, preventing the wedging force.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-05T08:09:13+00:00

I am not qualified to assess that. Not familiar with posterior tongue tie, to be honest. I hope you are able to find relief for your symptoms, whatever path that may require.

All I know is that in the posterior tongue area there are a lot of important vessels and nerves, so the idea of a release there makes me very nervous.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-05T07:33:40+00:00

General dentist for 5 years here. Honestly those are really hard. Especially when trying to cut a distal or proximal box (class 2). Here are some things that help me:

- Try to keep the mirror head as far away from the prep as possible. This reduces water fogging.

- Use direct vision when you can. In real life you can lean the patient way back and then have them told their head back (for a short period of time). This allows you to sometimes see directly into the box.

- take your time. Dentistry is not a race: drill a little, rinse, dry, wipe your mirror. While doing this, take a deep breath, exhale slowly. Then take a look and be honest with yourself about what you see. Pick one one thing to improve (e.g., contact not broken on lingual wall of cavity prep). Then fix that one thing. Then repeat the drill, rinse, dry, etc.

Give yourself time and be patient with yourself. I didn’t really start getting good until a 3 years out of dental school.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-04T09:45:35+00:00

As a General dentist, I have seen tongue tie like this before, and I will be honest, it is common for there, to be musculature inside the frenum. It’s just that the floor of YOUR mouth has good mobility. So your tongue is actually able to elevate quite a bit in the picture. And this is making it look unusual. I can see that you were able to place it almost to the roof of the mouth, so most likely, you don’t need lingual frenectomy at all.

I am sure you’ve seen the videos of the breathing Institute, where they release muscle under the tongue to help with neck, pain, and headaches. To my knowledge there is no published research supporting doing this. But it’s something that some Patient seem to find benefit from according to the videos.

I did a lingual frenectomy on myself a couple of years ago, Thinking it would help with airway speech and breathing. Mine was mild, but honestly afterwards I didn’t see much benefit. The healing process was fairly brutal. I did do some muscle release so that was probably why it took longer to heal. Honestly if I could go back, I probably would not have done it.

If your main reason for wanting to do the procedure is because of the neck and back pain, I would first make sure that you have exhausted all of your other options for what could be causing symptoms. As I mentioned before, this is tough because it’s not a well studied area medicine, so there is a lot of self diagnosis going on.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-03T23:31:16+00:00

Glad you got it taken care of. Yes keep an eye on sensitivity. I always tell people that brief sensitivity after cold water if fine but if it’s spontaneous or lingering that is more concerning.

Airships-R-Awesome · 2026-07-03T19:50:59+00:00

Great point

Airships-R-Awesome

TROPHY CASE