<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 6:05 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:</span><br></div></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><i><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span>In the first edition of "Where To?" in 1950 Robert A Heinlein wrote<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>something like "there is some device, new but seemingly humble, that<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>will change the world.  We just don't know which."  At the time he<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>thought it was the transistor but by the time of the second edition <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></span>in 1965, he dismissed that as a trivial</i></blockquote><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><br></div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><font size="4">Heinlein<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> was brilliant to predict that in 1950 and a fool to dismiss it in 1965. Imagine how the world would be different if today we had no better way to control the flow of electrons than with a vacuum tube.</span><br></font></div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><font size="4"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></span></font></div><div class="gmail_attr"><font size="4"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">John K Clark</span></font></div></div></div>