voko said:
Yes, you are, just in the next sentence. Slapping a "not" on your statement does not change its nature in this respect.
Perhaps some comparative examples might clear things up.
Consider a pressurized, light water, nuclear reactor used for an electrical power generation facility. You may use whatever nuclear fuel you can practically mine and/or create (with due consideration given to natural resource limitations of our Earth and any power required to extract them) using any of today's technology, except that you cannot use uranium or any derivative of uranium byproducts (and that includes plutonium, since that is created by exposing 238U to a neutron flux. You may also not use uranium as a neutron source for the creation of your fuel). I claim with certainty that the plant will not generate a significant net power.
Consider an astronaut with a spacesuit, in space, on a spacewalk. Now tear the suit open and yank the astronaut out such that he is in space, but no longer wearing a spacesuit, and is at that point drifting in space. I claim with certainty that after that point the astronaut will not successfully recite the complete works of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Consider a modern day smartphone. Your goal is to reproduce that smartphone with the same form factor, power consumption, cost, and functionality except instead of using the several hundreds of millions (more likely billions these days) of transistors normally contained within that smartphone, you must substitute them with something else -- whatever is second best -- using only technology that is available today (no "future" technology allowed). I claim that within those form factor and power limitations, the result will fail and will not successfully connect to the network allowing you to download and display this thread.
As of today, the next best thing to the switching transistor (probably an electromechanical switch based on nanotechnology) is still
huge compared to the size of a transistor. And that would only work for the digital part of the cell phone. What about the analog portion of the phone, which includes such components as power amplifiers (PAs), low noise amplifiers (LNAs), mixers, etc? I can't even think of anything truly microscopic that you could use as a substitution. The end result wouldn't just be a slightly bigger smartphone, it would be a behemoth [comparatively speaking]. That's the second best.
That's not to say that are not any promising paradigm shifts for possible future technology. We might move transistors away from silicon to some other material such as graphene, or even
molybdenite, but those still involve transistors, so you couldn't use those as a "substitute" for transistors, because those are still transistors (just not silicon based, but still are transistors).
As I've mentioned before, there is some promising work being done with
carbon nanotubes, but that's not here yet. Perhaps it will prove to be a promising, practical, transistor substitute in the future, but it's not available today.
And by the way, I am
not ignoring the 60 years of technological advancement since the invention of the transistor. Our society in the here and now (in this reality in which we live) has had 60 years to come up with something better. They've even had the incredible advantages of transistor based tools to aid the effort. And the second best is still a behemoth. Things might look promising for the future given some recent developments with carbon nananotubes for example, but we're not there yet.
You started a speculation about an alternative timeline and made statements without any factual basis. It is about time that you admitted that and moved on. Ignoring facts, and saying that it is the PF rules or practices that make you very selective about what facts you accept or ignore in your fantasies just make them more ridiculous. Sorry if that sounds rude, but that is how I see it. I am not going to continue this discussion, just think about this.
Please stop it. I made
no speculation about an alternate timeline regarding the transistor, so stop claiming I did. I have repeated several times, that I am strictly speaking of today's technology*, in the world we live in the here and now, and having the history that today's civilization has actually gone through -- and today's people have actually lived through -- no alternate timelines are involved.
*[Edit: technically, this whole rigamarole started with discussing 20th century technology, but if you'd prefer it to be extended to today's technology as well, that's fine. It still applies, at least for the present time.]
