Dr.STONE SCIENCE FUTURE

Modern technology is a marvel. The fact that we've come as far as we have is a painstaking slow march that's taken over a half-century to get to this point. Hell, the x86 architecture alone is coming up on its 50th anniversary in two years, which is positively Jurassic in computing terms. Senku called semiconductors a pain in the ass, but I like his line in the manga better for being even more succinct: "semiconductors are hell." Just a few days ago (once again putting Dr. Stone's final cour eerily parallel to current events), some YouTuber fabricated some memory cells of his own in his shed as a proof-of-concept in response to the ongoing RAM crisis, but with actual semiconductors instead of the magnetic-core memory they used here (by the way, props to the commenter last week who predicted core-rope memory, which is a close relative of this technology). Even just TechLinked's coverage of the story goes into the kinds of stuff you need for it: a high-grade cleanroom, silicon wafers, some _very_ nasty chemicals that would make Xeno himself giddy, UV photolithography, and some means of aluminum metallization. Except for that last one, I actually have a decent grasp of what goes into the rest. If we were to construct our own roadmap along those paths, some of them are far trickier than the others. The cleanroom would be easy enough at the Kingdom of Science's current tech level and we already have most if not all of the ingredients for those chemicals on hand: primarily the fluorite we just picked up in Spain and our good friend Sulfurina, with hydrogen peroxide being the third. But I'd suspect the high-purity silicon needed for the wafers and a means to precisely etch the wafers is beyond their industrial capability. UV lithography in particular: easy enough with modern technology, but getting to this point required dozens of generational increments over the decades. Each die shrink has helped create the next as semiconductor size gets ever-smaller; right now we're at 2nm, expected to hit 1nm next year. I'm admittedly unfamiliar with that last term—aluminum metallization—and it might be something Senku and co. are already capable of or might vastly complicate the issue for all I know. It sounds like it might be akin to electroplating (something which is trivial at their level), but I'll defer to anyone more familiar rather than say anything definitive.

It still baffles my mind how comparatively tiny those older games were. (I've also been there already when such downloads still took several minutes.) Now, we sometimes face installation files for games of over 100GB which is just insane. lol Of course this isn't a valid comparison because of the vast differences between the two types of games, but I still find it fascinating to think about the scale of it.

As many others have said: for all his shounen goofiness, if Chrome had been alive in the 21st century, he'd be one of the finest minds of our generation. He doesn't have the same computational acuity and academic retention as Senku, but his brand of science—self-described as "getting out there and **doing**"—means he has a strong *practical* grasp of scientific principles and very sharp intuition: in particular, his talent for repurposing and combining concepts he's taught for all-new applications would have (and indeed *has*, when it comes to **re**-inventing Stone World tech) made him a major innovator. Dude's only held back by his primitive upbringing, but even then, he's shown he learns *fast*.

Petroleum has its uses besides just as fuel, but I agree that they'd be wise to ditch that particular application sooner rather than later. It's just a matter of capability: the reason petroleum fuel became so ubiquitous in the first place is that as far as energy goes, it's stupid-simple and provides the best proverbial bang for the buck at lower tech levels. Of course, this balance changes as we make progress in alternative energy—any fan of Technology Connections will know what I'm talking about—but for a civilization just starting out (or rebuilding from scratch, in this case)? Nothing beats the ol' dinosaur juice, for better or for worse. Fortunately, all those other uses for petroleum require far less of it and in far more enduring than the "burn once and it's gone" nature of liquid fuel. Stuff like plastic and asphalt production.

I like what someone said last week: the show works best as an introductory course, demystifying scientific concepts but not dwelling on them for too long before it moves onto the next paradigm. It gives you just enough knowledge for a solid starting point if you wanna go off and do your own research, without dragging down the pace for those who just want to watch for the story. And we've already covered a lot of the basics, so the pace is naturally going to pick up as we introduce further and further stages of progress. They'd already been around the turn of the 20th century at the start of S4, and as we know, that was *the* century when science skyrocketed exponentially and never looked back. So the story's just keeping pace with how we actually did it. Honestly, I feel like the show's "cliff-note fundamentals" method is the smartest way to go about its goal, considering its young target audience. This would be great to show in schools.

This might have to do with how rocketry works, famously called the rocket equation. You have your payload, and to move in space you need to bring fuel to move that mass. However, the fuel also has mass. So, you need to bring fuel to bring the payload and the fuel needed to land on the Moon. Wait - that has mass too. so you need to bring even more fuel to move the payload and landing fuel and the orbit fuel. And so on, exponentially. So, if you don't bring any return rocket or the fuel for it or develop heat shields, say you cut your final lander mass in half, your final rocket might be 1/4 the size. If their timeline is tight, that could make a big difference in making the rocket way simpler with the technology they have.

Even if he is human, it's been speculated that he's using a Medusa to petrify himself and only waking up for brief periods to check on Earth every however-many years. So chances are if you sent a 'Medusa missile' he'd already be stone when you set it off and you'd have no effect. Or that even if you did manage to catch him during one of his brief 'awake' periods, whatever revival system he has would just activate at the next scheduled wake-up time and he'd be back on schedule (and pissed off).