"Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said, "What I cannot create, I do not understand." The most straightforward interpretation of this is that our technology — what we can create — is constrained by our knowledge. There are, of course, natural limits to human technology. We can't travel in a straight line faster than the speed of light, for example. There may also be natural barriers to human knowledge — facts about the universe that are forever inaccessible to us due to the configuration of our biology. Sure, we have created technology that scaffolds our senses and cognition: Microscopes let us peer into the world of the small, telescopes provide a window into the world of the big, and computers crunch numbers and data that our individual minds are incapable of processing. However, the technologies and experiments that allow us to expand our knowledge are coming at an ever-increasing price. Projects like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN ($4.75 billion to construct and $286 million annually), the International Space Station ($3 billion per year), and the international effort to achieve nuclear fusion at ITER (an estimated $18 billion to $20 billion for construction) show that human efforts to probe our scientific horizons require increasing energy and resources."
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Conor Feehly, "Why haven't we found intelligent alien civilizations? There may be a 'universal limit to technological development’". Space (October 9, 2024)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Technology
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