Returning People to the Moon After Apollo by Pat Norris

Author:Pat Norris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030149154
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Moore’s Law

Perhaps the most obvious reason why human flights to the Moon ended in the 1970s is that since then we humans have been outperformed by machines. We continue to breath oxygen, drink water and eat food in the same quantities as we did then. We still sleep about 8 hours a day, we weigh the same (or more) and take up the same space (or more). On the other hand electronic machines have gotten smaller and cheaper while performing the same amount of work. They use much less electricity than they did before and take up a lot less space.

We see the evidence of this ever-increasing power of electronics in our cell phones, flat-screen TVs, digital cameras, video game consoles and the like – they get better and better despite getting smaller and lighter, and tend to cost much the same (perhaps a bit more in the case of a smart phone, but less in the case of a laptop). The rooms full of computers and storage devices at Apollo Mission Control in Houston in 1969 are outperformed by the computer in a modern smartphone. And the smartphone doesn’t need the special electricity generation station to provide the tens of kilowatts of power needed not only by the 1969 computers but also by the industrial-scale air conditioning that prevented them from bursting into flames.

The boss of computer chip manufacturer Intel, Gordon E. Moore, spoke about this trend in the 1960s – a doubling of the power of computer chips every two years or so. As the trend continued into the 1980s and beyond it became known as Moore’s law in honor of its first annunciator (see Fig. 9.2). It’s still going strong today, so if you do the math you find that 50 years after Apollo 11 (1969) an electronic device has typically increased its power about 30 million times – and counting.

Fig. 9.2.The number of transistors in a computer Central Processing Unit (CPU) chip doubles every two years in line with Moore’s law – note the log scale on the vertical axis. The law applies not only to the speed of computers but also to the size of computer memory and the number of pixels in a digital camera.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.