The Invisible Trillion · The Other Ledger

Science

The scientific enterprise is, increasingly, a computational enterprise.

The first black hole image, released in 2019, was produced by a globe-spanning radio telescope array whose data was integrated and processed by data centers. The detection of gravitational waves by LIGO in 2015 required computational analysis of signals a thousand times weaker than the noise. The James Webb Space Telescope’s images depend on enormous amounts of processing before they become the pictures you see. The Human Genome Project, which took 13 years and $3 billion to produce the first human genome in 2003, now takes a day and about $200 per person, because sequencing machines have gotten better and the software has gotten enormously better.

Drug discovery is increasingly AI-assisted. The initial stage — identifying which molecules might work against a given disease — is being massively sped up by AI models that can screen millions of candidate molecules in the time a traditional lab could test a few hundred. Whether this translates into a faster pipeline for approved drugs is still being worked out (late-stage trials are still slow and human-dependent), but the early-stage productivity gain is real and documented.

Materials science, climate science, high-energy physics, cosmology, neuroscience, condensed matter physics, genomics, proteomics, epidemiology — every one of these fields has been rebuilt, over the last twenty years, around computational methods that weren’t possible before. Some of them have seen order-of-magnitude increases in the rate of new discoveries as a result.

The boring version of this story is: science is getting faster. The less-boring version is: science is making discoveries right now that would have been impossible at any previous point in human history, and this is happening across essentially every field, and the cause is the same cause — chips got fast enough, and data centers got big enough, that problems that used to be intractable are now tractable.

If you enjoy the fruits of modern medicine, modern engineering, modern clean energy, and modern agriculture, you are enjoying the downstream effects of this acceleration. The downstream effects will keep coming, for your whole life, assuming we don’t wreck the upstream.

All 19 chapters of The Invisible Trillion · Library · All courses