Manufacturing in space may never pass this test, because of its cost.

The problem is simply that nuclear power is a technology ill-suited to the most critical of innovation practices: learning by doing.

It became routine and unexceptional to expect radical innovations every few months, an unprecedented state of affairs in the history of humanity. Almost anybody could be an innovator, because thanks to the inexorable logic unleashed and identified by Gordon Moore and his friends, the new was almost always automatically cheaper and faster than the

They have changed the world as surely as steam engines did.

Invention, he famously said, is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration. Yet in effect what he was doing was not invention, so much as innovation: turning ideas into practical, reliable and affordable reality.

so we may be holding machines to a higher standard than people.

They are essentially the same phenomenon: evolution.

The light bulb emerged inexorably from the combined technologies of the day. It was bound to appear when it did, given the progress of other technologies.

The chief way in which innovation changes our lives is by enabling people to work for each other. As I have argued before, the main theme of human history is that we become steadily more specialized in what we produce, and steadily more diversified in what we consume: we move away from precarious self-sufficiency to safer mutual interdependence.