The airplane is an interesting case. Early airplane hardware was tied up in patents and actually building a machine was a particularly daunting prospect. Innovation was slow. Then WWI happened and the government basically forced the companies to give up their patents on aircraft. What followed was a revolution with dozens of companies forming each trying their hand at making aircraft. Plus, there was a guaranteed market with the government going to war. It’s safe to say that the aerospace industry would look very different today had it not been for WWI.
The only long-term strategy that works for our (or any) species is to expand beyond our own solar system (and eventually, universe)
Depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with that strategy. Endless growth? Yeah, you’re probably right. Sustained survival of a relatively static population? We could probably do that from the comfort of our own rock.
There is a good story by Andreas Eschbach, Exponential Drift, based on the premise that a) aliens exist and that b) that’s the thing the aliens are very afraid of. And take countermeasures.
Sustained survival is not possible without the ability to get off of the planet. The Sun has a limited lifetime. That said, the remaining lifetime of the sun is much much longer than humans have currently existed, so sustained survival minus that fact isn’t a terrible goal to shoot for.
The other big threat is dinosaur killer sized asteroids. Sustained survival means excellent asteroid detection (we don’t have this yet, although it improves year over year), AND some means of deflecting a giant that we do detect. This is something we are not even close to yet.
It seems likely to me that we will have to reach the point of sustained survival for a relatively long time before we collect enough resources (including technology) to actually make a go at colonizing a distant solar system.
I’m reminded of the Fermi paradox, where you do the math on colonization and discover that the galaxy should have been totally colonized dozens of times over by now. It’s one of the strongest arguments IMHO that interstellar travel is just too difficult, and we’re doomed to be stuck in our home solar system until the sun burns us up.
so according to this, Iron was mastered because people went to war at each other a long time ago, not because they found that iron was stronger than copper or copper stronger than stone etc ?
That is interesting… however, I’d argue that it was the specific conditions of the Cold War more than the rise in spending during the Great War that contributed to the aerospace industry. I don’t think there was a similar case into peace time during the interwar period on spending for airliners. I think unlike the Cold War, the interwar period saw a hard line against US involved in military spending, in part due to the Nye Commission (edit: or rather Commission):
Meanwhile, Cold War US citizens saw the military industrial complex as a job creator. It indeed helped us finally pull out of the depression and provided good industrial work well into the Cold War. A. Phillip Randolph specifically focused on the defense industry to protest segregation during the war because of the number of good jobs available.
Also, I don’t think it negates my main point, either, which is that innovation isn’t necessarily directly connected to military spending.
RIght, the sun burning out. Whoops. I was reflexively responding to the usual assertion that “we have to colonize other planets right now because we’re exhausting this one of all it’s resources by exponentially growing and obviously there’s no other solution to that problem.”
But yeah I guess if surviving the sun burning out is the goal then that’s a little different.
EDIT: what if we built a different sun? like a better one.
Not just “kind of true” but absolutely true… I’m old enough to remember it! Your remark about dynamic routing protocols is also absolutely true, and well put.
Paul Hellyer was Canada’s Minister of Defense in the mid-1960s. Hey, its 2014. He’s had 40 years to develop dementia. Sorry he’s lopped the twig but, there it is…
Fermi’s paradox is guesswork. So is the Drake Equation. We have only one example to go on, for developed planetary civilizations. The things we REALLY don’t know are:
(1) How common it is, on a life-bearing planet, to evolve an intelligent species, and,
(2) The average time required for a galaxy to develop at least one star-faring species.
If (1) is a very low-probability event, then (2) is going to be a LONG time. So we COULD be an older race, or by sheer luck, we’re on the other side of the galaxy from the nearest star-faring civilization.
Alternately, there COULD be protection of our system from outside influences. We could, in fact, be INUNDATED with alien sensors, and being kept as a preserve. . . of Reality TV.
“Next, on Mutual of Omicron’s ‘Wild Planet’. . . . .”
[quote=“fuzzyfungus, post:44, topic:18544”]
I’d be inclined to agree (though not to necessarily assume that there are the fields of science necessary to be an intergalactic species).[/quote]Whoah, that’s some efficient grammar. Did you have to work to compose that, or did you just bang it out?
The only question is whether we are in fact missing something, or if dying withing spitting distance of where you evolved is just how things go in this universe.
Aren’t you missing generation ships? Seems the only hurdles there are figuring out where you’re headed, and engineering a sustainable onboard ecosystem; relatively trivial obstacles.
Hah! If we had that sort of godlike technological capacity, interstellar travel would be somewhat more feasible.
"This information is top secret in the way that government isn't talking about it, but if you talk to the whistleblowers ... there's a lot of information and it doesn't take a lot of effort to find it"
I’m just putting it out there for anyone interested in the subject:
Colonel Phillip J. Corso, US Army (ret.)
Col. Philip J. Corso - The Lost Interview on UFOs
Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut, sixth man on the moon
UFO Disclosure: Edgar Mitchell on UFOs at Press Conference - Aliens Are Real 1
Command Sergeant Major Robert Dean, US Army (ret.)
UFO Cover Up - Robert Dean (1993)
Don Phillips, Contractor, USAF, CIA, Lockheed Skunkworks.
Technology from Extraterrestrials
Gordon Cooper, Gemini and Mercury Astronaut
Disclosure Project Witness Testimony Archives - Gordon Cooper
