[schoen]

I think the weakest point of your argument -- which also has some strong points -- is when you point to specific inventions and ask why other societies didn't invent them or didn't pursue them, like the wind tunnels.

The Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics and had access to an enormous range of vehicle and propulsion-related technology which was mostly developed over the century prior to their invention of the airplane. Notably, they also had access to gasoline-powered internal combustion engines.

While it's plausible to argue that maybe the Wright brothers (or other important inventors) couldn't have afforded to dedicate the resources that they did to their invention and engineering efforts without the possibility of rewards from a patent's exclusivity, it's implausible to suggest that this is the most salient difference between inventors in different millennia. For example, the inventors in Leonardo's time or in ancient Rome didn't have internal combustion engines, or many other things that would actually make flying machines (or wind tunnels!) function usefully.

Indeed, a lot of the discussion we hear nowadays about the ability to build new kinds of flying machines, like flying cars or electric planes, relates to the problem of energy density in different kinds of fuels and power systems. These have seen a lot of improvement. You can perhaps credit the patent system for much of that improvement because it helped people raise money to spend on experimentation. But in any case, people in earlier millennia couldn't have just skipped over the need to have all of these other technologies available in order to make flying machines work.

(In fact, Leonardo devised some ideas for flying machines with people in recent times have gotten to work, but power and energy density, not aerodynamics, are still the obstacles to making these machines fly high and long.)

[logicallee]

I'm not actually speculating about some invisible hand directing the Wright brothers, though. They were bicycle mechanics who had relied on patented work. As it began to dry up, they explored new things they could patent.

They literally explored flight purely because it was patentable. Period. If it hadn't been, they would not have played in that field.

see this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613119

Regarding the rest of your response, okay, I will grant you that asking for cross-cultural comparisons across millennia is problematic. So you simply must think through very rigorously even the thought experiments you suggested. Thanks for the discussion.