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by jfengel
2114 days ago
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Even more than the funding, I hate the perpetual fueling of the narrative that magic is just around the corner. Why bother learning actual, boring science when a revolution is going to make everything different tomorrow, bringing us flying cars and gorgeous green Martian girls in steel bikinis? There's an enormous amount of science denial, at least in the United States. A lot of things go into that, but I don't think it helps that stories like this present scientists as wedded to orthodoxy and general killjoys who hate imaginative iconoclasts. Instead, people lurch from one self-styled Galileo to another, as they fade from view without even reading the confirmation that their work was wrong. Meantime, science produces a steady stream of advances both fundamental and practical. And those are taken for granted, unless scientists something you don't want to believe, when they can be presented as scientists are in stories like this. |
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Do you know why humans went to the moon in 1969?
It wasn't just that people suddenly woke up one day and wanted to. The earliest known story of a voyage to the moon was written by Lucian of Samosata, CE 125. It wasn't that people woke up one day and were smart enough; the orbital mechanics were hard math, but the basics were understood since Newton.
It was that in 1935, the Aluminum Association was founded. Extraction of aluminum was only started in 1825, and we only had the array of necessary technologies to do it in mass quantities, reliably, with the development of massive power stations. Aluminum is useful for several things, but most importantly: it can be hammered into a thin but solid material that can form aerodynamic shells and contain pressures against vacuum. It was, basically, a miracle metal. It made the aviation age cheap and (coupled with other breakthroughs like radio, which is still only a 100-year-old-technology) the space age possible. One generation after the founding of the AA, humanity set foot on the moon.
I believe people think magic is just around the corner because the previous two or three generations have lived through one miraculous invention after another. And you're right; these inventions don't spring from nowhere. They come from people observing unexpected phenomena, dogging that phenomena until it can be understood and reliably manifested or controlled, and putting ingenuity on what could possibly be done now that the rules of the world have changed, because, in a sense, magic just happened. At least from the point of view of the average person living through the technological revolutions as they come one after another.