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> the perpetual fueling of the narrative that magic is just around the corner 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. |
Real revolutionary and amazing technology comes from physics that came way before, which in turn came from math that was even older.
Today people mostly can't imagine what the world was like, technologically and socially, a hundred years ago when relativity and quantum mechanics were on the cusp of being developed.
The things which will transform or devastate the world in the next few decades have been growing for the last 50 years even if most haven't noticed. It will look like coming out of nowhere, but it won't be in the way that this space drive is.