[moralestapia]

Paper planes have been a thing for a long while, but I guess no one thought that could scale?

It's like fire, super obvious in retrospective, and yet took thousands of years to become a technology.

[mr_toad]

It’s not easy to scale materials and retain the necessary rigidity. Like if you tried to scale up a primitive kite to support a human it would either be too heavy or too bendy. You need better materials and better construction techniques.

[NovemberWhiskey]

>Paper planes have been a thing for a long while, but I guess no one thought that could scale?

... and they were right, because aerodynamics is not scale-invariant.

[moralestapia]

Well, airplanes do exist now, so that did definitely scale.