Georg Wrede wrote:
BCS wrote:
the story I want to puzzle out is that a group of a few thousand
people get dropped on a planet with an indestructible encyclopedic
reference, really good geological maps and their birthday suits. I've
wondered how long it would take to get into back into space. If they
can keep society together, I'd bet it would be under 100 years, it
might even be under a generation.
Let's say, instead of just birthday suits and an encyclopedia, they'd
have a magic box that just doles out any hand tool you can think of
wishing you had. Oh, and another box that feeds them all. A third that
keeps them clothed, and a fourth to tend to their medical issues. And,
they'd be no ordinary rednecks, but all of them belonging to Mensa.
But let's say they aren't NASA engineers, just otherwise smart.
They'd have to start with some serious reading. They'd have to spend
years figuring out the design of the ship, write the computer programs
for avionics, fuel control, etc. Then they'd have to design the
computers to run them on. And the computer programs to design the
microchips.
Then they'd have to design a chip factory to make the CPUs and other
chips needed. Another factory to make fuel. A couple of mines, too, to
get titanium and aluminium alloys, and a few plastics factories to make
all the plastic parts. They'd need to either develop synthetic rubber or
find rubber trees, or find a substitute, to make hydraulic tubing.
They'd need some serious expeditions to find what they need, in great
enough quantities.
Before all of this, they'd need to find out how to create factories that
make bricks for the other factory buildings, build a power plant big
enough to run the factories, chemical processes for fuel and stuff,
mills and forges. They'd need a few hundred Jeeps just to get around the
planet in search of raw materials, and they'd need to build factories
for oil well drills, piping, and truck factories for transport of all
kinds of crap and raw materials.
Oh, and they'd need to not be jealous, adulterous, envious,
self-promoting, greedy, bossy, dishonest, delinquent, criminal, etc. and
not treat others with disrespect. Or else half their progress will go to
all that. (What's -50% compounded annually over, say, 20 years? Get it?)
Motorola dominated the world of wireless communications, and was a big
chip maker, only ten years ago. Ever wonder what happened?
(Yesterday I saw a rerun of Bad Boys. That movie is so true to life in
that anytime something is going down, people just start yelling at each
other, instead of focusing on the emergency at hand.)
And let's say /all/ the circumstances otherwise are perfect (like no
earth quakes, no storms, floods, or even thunder).
How many parts are there in a rocket? Not to mention a StarTrek kind of
spaceship? In the 1970' I was a camera salesman. I saw an exploded view
of the Canon FTb (a regular SLR camera). They boasted it had one
thousand parts. Say it takes a thousand cameras to build a rocket.
That's a million parts.
How many rockets would they have to build just for testing various
things, and getting it right?
Any author in whose book even one of them gets up in space before 500
years, is an idiot, and should be sent back to college. Math, physics,
chemistry, at least.
Their number one problem is, they're too few compared to the task.
Developing things to make things to make things[...], and having the
knowledge is fine, but you have to be so many that it actually gets done
before doomsday. Hell, if it was that easy to build a rocket, then the
guys in Afghanistan and Nigeria would have been a few times to the Moon
already.
People really underestimate things. "Yeah, this guy I know wrote this OS
kernel, and today even mainframes run Linux." If you count the man-hours
Linus and thousands of others have done, combined, guess what. Say
they'd been a hundred instead. Today Linux is almost 20 years, so we're
talking two hundred years, right?
You know, if the entire mankind decided to stop fighting, and wanted to
build the Enterprise now (forget warp drive), I'd say it would take way
more than a generation. Hell, merely sending 2 guys to Mars seems too
much. How long does it currently take the world's most powerful nation,
from decision to deployment, to make a jet fighter? And these guys
already have the factories, infrastructure, CAD programs, expertise,
experience, clout, etc.
Sorry for the long quote, I quoted this in full because I liked it this
much. It's the best post I've read in a long time.
One thing I'd like to emphasize is that building complex technology is
hard for a small core of people because it's hard to get specialized in
multiple things at once. Think of how long it takes to become expert in
any serious domain... I'm not sure most of us could get up-to-speed in
more than a couple major technologies fast enough to also use them
creatively.
We benefit of many generations who worked before us and created
technology. Even before the exponential elbow of recent times, there was
plenty of technology that we afforded to take for granted.
Speaking of which (damn ranting and subject changing!) I think the
Medieval Ages were a stain on our history. I read somewhere how at the
beginning of that dark time there was actual *loss* of technology: they
had these aquaducts and pumps and mechanisms and whatnot from the Romans
and didn't know how to repair them anymore, so they just let them go
decrepit. Very scary.
When I'll see loss of technology happening, I'll now we're in big
trouble. I hope it won't happen in my lifetime, or ever.
Andrei
