Georg Wrede wrote:
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.
To amplify your point a bit with a real life example, during WW2 a B-29 landed in the USSR, intact. It was decades ahead of Soviet aerospace tech at the time. Stalin had to essentially redirect his entire aerospace industry to simply copy it. A propeller driven, 4 engine bomber. I saw a documentary on this, it took maybe 10 years and 10,000 engineers who had to recreate every part on it. It was a monumental task. They had all the information needed, but no infrastructure to make the parts.
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?
People sometimes remark about how many thousands of programming languages are invented, and how few ever get anywhere. Part of the reason is that 99.99% of the work is not inventing it, it's debugging it, tuning it, deploying it, writing manuals, smoothing out all the rough edges, etc. That's what defeats all those language projects, the creators quit on them.
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.
You're right. You'll need *millions* of people to create a starship, even starting with blueprints.
