>In order to build a MOSFET, you need to know how do electrons react in the presence of thin barriers, and how thick should the gate oxide be to prevent breakdo

>In order to build a MOSFET, you need to know how do electrons react in the presence of thin barriers, and how thick should the gate oxide be to prevent breakdown while still keeping the field strong. And yet I somehow managed to produce a pretty complex quantum computer before I was even born: my brain. Or maybe my mom did, but she is nearly as ignorant of quantum physics and biology as I was as a fetus, so the point stands. The person above was wrong about your implicit assumption about QM and dependency chains. Your real assumption is that interstellar societies will develop technologies intentionally using explicit knowledge that charts such a dependency chain, rather than evolving capabilities via or alongside implicit knowledge, such as the implicit knowledge we all share in which allows us to produce human brains with no intellectual effort whatsoever. We don't and can't know what chunks of those dependency chains are innate for other species, which in turn means we don't know how they will traverse such a chain, even assuming ad arguendo your hypothesis that the dependency graph is essentially linear.