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But if the first spaceship was never developed, would the second spaceship have been?
by rytill 5y ago
But if the first spaceship was never developed, would the second spaceship have been?
- treis 5y agoSure because you develop technology while working on achievable goals. As an example, what could someone in 1920 do to help develop fusion power? Pretty much nothing that would be practically useful today. But they had stuff they could achieve which laid the groundwork to what we're doing today.
- lovehashbrowns 5y agoBut then you run into things that you only discover while trying to do something practical. Like the space shuttle having to land--NASA developed grooved runways specifically for this purpose and now they're on our highways. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/Groove.html https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/Groove.... There are technologies, materials, and methods we've developed, tested, and perfected because of some specific need. I mean, how much of the internet do we have today as a result of CERN having to store and share vast amounts of data and information? Sure, you can say /eventually/ we would've come up with alternatives. But a lot of the internet and technology in the 90s came as a direct result of CERN doing practical things. How would we know we'd need solid state drives today if we didn't develop a need for hard drives? The same can be said of NASA, the space shuttle, the Hubble telescope, etc. Going back to CERN, maybe it would've been better to wait for the Superconducting Super Collider because it was going to be more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider. But so far only one of these particle accelerators has detected the Higgs boson.
- treis 5y agoYour examples agree with what I am saying. Target things you can build today.