Gedanke experimetn, what would you need to make ...

Okay, so I'm late and catching up, but Offbreed <offbreed_106 RemoveThis @hotmail.com>
wrote on Wed, 22 Feb 2006 18:13:21 -0800 in alt.books.david-weber :
>deowll wrote:
>> "Offbreed" <offbreed_106 RemoveThis @hotmail.com> wrote in message
>
>>> About half that. You know it's possible.
>>
>> Not unless you know how to make the chips.
>
>"Half that" is a hundred years.
>
>In "Apoc Troll", we have someone who knows a bit about the basics of the
>advanced technology. To make a closer comparison, we would need to have
>someone carry the calculator back in time. The key question would be
>whether that person knew enough of the key information to start a new
>technology. We had photography about 150 years ago, and that's an
>important technology for transistors and ICs.
>
>If the politicians and businessmen of 200 years ago thought that the
>development of a pocket calculator was sufficiently important and had a
>near immortal informant to keep the project on track, I think it would
>take less than 100 years to develop that calculator, and computers.

Some years ago, I was minding the machine at work, and asked myself,
"if you could go back to 1588, what would you take?" I thought that
"inventing a Hollereth Tabulator would be "simple" to do in 1588. Save
that I would have to "invent" electricity, precision machining (the
micrometer, I would later learn, wasn't first made till 1640), punch cards,
and so on. Plus a few dozen other conceptual changes.

Taking a calculator back 200 years would require similar paradigm
shifts. For starters, there is the "invent" the periodic table. You would
have a lot of before we can do A we must do B, which would mean we have to
do C first as well. Rinse lather repeat.

Taking as an interesting alternate story, Ludmilla is able to destroy
the troll before crashing, and manages to get it down in "one" piece, on
land, and then dies. Now we have "modern" humans who have a very advanced
human technology, so they know it can be puzzled out. But they don't know
_about_ space suits with force field helmet. And other "invisible"
details.
With the Fighter, we have an Alien Artifact, of a very advanced
technology, and first we have to figure out how to make it work, before we
can figure out what it does, let alone what we need to know in order to
prepare to understand what we will need to figure out how to make one.
Progress is inherently iterative, we use crude tools to make better
tools, and those tools to make even better tools.

tschus
pyotr

--
pyotr filipivich
Typos, Grammos and da kind are the result of ragin hormones
Fortesque Consulting: Teaching Pigs to Sing since 1968.