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Old 02-10-2018, 09:18 AM   #42
whswhs
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
Default Re: Is TS optimistic or pessimistic?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
I don't know the later THS books, but that kind of thing is why I don't put too much weight on assessments of the plausability of distant technology. Beyond some very basic things which people have been arguing about for a long time (so interstellar travel by anything but tiny robotic probes is 'almost certainly not'), usually there are a lot of assumptions and simplifications involved, and those assumptions and simplifications reflect our culture. There are quite a few areas of science where engineering runs ahead of theory: I have seen a case where a metallurgist declared in print that something was impossible, and a few decades later several people went out and did it in a backyard forge because their techniques had advanced enough.
My favorite example is the philosopher Auguste Comte, back in the nineteenth century, writing that scientists should not discuss the composition of celestial bodies, because it would never be possible to investigate it empirically. That was just a couple of years after the invention of spectroscopy. Comte was on the faculty of a French technological academy at the time, I believe; that was where he spent most of his working life, at any rate.
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