[OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you "new"

[Georg Wrede]

BCS wrote:
> the story I want to puzzle out is that a group of a few thousand people 
> get dropped on a planet with an indestructible encyclopedic reference, 
> really good geological maps and their birthday suits. I've wondered how 
> long it would take to get into back into space. If they can keep society 
> together, I'd bet it would be under 100 years, it might even be under a 
> generation.

Let's say, instead of just birthday suits and an encyclopedia, they'd 
have a magic box that just doles out any hand tool you can think of 
wishing you had. Oh, and another box that feeds them all. A third that 
keeps them clothed, and a fourth to tend to their medical issues. And, 
they'd be no ordinary rednecks, but all of them belonging to Mensa.

But let's say they aren't NASA engineers, just otherwise smart.

They'd have to start with some serious reading. They'd have to spend 
years figuring out the design of the ship, write the computer programs 
for avionics, fuel control, etc. Then they'd have to design the 
computers to run them on. And the computer programs to design the 
microchips.

Then they'd have to design a chip factory to make the CPUs and other 
chips needed. Another factory to make fuel. A couple of mines, too, to 
get titanium and aluminium alloys, and a few plastics factories to make 
all the plastic parts. They'd need to either develop synthetic rubber or 
find rubber trees, or find a substitute, to make hydraulic tubing.

They'd need some serious expeditions to find what they need, in great 
enough quantities.

Before all of this, they'd need to find out how to create factories that 
make bricks for the other factory buildings, build a power plant big 
enough to run the factories, chemical processes for fuel and stuff, 
mills and forges. They'd need a few hundred Jeeps just to get around the 
planet in search of raw materials, and they'd need to build factories 
for oil well drills, piping, and truck factories for transport of all 
kinds of crap and raw materials.

Oh, and they'd need to not be jealous, adulterous, envious, 
self-promoting, greedy, bossy, dishonest, delinquent, criminal, etc. and 
not treat others with disrespect. Or else half their progress will go to 
all that. (What's -50% compounded annually over, say, 20 years? Get it?) 
Motorola dominated the world of wireless communications, and was a big 
chip maker, only ten years ago. Ever wonder what happened?

(Yesterday I saw a rerun of Bad Boys. That movie is so true to life in 
that anytime something is going down, people just start yelling at each 
other, instead of focusing on the emergency at hand.)

And let's say /all/ the circumstances otherwise are perfect (like no 
earth quakes, no storms, floods, or even thunder).

How many parts are there in a rocket? Not to mention a StarTrek kind of 
spaceship? In the 1970' I was a camera salesman. I saw an exploded view 
of the Canon FTb (a regular SLR camera). They boasted it had one 
thousand parts. Say it takes a thousand cameras to build a rocket. 
That's a million parts.

How many rockets would they have to build just for testing various 
things, and getting it right?


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.

Their number one problem is, they're too few compared to the task. 
Developing things to make things to make things[...], and having the 
knowledge is fine, but you have to be so many that it actually gets done 
before doomsday. Hell, if it was that easy to build a rocket, then the 
guys in Afghanistan and Nigeria would have been a few times to the Moon 
already.

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?

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.