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

[Walter Bright]

Georg Wrede wrote:
> 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.

To amplify your point a bit with a real life example, during WW2 a B-29 
landed in the USSR, intact. It was decades ahead of Soviet aerospace 
tech at the time. Stalin had to essentially redirect his entire 
aerospace industry to simply copy it. A propeller driven, 4 engine 
bomber. I saw a documentary on this, it took maybe 10 years and 10,000 
engineers who had to recreate every part on it. It was a monumental 
task. They had all the information needed, but no infrastructure to make 
the parts.


> 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?

People sometimes remark about how many thousands of programming 
languages are invented, and how few ever get anywhere. Part of the 
reason is that 99.99% of the work is not inventing it, it's debugging 
it, tuning it, deploying it, writing manuals, smoothing out all the 
rough edges, etc. That's what defeats all those language projects, the 
creators quit on them.


> 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.

You're right. You'll need *millions* of people to create a starship, 
even starting with blueprints.