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

[Georg Wrede]

BCS wrote:
> Hello Georg,
> 
> [...]
> 
> 
> I'll grant it's a hard job, but look at WW-II, throw in some large ugly 
> unifying force and Stuff Gets Done!

Well, for example, when the Allied ganged up against Hitler, there were 
more than a hundred million people /focused/ on one single thing: to get 
him out before he gets us. /Nothing/ else had priority. Even housewives 
did the best they could to help, including nursing each others kids so 
the others could go to work making bombs.

So, _one_hundred_million_ really determined people, a few years, and 
they made some simple airplanes and war boats, some explosives, and 
guns. (OK, I'm putting this down a little... They also trained some guys 
to walk across France with assault rifles. :-) )

But the whole point is, they were a lot more than a couple of thousand, 
they had the infrastructure all in place, a ready society, and a common 
enemy! And it *still* took a couple of years to get up to D-day.

> Heck, look at 1900-2009. I'd say 
> that most of the tech that existed in 1900 could be built from the 
> ground up in under 50 years if the people didn't needed to do any R&D 
> and are motivated enough. 

Reread my post. It's easier for the whole world than for a couple of 
thousand guys. There's simply too much to do. And, like Andrei said, too 
much expertise needed [for the nontrivial things] to have time to learn 
it all by that number of guys.

> As for some hard numbers, I recall a NOVA show 
> where a construction planner was asked to set up a time line for the 
> pyramids using period tech. The time line was under 3 years (2.5 IIRC).

Say 2000 men and 3 years. But stacking stones is a bit easier than doing 
rocket science, right? Building rockets is not just stacking iron, most 
of it is the rocket science, and that takes reading, thinking, and 
asking each other. A lot.

And even if they had full blueprints, there's an awful lot of parts to 
make, and a crapload of fuel to make. And the fuel factory, with or 
without blueprints.

Just to get a measure, write on a piece of paper how many hours you 
would need to write a Monopoly (the board game) server that servers 
10000 players, on a PC. One honest and careful estimate, according to 
your own programming skills. Then, do that many hours of work on it, and 
see how many percent of the work you got done in that time. (If that's 
too big a project, then do a TicTacToe server.)

I don't want the answer. It's for yourself.