Perry E. Metzger: "Most are unaware of how much of space technology was theoretically anticipated and worked out by a handful of people decades before anyone actually tried to achieve orbit. Tsiolkovsky’s achievements, for example, are astounding and worth reading about." https://twitter.com/perrymetzger/status/1627465913237635074?...
That's a mind-opening Twitter thread, thanks for posting.
"Anytime anyone says to you “if that’s possible, why hasn’t it been done yet?”, remember that virtually everything about modern spacecraft was figured out by a Russian eccentric decades before anyone did anything with his publications."
I wonder if there are such eccentrics alive today, and how could we tell if we're looking at a sneak peek of the future to come? Is such situation even possible today? Or can we safely assume that today, if something seems possible but hasn't been done yet, then either the math behind it doesn't work out, or the economics of it don't.
On the question of who, I can think of three candidates: Eliezer Yudkowsky and the crowd around him on General AI, Eric Drexler on nanotech, and maaaaybe Stephen Wolfram on the computational nature of the universe. In all three cases, the works I read presented ideas and reasoning that added up - but I'm aware they're also widely criticized, and unfortunately, I lack deep enough knowledge to properly evaluate both the ideas and the arguments of the critics.
The above is on the "seems like the math of the thing adds up?". On the "it obviously does, but the economics might be tricky" side, there's tons of well-developed ideas for things to put in orbit and on other celestial bodies. No point in picking examples.
Yud can't be that eccentric if he's got a crowd. Especially since all their ideas are just things they read in old SF novels or old analytical philosophy papers.
