If we didn’t even have the verb “to fly”, and nobody had seen something fly, “going up and travelling sideways while hovering some distance above the ground” would have been a weird niche idea, and people like the Wright Brothers would have probably never even heard of it. It could have easily taken decades longer.
I think people would have noticed feathers, paper, or folded sheets of paper hovering above the ground for long periods of time; people would have been able to flap their arms and feel the upward force and then attach large slabs and test how much the upward force was increased; people would have had time to study the ergonomics of thrown objects. Maybe it would have taken longer, but I think flight still would have been done, in less than a “few decades” later than it took for the wright brothers to figure it out.
Reason+capitalism is surprisingly resilient to setbacks like these.
I strongly disagree with this counterfactual and would happily put up large sums of money if only it were possible to bet on the outcome of some experiment on this basis.
Humans designed lots of systems that have no analog whatsoever in nature. We didn’t need to see objects similar to computers to design computers, for instance. We didn’t even need to see animals that do locomotion using wheels to design the wheel!
It’s just so implausible that people would not have had this idea at the start of the 20th century if people hadn’t seen animals flying. I’m surprised that people actually believe this to be the case.
To be fair, we did have animals that served the purpose of computers. We even called them computers—as in, people whose job it was to do calculations (typically Linear Algebra or Calculus or Differential Equations—hard stuff).
This is true, but if this level of similarity is going to count, I think there are natural “examples” of pretty much anything you could ever hope to build. It doesn’t seem helpful to me when thinking about the counterfactual I brought up.
If we didn’t even have the verb “to fly”, and nobody had seen something fly, “going up and travelling sideways while hovering some distance above the ground” would have been a weird niche idea, and people like the Wright Brothers would have probably never even heard of it. It could have easily taken decades longer.
I think people would have noticed feathers, paper, or folded sheets of paper hovering above the ground for long periods of time; people would have been able to flap their arms and feel the upward force and then attach large slabs and test how much the upward force was increased; people would have had time to study the ergonomics of thrown objects. Maybe it would have taken longer, but I think flight still would have been done, in less than a “few decades” later than it took for the wright brothers to figure it out.
Reason+capitalism is surprisingly resilient to setbacks like these.
I strongly disagree with this counterfactual and would happily put up large sums of money if only it were possible to bet on the outcome of some experiment on this basis.
Humans designed lots of systems that have no analog whatsoever in nature. We didn’t need to see objects similar to computers to design computers, for instance. We didn’t even need to see animals that do locomotion using wheels to design the wheel!
It’s just so implausible that people would not have had this idea at the start of the 20th century if people hadn’t seen animals flying. I’m surprised that people actually believe this to be the case.
To be fair, we did have animals that served the purpose of computers. We even called them computers—as in, people whose job it was to do calculations (typically Linear Algebra or Calculus or Differential Equations—hard stuff).
This is true, but if this level of similarity is going to count, I think there are natural “examples” of pretty much anything you could ever hope to build. It doesn’t seem helpful to me when thinking about the counterfactual I brought up.