This sounds implausible to me. I agree it would have taken longer to occur to people, but arguing that at some time people wouldn’t have figured out how to make helicopters or planes seems difficult to believe.
I’m curious why people would think this, though. Why is the possibility of flight and the basic mechanism of “pushing air downward” supposed to be so difficult, either conceptually or as a matter of engineering, that we couldn’t have achieved it without the concrete example of birds and insects?
Why is the possibility of flight and the basic mechanism of “pushing air downward” supposed to be so difficult, either conceptually or as a matter of engineering, that we couldn’t have achieved it without the concrete example of birds and insects?
Because you need evidence to raise a hypothesis (like “heavier-than-air flight”) to consideration, and also social proof / funding to get people to take the ideas seriously. In hindsight the concept is obvious to you, as are the other clues by which other people could obviously have noticed the possibility of flight. That’s not how it feels to be in their place, though, without birds existing to constantly remind them of that possibility.
Out of curiosity, where do you think people got the idea of going to the moon from? By your logic, since we never saw any animal go to the moon, how to do so shouldn’t have been obvious to us and it should have been extremely difficult to secure funding for such a project, no?
I’m not saying that flight wouldn’t have happened at all without birds to look to. I’m saying that I think it would have taken somewhat longer, measured in years—decades.
I think this is plausible, especially if you make the range of “somewhat longer” so big that it encompasses more than an order of magnitude of time, as in years—decades. It’s still not obvious to me, though.
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 birds didn’t exist (& insects etc.), maybe it never would have occurred to people that heavier-than-air flight was possible in the first place.
Hard to know the counterfactual though.
This sounds implausible to me. I agree it would have taken longer to occur to people, but arguing that at some time people wouldn’t have figured out how to make helicopters or planes seems difficult to believe.
I’m curious why people would think this, though. Why is the possibility of flight and the basic mechanism of “pushing air downward” supposed to be so difficult, either conceptually or as a matter of engineering, that we couldn’t have achieved it without the concrete example of birds and insects?
Because you need evidence to raise a hypothesis (like “heavier-than-air flight”) to consideration, and also social proof / funding to get people to take the ideas seriously. In hindsight the concept is obvious to you, as are the other clues by which other people could obviously have noticed the possibility of flight. That’s not how it feels to be in their place, though, without birds existing to constantly remind them of that possibility.
Out of curiosity, where do you think people got the idea of going to the moon from? By your logic, since we never saw any animal go to the moon, how to do so shouldn’t have been obvious to us and it should have been extremely difficult to secure funding for such a project, no?
I’m not saying that flight wouldn’t have happened at all without birds to look to. I’m saying that I think it would have taken somewhat longer, measured in years—decades.
I think this is plausible, especially if you make the range of “somewhat longer” so big that it encompasses more than an order of magnitude of time, as in years—decades. It’s still not obvious to me, though.
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.