I agree with Nornagest’s interpretation regarding whether people in the 19th century had any idea what they were talking about with respect to reanimating the dead. With regards to space cannons, those turned out to be unworkable and we never made them at all. The gap from “maybe we could get to the moon with some sort of space-rocket” to actually making spaceships was much shorter.
There are plenty of cases where speculative technologies have turned out to be unworkable and were never actually put into use, but that’s an error of a different kind than speculating that a specific technology is hundreds of years off.
Still, there are projects of space rockets as early as 1881 (Nikolay Kibalich), and maybe earlier. Tsiolkovskiy has published his formula for estimating required amount of fuel in 1897, 60 years before first artificial satellite.
In 1822 there were some designs of Babbage’s Difference Engine. His designs dated by 1847-1849 were implemented and worked—a century and a half later. First Turing complete computer to be built was apparently ENIAC… in 1946.
So, for primary wishes of humanity, one century from working blueprint to implementation (of a more efficient plan) is not unprecedented. Of course, we don’t know whether our current cryonics is theoretically enough for preservation....
Due to lack of ways to calibrate, “hundreds of years” cannot be taken as a precise prediction, of course. On the other hand, “we have a general idea” cannot be taken as a prediction, either. After all, fusion power plant could turn out to be simpler than reviving cryonics patients.
I agree with Nornagest’s interpretation regarding whether people in the 19th century had any idea what they were talking about with respect to reanimating the dead. With regards to space cannons, those turned out to be unworkable and we never made them at all. The gap from “maybe we could get to the moon with some sort of space-rocket” to actually making spaceships was much shorter.
There are plenty of cases where speculative technologies have turned out to be unworkable and were never actually put into use, but that’s an error of a different kind than speculating that a specific technology is hundreds of years off.
Still, there are projects of space rockets as early as 1881 (Nikolay Kibalich), and maybe earlier. Tsiolkovskiy has published his formula for estimating required amount of fuel in 1897, 60 years before first artificial satellite.
In 1822 there were some designs of Babbage’s Difference Engine. His designs dated by 1847-1849 were implemented and worked—a century and a half later. First Turing complete computer to be built was apparently ENIAC… in 1946.
So, for primary wishes of humanity, one century from working blueprint to implementation (of a more efficient plan) is not unprecedented. Of course, we don’t know whether our current cryonics is theoretically enough for preservation....
Due to lack of ways to calibrate, “hundreds of years” cannot be taken as a precise prediction, of course. On the other hand, “we have a general idea” cannot be taken as a prediction, either. After all, fusion power plant could turn out to be simpler than reviving cryonics patients.