Re: Re: starship-design: scoops and sails and something to push against

[KellySt@aol.com]

In a message dated 10/12/98 6:56:40 AM, ajcrowlx2@ozemail.com.au wrote:

>Hi Group,
>
>KellySt@aol.com wrote:
>
>> In a message dated 10/9/98 10:06:44 AM, zkulpa@zmit1.ippt.gov.pl wrote:
>>
>>
>> >> Further, if people want to propose reasons for interstellar colonization
>> >> missions, they'll have to have reasons and patterns that haven't failed
on
>> >> Earthly colonization projects.
>> >>
>> >Or quite new reasons that may turn up in a quite different,
>> >interplanetary-space society.
>>
>> Interplanetary societies of humans are unlikely to find any fundamental new
laws
>>
>> of society, culture, psychology, or economics.
>
>You think so? I would've thought that such would only be feasible by careful
>societal crafting and research into psychology etc. I think it's foreseeable
that
>we'll achieve great insights into how humans tick, especially if "uploading"
>becomes possible and computer analysis of brain-structure and programming is
well
>advanced.

No, we might come to understand more details about the mechanisms that drive
them, but as for discovering a fundemental new "society, culture, psychology,
or economics" that would seem pretty unlikely.  At this point that would be
like finding gravity didn't work the same on the 4th thursday of every
century, or you really could lose money on every item you sold, but make it up
in volume.


>Besides saying they won't find anything new is the same as saying that
science
>is
>dead, and that's a proposition we're all implicitly assuming is incorrect by
>trying to limit our designs to what we can reasonably imagine now. We seem to
>agree that we can't predict what might be possible by 2050, and I'd say the
same
>applies to all the sciences.

Not at all.  There a difference between expecting science to never learn
anything new, and expecting to find everything known before was wrong.
Neutons laws of gravity still work fine.



>> >
>> >-- Zenon
>>
>> Kelly
>
>Adam

Kelly