It just struck me - watching Brad Wright’s Travelers for the third time - that even though we might not have developed light sabers or faster than light drives or teleportation devices yet, we might already have all the components or ingredients or raw materials “laying around” and the only thing standing between us and technological advancement is the knowledge on how to assemble and them the correct way.

Aaand while writing this I realized what an oversimplification this is. We not only had to learn how to assemble materials in order to invent, say, batteries but we also had to understand electricity and how to manipulate it.

So, never mind. 😂

  • Denjin@feddit.uk
    21·
    3 days ago

    The concept you’re groping around I think is “the adjacent possible”.

    You can’t create the battery without understanding chemical potential energy and several other concepts. Imagine a house with infinite rooms branching off one another, you can’t reach a distant room without travelling through the adjoining rooms.

    The basic building blocks of everything already exist and have done since the first fraction of a second after the big bang, the key is to navigate a route through to the adjoining room.

    Think of the inventions of Da Vinci, many of those were considered vastly ahead of their time, he was able to “see” forward into other rooms not adjacent but there didn’t exist the technology to realise his dreams of flight etc.

      • kayzeekayzee@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        8·
        3 days ago

        There are a lot of fundamental laws of physics that totally break if you allow the possibility of FTL transport (at least as we understand them).

        • icelimit@lemmy.ml
          1·
          33 minutes ago

          We need to intensify our understanding.

          People thought it was impossible to get trains to go above some weird speed limit because the air would get sucked out of our lungs because of the pressure difference created via Bernoulli’s principle.