It'll Never Work (1997) | Hacker News Reader

It'll Never Work (1997)

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99 pointsrndn79 comments

And here's one from Carl Sagan for a nice counterpoint:

"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

I kinda disagree with that, as anyone trying to do something new is being laughed at, in general.

I don't really care about the ideas, it's just frustrating to be laughed at every time to want to try something new. There's always something dismissive, some jealousy, some surprised inability to be humble while facing something strange or new.

It would probably be best to get over that frustration because it's human nature.

To be fair, Columbus did underestimate the size of the Earth by about a factor of 2, and that was over 1500 years after Eratosthenes had calculated it to a reasonable degree of accuracy. A lot of the geographers laughing at him did so for that reason, not because they thought the Earth was flat. To his dying day he thought he'd sailed half way round the world to the East Indies. That's why we call those islands the West Indies, and call native american's Indians to this day. If the Americas hadn't been there, the expedition would have all died when the supplies ran out. Columbus wasn't right, he was lucky.

Larry Page told his advisor that he thought it would take 2 weeks to index the Internet. His advisor knew it would take a lot longer but didn't say anything.

What were the names of those geographers?

> What were the names of those geographers?

Well, among them, Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian working for the Spanish crown. Contemporary of Columbus, traveling at the same time as Columbus later voyages. He's the one that first identified, or at least popularized, that the lands Columbus was still insisting were the East Indies were a "New World". Has a couple continents named after him.

>>Columbus did underestimate the size of the Earth by about a factor of 2

>>Columbus wasn't right, he was lucky.

If Columbus had estimated it right, the sheer magnitude of task would have overwhelmed him from even trying.

Getting into the game even by foolishness increased his chances of getting lucky by huge margin compared to the sailor who was sitting back at home in Spain.

Sometimes you need to be the bozo the clown to be the best entertainer in the world.

It's nice to see that not all of the claims made that turned out to be false were in the negative.

e.g:

Automobiles will start to decline almost as soon as the last shot is fired in World War II. The name of Igor Sikorsky will be as well known as Henry Ford's, for his helicopter will all but replace the horseless carriage as the new means of popular transportation. Instead of a car in every garage, there will be a helicopter.... These 'copters' will be so safe and will cost so little to produce that small models will be made for teenage youngsters. These tiny 'copters, when school lets out, will fill the sky as the bicycles of our youth filled the prewar roads. - Harry Bruno, aviation publicist, 1943.

Furthermore, I notice that's by an aviation publicist; and that just happens to lend to my other comment / question:

How many of these people were paid to have the stance that they had?

Isn't the big miss there that they turned out not to be that cheap, nor that safe? Living in a city with bad traffic, I'd love to get a small copter.

But if everybody else had a small copter too, wouldn't the air traffic be just as bad?

Not really, because you have another dimension to expand into, so you can imagine adding as many levels as you need. Also you avoid all the obstacles that cars have to navigate at ground level (rivers, buildings, trees, etc).

On the other hand, there's some work to be done to define good copter "rules of the road". A simple solution is to say you can only go north at lvl1, east at lvl2, south lvl3, west lvl4. That would pretty much eliminate lateral collisions, so then you've only got level changes and takeoffs/landings to solve and it's done.

On the other other hand, there are bad drivers, there'll surely be bad pilots. Perhaps self-driving copters is the answer!

Given that airports require air traffic control to coordinate all the takeoffs and landings of airplanes, and the number of airplanes would no doubt be much smaller than the number of helicopters that would fly in a similar physical area at mass scale if helicopters replaced cars... I don't know how much the increased dimensions would really help. Airplanes trying to make their own decisions at airports would be disastrous, even if all the pilots agreed on what constituted right of way.

Birds (in spite of, or rather because of their birdbrains) seem to be doing ok at this.

I think birds fare about as well as an aircraft when striking other aircraft. Doesn't really seem comparable.

They fare infinitely better. Imagine the kind of traffic that you see around a large tree at dusk that birds use for sleeping around a major airport. The carnage would be beyond your wildest nightmares.

I think I didn't communicate clearly. What I meant to say is that I think birds fare as well when birds strike aircraft (jets, helicopters) as when aircraft strike other aircraft. There's a measurable difference between a 200g soft thing bumping into another one, as opposed to a multi-ton rigid structure full of high explosive liquid and fast moving things having a little tiff.

I get what your saying about the organized chaos, but the risk slight accidental impact imposes isn't even close.

Would be awesome, though, gotta say.

The whole trick is in avoiding the collisions in the first place which birds manage with considerable grace, even when there are a lot of them. I live in the middle of a bird sanctuary and there are on a good day a few million of them nearby and to see them take off in enormous flocks without any mishap or central control is extremely impressive.

The obvious fact is that we engineer our aircraft (especially choppers) in a way that is totally contrary to the principles of flight (which penalizes weight and power-to-weight even more) but it's a direct function of the fact that we'd like to be on board as well and we're a lot heavier than the heaviest birds. All that machinery is our technological workaround for not having wings and it comes at a significant price: that as soon as anything at all goes wrong we are painfully reminded that the sky is not our natural element. So there are very few ways that we manage to recover from any mid-air collision and the speed for fixed wing aircraft and the potential energy of rotary craft pretty much guarantees destruction and death or at a minimum serious injury of all occupants in case of accidents.

There may be some way in which we could re-visit flying designed from the ground up with recovery from collision and failure of (sub)systems in mind. I wonder what form it would take.

we are painfully reminded that the sky is not our natural element.

Isn't that also something else? There are evolutionary characteristics in bird brains that enable them to react the way they need to survive in the air? Even with the best machine learning algorithms, would we really be able to replicate that intelligence within a single generation? Maybe, stranger things have happened, but I doubt it. Certainly, I doubt human pilots would be able to replicate it, I think AI would have a better chance, but that's still scary.

I saw a 3D flocking demo in the 80's that looked eerily natural. Mindblowing at the time and the whole thing revolved around only 4 parameters and some simple formulas. Emergent behaviour at its finest so replicating that would not be all that hard. Getting the machinery in place to obey the signals is a lot harder.

And also unsafe. I'd rather not have to navigate the friendly skies knowing a distracted driver is climbing too fast and is going to crash into me, or is texting and nudges the stick and crashes into me, or falls asleep and...

Nothing in air will ever take off (sic) because of the potential energy involved. It's not passive enough.

Can anyone explain the flaw in Bickerton's reasoning? It's not obvious to me where the mistake is:

"For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme at this speed is 15,180 calories... The energy of our most violent explosive--nitroglycerine--is less than 1,500 calories per gramme. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one-tenth of the energy necessary to escape the earth... Hence the proposition appears to be basically impossible."

I believe the flaw was the assumption that the only way to get something into space was via detonating explosives.

Correct me if I am wrong, but we created more powerful fuel than he had when he made that statement.

Just guessing here, but he assumes that the thermal energy of that gramme traveling at 7 miles/second needs to be applied instantaneously or nearly-instantaneously, when it can instead be given to that gramme over the course of several minutes via, say, a Saturn V rocket system.

He is correct. He is saying that a gram of fuel doesn't have enough energy to get itself into orbit. That is a true statement. But he ignores the fact that rockets spend many many grams of fuel to get a gram of non-fuel into orbit.

I don't think that right. He's saying you can expend 10 grams of nitroglycerine, but the 10 grams isn't enough to get the 10 grams up into the orbit how can it possible carry more.

Because the 10 grams don't enter orbit. They're expended and stay on Earth. You'll still need more than the 10 grams because you will be lifting the some portion of the 10 grams up into the atmosphere because you can't use or get the energy in an instant. The explosion and propulsion happens over a period of time.

Rockets have multiple stages. Most of the fuel doesn't have to be accelerated nearly that fast.

(Also, I don't know how that compares to rocket fuel.)

That statement considers a projectile shot with a cannon. Gravimetric energy density of e.g. gasoline is much higher than nitroglycerine (6.4 MJ/kg vs. 46 MJ/kg).

He just described the energy requirements: each gram of payload needs 15k of energy put in to escape orbit. He didn't think of fuel which exists simply to move the rest of the fuel (the rocket equation).

Imagine 50 sticks of dynamite separated by metal plates. The bottom stick explodes, lifting the pile a bit (energy split 50 ways). Then the bottommost explodes, lifting more (split 49 ways). This continues until the second stick propels the first into orbit.

You can play with the numbers so

explosion energy * (1/50 + 1/49 + ...) = escape energy

You quickly realize it gets asymptotic, and extra fuel contributes relatively little to the payload.

I think he is imagining detonating all the explosives at once, like a gun, the bullet being the payload you want to put into orbit - like in the Jules Vernes books - instead of progressively consuming a fuel like kerosene (which itself has, from wikipedia, an energy density of about 10 kcal/g), leaving more and more mass behind as you ascend.

The gun idea seems to be, instinctively, very inefficient because of the need to fight the air density in the lower atmosphere all in one shot. I may be wrong there - mostly imagining what may be wrong with the approach (beyond reducing a live payload to a pink mist) based on kerbal experience :-p

He ignores staging and conservation of momentum. The explosives stay on Earth, and transfer their energy to a smaller mass which departs it. Since that smaller mass can in turn be explosives, you can repeat the process infinitely to achieve any desired net thrust-to-weight ratio for the final stage.

Also, nitroglycerine is pretty terrible fuel. You can get 7 times more energy from burning a gram of ethanol than from exploding one gram of TNT.

Projectile vs. rocket.

The calculation is entirely correct -- we cannot shoot a projectile into space. There is no sensible way to get something to go fast enough to make it to space from Earth with no further propulsion. A better argument, actually, is about acceleration. In order to not be utterly crushed, a projectile would need a massive vertical track to be shot into space. Earth's escape velocity is around 10km/s. g=10m/s^2. If we assume maximum acceleration of 10g to not crush the pilot, to get out, we'd need to accelerate at 10g for 1,000 seconds. During that time, we'd travel a few thousand kilometers. Accelerating faster -- as with a nuclear explosion -- only exasperates the problem.

We solved the problem by having propulsion the whole way up. We can fire a rocket into space, and it can take it's sweet time to get up there.

Also fun to note this argument from first principals could be levied against the Earth if it were just a bit bigger:

"If our planet was 50% larger in diameter, we would not be able to venture into space, at least using rockets for transport."

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedi...

One wonders if it were the case, if humanity would come up with a solution by necessity or we'd still be grounded. My guess is we'd have nuclear powered rockets.

> The energy of our most violent explosive--nitroglycerine--is less than 1,500 calories per gramme.

Well, part of it is that you don't really want "violent explosives", you want a controlled combustion. Once you take that limitation out of the way, turns out that explosives don't have very high energy densities, they are actually, for the most part, less energy-dense than food. Take a look at this table: http://physics.info/energy-chemical/

(Funnily enough, was discussing this over lunch just now).

What about project orion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propu...

I think exploding nuclear bombs as a propellant qualifies as "violent explosives". Then again it was the 50's and those guys loved nuclear things.

I've always thought about it as the difference between "throwing something out of Earth's gravity" (launching a projectile with initial force only) versus "climbing [a ladder?] out of Earth's gravity" (continually applying force just over gravity's influence.)

I think Bickerton has confused the two concepts.

Consider that gravity is the weakest of all forces. You overcome it every time you jump, run (with both feet off the ground) or climb a ladder. You don't overcome it for long enough to get into orbit, but you still overcome gravity. Birds and airplanes regularly overcome gravity.

This seems interesting:

> The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling through our streets and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would call for prompt legislative action ...

Is this really so off-the-mark? Or have we just got used to vehicles being the kings of the streets, displacing pedestrians and filling our breathing air with pollutants?

Early outrage over automobiles injuring and killing pedestrians at an alarming rate threatened to stall the growth in driving. In response, the auto industry undertook a major campaign to assert that cars should have the right-of-way and to denormalize people walking and cycling on the street, pushing them to the edges and criminalizing "jaywalking".

Now, when a person driving a car kills a person walking, the default reaction is to blame the person walking for not being careful or attentive or visible enough. We have been conditioned point the finger at the pedestrian's earbuds rather than the obvious source of danger.

Even when a driver is found guilty of careless driving, the maximum punishment - at least in most North American jurisdictions - is a $500 fine and maybe a few demerit points.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. Pedestrians are not automatically to blame in every case. Today we have rules governing the movements of both pedestrians and cars. There is no default winner. Pedestrians win on crosswalks and such, but not in the middle of highways. And even there the car is no clear winner. For instance, if both driver and pedestrian have earbuds in, society today would say the driver is the more reckless. In fact most jurisdictions specifically forbid headphones on drivers. None that I know of forbid them of pedestrians.

And 500$ is certainly not the maximum punishment. Vehicular homicide, negligence causing death, reckless endangerment, DUI ... even basic speeding tickets in many jurisdictions are far higher than 500$.

Wherever the blame may be, and whatever the punishments are, the fact is that the quote was more prescient than inaccurate: we should have legislated better in the early days of the automobile. Now it is too late (or will take too long for changes to take effect): the automobiles are ruling the roads, and specially the cities, from streets to parking lots. Urban planning is done (in most cases) with the goal of facilitating car circulation - pedestrians and bicycles are an afterthought, when at all.

Speaking for my jurisdication (Ontario), it is theoretically possible to find a driver guilty of careless or reckless driving and a penalty more severe than $500. In practice, it is extremely rare to see a serious charge, let alone a conviction, even when a driver strikes a pedestrian crossing legally in a crosswalk.

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2011/05/18/is_a_persons_life...

Here are some quick examples I found:

http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2011/05/12/driver_fined_50...

http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2011/05/13/toronto_woman_f...

http://metronews.ca/news/halifax/449137/man-34-dies-after-be...

And it's not just Ontario:

http://gothamist.com/2011/07/14/unlicensed_dump_truck_driver...

http://gothamist.com/2014/04/09/drunk_driver_who_killed_broo...

http://www.streetsblog.org/2011/11/11/unlicensed-driver-who-...

Et cetera, ad nauseam.

Considering that before cars, cities were drowning in horse manure, I would say the quote is off the mark.

> The horse was no newcomer on the urban scene. But by the late 1800s, the problem of horse pollution had reached unprecedented heights. The growth in the horse population was outstripping even the rapid rise in the number of human city dwellers. American cities were drowning in horse manure as well as other unpleasant byproducts of the era’s predominant mode of transportation: urine, ﬂies, congestion, carcasses, and trafﬁc accidents. Widespread cruelty to horses was a form of environmental degradation as well.

The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-storey windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed. [0]

[0] http://www.uctc.net/access/30/Access%2030%20-%2002%20-%20Hor...

Sure, we had a problem with horses. But we also had a looming problem with cars, which is what the quote is (correctly in my opinion) forecasting, one which we are now starting to acknowledge (practically unsolvable currently). So the quote is very much on the mark.

The horse manure problem was a somewhat related issue, but does not invalidate the quote. Could we have solved the horse manure problem without creating a pedestrian-hostile society? Who knows, we didn't even try.

http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp

I do not know why you were down-voted, that was interesting.

So the quote comes from a fictional report from the late 1950s that tried to make fun of regulation of atomic power. That makes it strangely prescient: first, when the automobile was already a mass-media transportation system, the authors of this satiric piece failed to acknowledge the problems that it had already created in the society they were living in. And second, they do not correctly foresee the problems of atomic power (arms proliferation, for example)

They use the car analogy wrongly: the car has actually created lots of problems, they simply do not see them, because they are so used to those problems.

Note that I am not saying that the car has not advantages, just that some of the problems stated in the quote are real.

My all time favorite from Paul Krugman:

"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."

He says it really wasn't a prediction so he wasn't wrong:

http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-responds-to-inte...

Sounds like that might be the wrong thing to say.

As if the fax machine didn't have a huge impact.

I find this one odd:

>People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon... Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is of course the very best. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but the sacred scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth. - Martin Luther (1483-1546) [Criticizing Copernicus' heliocentric theory of planetary motion.]

Because Copernicus wasn't the first astronomer to suggest this. In fact there's a very long line of Muslim astronomers that preceded Copernicus and noticed that the Greek model was wrong, based on a very simple observation: if the earth is stationary and every thing else revolves around it, the view of the heavens should be the same every night (which it isn't). In fact the Muslims actually proposed and experimentally tested several models before Copernicus.

> every thing else revolves around it, the view of the heavens should be the same every night

Well, unless of course the heavens revolve as well. Which is how it was usually pictured in those days, the distance of the stars was surprisingly much larger than even the wildest estimates.

I obviously over simplified it. The original muslim astronomers not only tested the greek model but several others using observational data and mathematical models.

"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years." - John von Neumann in 1949

Also needs a page listing all the times that someone said that something wouldn't work, and they turned out to be correct.

Yeah... confirmation bias written all over that premise.

Don't go West young man. (Advice to Columbus.) I. A Voyage to Asia would require three years. II. The western Ocean is infinite and perhaps unnavigable. III. If he reached the Antipodes he could not get back. IV There are no Antipodes because the greater part of the globe is covered with water, and because St. Augustine said so. V. Of the five zones, only three are habitable. VI. So many centuries after the Creation, it is unlikely that anyone could find hitherto unknown lands of any value. - Report of the committee organized in 1486 by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain to study Columbus' plans to find a shorter route to India.

Makes you wonder about widely derided projects such as Mars One.

Not really. Nobody is saying that the stated goals of Mars One are impossible to reach. People are saying that it's a scam without the means or even a viable plan to reach those goals.

See the other comment by simonh in this discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9261989): Columbus had a multiplicity of detractors because his estimate of the circumference of the Earth was off by a factor of 2, and to his dying day insisted he'd found the East Indies, not the very fortuitous West "Indies". If the Americas weren't there, he'd be at best a footnote in history, a crazy explorer who'd perished with his crews.

Reading this list just gives me a head-rush of joyous giddiness. Take that, craven old conservatives and naysayers!

"Men might as well project a voyage to the Moon as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy North Atlantic Ocean."

- Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London.

> Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles. The earth does not have limbs and muscles; therefore it does not move.

> - Scipio Chiaramonti [Professor of philosophy and mathematics at University of Pisa, arguing against the heliocentrc system, 1633]

I can't help thinking that particular sentence context is more political than `scientific`.

It's also a classic example of an argument that proves too much. If the earth can't move because it lacks limbs then surely the sun isn't able to move either.

Ah, but do we know the sun isn't made of limbs and muscles? ;-)

But we can trivially see a boulder rolling down a hill and know that limbs are not a pre-requisite for motion.

It's more obvious than that. The argument is logically wrong.

Is it too much to ask for references? I have had too many bad experiences over the years where person x was alleged to have said something when in fact never did.

A derived blog post by Sam Altman: http://blog.samaltman.com/technology-predictions

Interesting that at least one prediction is too optimistic:

    Bitcoin is definitely going to be trading at $10,000 or more and in wide use by the end of 2014.
       - Many otherwise smart people, November of 2013

And I have to comment on:

    Superhuman machine intelligence is prima facie ridiculous.
       - Many otherwise smart people, 2015

It's not prima facie ridiculous, but the more common error is to take it for granted. I just don't like it when people start to make predictions about the future based on technology uploading brains to computer or simulating the universe (which was done in the book "Superintelligence" which I just read). It's far from obvious that those things are even possible.

not in the same vein as "it'll never work", but, arthur-eddington's heavy-handed approach to subramanyam-chandrashekar's theory on maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star (chandrashekhar's-limit), seems to have set back cosmology by at least couple of decades. what is kind of interesting, is that, lot's of luminaries f.e. bohr, fowler, pauli etc. agreed with his (chandra's) analysis, but owing to reputation of eddington, were unwilling to support him publicly.

an excellent book by arthur-miller (empire-of-stars) is quite fascinating

And just to think: what if the human race from the beginning of time, never lost any knowledge. No libraries were burnt, books and theories weren't banned, scientist kept their heads...on their bodies, info after a fallen empire was retained, the dark ages never happened, the pyramid mystery would never have been one, etc..., would we be several hundred years ahead of where we are now? Or is there some existential force that dictates the progression of innovation? Is it tied to the evolution of the human brains' capabilities?

You don't need that `existential force` question to find hypothesis and answers to your first question. You are framing your question by opposing (`or`) that `existential force` to whatever your answer is to the first question.

It's really more rhetorical. Clearly I can't just oppose it because there is not a definitive answer. Just seeing what people think as far as the progression of mankind goes.

David Deustch in his book "The Beginning of Infinity" claims the 'existential force' is the emergence of a culture of criticism that recognizes the need for good explanations. The catch is these types of cultures have only sprung up occasionally in the history of humanity, with the vast time between made up of periods of stagnation.