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Comment by Tossrock | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't it worth getting excited about? I get excited about lunch. It costs me nothing to follow the progress on low-probability, high impact technological advancements (see: space elevators, commercial fusion power, etc)

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I guess this is really the point: space elevators and commercial fusion are many, many orders of magnitude more likely to pan out than this is. Both of those are engineering challenges, and materials science challenges. They may be insurmountable ones, or they may not. But neither one would unconditionally require changes to the bedrock principles of physics.

Human beings are not good at distinguishing between levels of "very low probability". Getting excited about space elevators is awesome, even though we're awfully unlikely to see them in our lifetimes and they might never pan out. But these drive theories are pretty literally too good to be true.

Well here's the thing. We could put a fully-functioning fast food restaurant on the moon by 2020. It's an engineering challenge and 100% surmountable. But we won't. It's more likely that we've fundamentally misunderstood physics than we would actually put in the effort to do that.

But the economic consequences of, say, commercial fusion would be enormous. Whoever mastered it would stand to become the wealthiest nation/corporation/person on the planet. Can't say the same for a Jack-in-a-box on the Sea of Tranquility.

I can't begin to tell you how much more likely I would consider a lunar McDonald's publicity stunt than a demonstration that "momentum isn't conserved after all". The first is so implausible as to be laughable. But the second makes the first look mundane. The future behavior of large groups of people is enormously more complicated and less understood than quantum field theory and the standard model.

I'm not really talking about this specific thing. (Though are you sure it even requires momentum to not be conserved?)

I'm just trying to say that our knowledge is incomplete enough that I would very solidly bet on certain "impossible" things being more likely than certain "possible" things. So sure people are bad at judging highly unlikely things, but even possible/impossible is not a reliable criterion. (As long as you don't cheat with hindsight.)

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