I'm pretty sure that
has been tried, likely millions of times before. How do we know we can't melt steel with our mind? Because we've tried, and it didn't work. We weren't born with some inherent knowledge of physics and the universe, we painstakingly experimented with everything until we developed a model of how things worked, and we've passed that along.
> On the other hand, what I said earlier boils down to "it's pointless to attempt something that can't be done". I fail to see how that warrants lodging a complaint like yours.
But you've provided no real evidence that it can't be done, have you? Trying provides that first bit of evidence, in whatever direction it goes. I'm all for prioritizing what we try, but stating something is pointless to try when it hasn't yet been tried implies you not only have perfect knowledge of all the variables that constitute the outcome, but can also use them to correctly predict the outcome. I feel fairly safe in asserting that neither you, nor any other person alive, is truly capable of that. As such, nothing is truly "pointless". It may be undesirable for a number of reasons, but pointless is not one of them.
To be clear, I'm not arguing for argument's sake. I truly believe that that the original idea has enough merit to at least try. That's not to say the outcome will be as hoped, but that doesn't mean we won't learn something in the doing. Is that not why we try things? To learn?