Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 8207643" data-attributes="member: 177">Eventually, yes.&nbsp; There are other places to look for life, after all.&nbsp; Once we have sufficient evidence (or lack of evidence), we will look elsewhere.&nbsp; Mind you, we are nowhere near what we'd call sufficient evidence, because our ability to do experiments and explore is so limited at such remove.So, the Wright Brothers were engineers, not scientists.&nbsp; The scientific principle upon which flight is based was discovered by Bernoulli back in 1738.&nbsp; However, that principle was not discovered in the context of trying to fly - Bernoulli was working in hydrodynamics.&nbsp; It just happens to be that air is also a fluid, and so Sir George Cayley could apply that principle when developing the airfoil generations later in 1810.&nbsp; The Wright Brothers added some structural engineering and improved control systems in 1900.And this is how science typically goes.&nbsp; The principle or information you find at one time is later (often much later) used in unrelated applications by other people.&nbsp; This is the value of research for the sake of research - you cannot predict what science bits will be needed a decade or a century in the future.&nbsp; So, trying to limit people to targeted pursuits with known outcomes will put a decided drag on advancement.You do realize that doing this systematically was some of the founding work of chemistry, right?&nbsp; And that writ very large and with very complicated mathematics, this is the high-energy physics of colliders, which can be characterized as trying to figure out how a mechanical watch works by throwing it at a brick wall really hard, and watching the pieces fly out.My doctoral thesis was effectively about smashing watches against walls. Your &quot;practical side&quot; is apparently uninformed about how well these things pay off over time.&nbsp; Your entire technological world is based on what was, at its time, like rednecks throwing things into a fire to see what would happen.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Umbran, post: 8207643, member: 177"] Eventually, yes. There are other places to look for life, after all. Once we have sufficient evidence (or lack of evidence), we will look elsewhere. Mind you, we are nowhere near what we'd call sufficient evidence, because our ability to do experiments and explore is so limited at such remove. So, the Wright Brothers were engineers, not scientists. The scientific principle upon which flight is based was discovered by Bernoulli back in 1738. However, that principle was not discovered in the context of trying to fly - Bernoulli was working in hydrodynamics. It just happens to be that air is also a fluid, and so Sir George Cayley could apply that principle when developing the airfoil generations later in 1810. The Wright Brothers added some structural engineering and improved control systems in 1900. And this is how science typically goes. The principle or information you find at one time is later (often much later) used in unrelated applications by other people. This is the value of research for the sake of research - you cannot predict what science bits will be needed a decade or a century in the future. So, trying to limit people to targeted pursuits with known outcomes will put a decided drag on advancement. You do realize that doing this [I]systematically[/I] was some of the founding work of chemistry, right? And that writ very large and with very complicated mathematics, this is the high-energy physics of colliders, which can be characterized as trying to figure out how a mechanical watch works by throwing it at a brick wall really hard, and watching the pieces fly out. My doctoral thesis was effectively about smashing watches against walls. Your "practical side" is apparently uninformed about how well these things pay off over time. Your entire technological world is based on what was, at its time, like rednecks throwing things into a fire to see what would happen. [/QUOTE]

Verification