How come when something is invented or an achievement is made, every other human seems to be able to get amazing at it super quick. Reusable rockets were impossible, you’d die if you run 100 miles, etc.
In: Technology
Well, oftentimes more than one person is working on the same thing at once. History has lots of examples of two or more people all coming to similar discoveries around the same time – the Germans and Americans were both developing atomic bombs simultaneously for example – and now that we’re in the age of global communication, where the ability to communicate with people around the world only improves access to the incremental knowledge necessary to come up with these techniques.
There’s also reverse-engineering. If the thing you’re inventing requires a eureka moment, then you can often get that moment by deconstructing what someone else has built, and seeing how they approached the bit you got stuck on.
There’s confirmation bias to take into account here too though. For every example where one person did something and then everyone else also did it shortly after, there’s an example where one person did something and everyone else is still stuck trying to figure out how to do it for ages. Nukes are also a good example here. Most countries aren’t even trying to make them, and those that are (North Korea) have taken a long time to do it.
Those things were clearly not impossible and we just lacked a deep understanding of what it takes to achieve it. You won’t hear rocket engineer today say that an space elevator is impossible but it’s not to weird to expect a normal engineer from 100 years ago say it is, he just lacked the knowledge. But when you have someone who is an actual educated expert on something like a physicist say that faster than light travel is impossible it’s not and random guess but an statement that comes from having the knowledge.
The strongest barrier to achievement is mental. Once somebody else has achieved something, suddenly that thing becomes possible
Well once one person did it we know how. We can replicate their technique and improve on it.
Thats what made humans so succesfull. We can learn from others and are therefore not limited to relearning everything from scratch again.
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