Happy New Year. What man has done, man may aspire to.

View 707 Saturday, December 31, 2011

HAPPY NEW YEAR

We’re just back (early) from Larry Niven’s New Year party.

I had some good conversations. Most of my thoughts lately are on the latest novel, and in particular, is there any way that the United States can be saved? In a sense it’s a fairy tale because we postulate a sufficient threat to us all to justify some really drastic measures.

Steve Jobs famously said that he did not build Apple Computers in the United States because there were not enough available and affordable quality control engineers and skilled technicians whom he had faith in to produce the quality products he demanded. He trusted Singapore and the Orient more.

There are many grains of truth in that. Still, in 1940 – 1945, with a population of 140 million, half the work force conscripted into the armed services thus requiring building a new work force from women, apprentices, new graduates, and people called out of retirement, we produces a Liberty ship a day, thousands of B-17’s and other heavy bombers, clouds of fighters, and enough tanks to give numeric superiority over the best the Germans could produce. Once, told that the German Panther was ten times better than the US Sherman, we said that the solution to that was simple. We would build 11 Shermans for every Panther. We pretty well did that.

We built the Empire State Building during the Depression in one year. We built Hoover Dam during the depression in 3 years. We built the P-51 from drawing board design to actual combat deployment in 105 days. We built clouds of P-47 close support aircraft. We build a mechanized army and the ships to take it to Europe. All that without computers, without robots, without Interstate highways, with a population of 140 million, beginning with an economy enthralled in the Great Depression.

And we educated a work force fully capable of doing that. We turned out a generation that could read.

If we could do all that then, can we not do it now? What man has done, cannot man aspire to? Suppose we were given the chance? You have the power, what will you do?

That’s our next book. We’re working on it. Do we live in a true Dark Age in which we have forgotten what we can do? Many think so. When I mention Jaime Escalante and what he did, most scratch their heads unable to remember who he was. Yet what man has done man can aspire to.

Those thought engulf me.

Suggestions welcome.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Digging through the archives I found this: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/hammer.html which turned out to be interesting. I also found this.

this http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7199/full/4531184a.html