Monsterleg said:
So your saying that anytime anyone ever has an idea they should never tell anyone about it so they never set any long term goals in any field and the limitations are never realized and discussed.
Not at all, I was specifically saying the opposite of this.
Monsterleg said:
And if they don't have the correct qualifications or skill set and can't even overcome the first hurdle by them self then... I guess the idea might as well have never occurred.
Nope. What I was saying is that it's perfectly fine to have some ideas but it is pointless without acknowledging or raising the point of the technological hurdles.
Monsterleg said:
It's actually more likely that someone without a master's in physics will come up with a wonderful idea because they don't have all these entrenched concepts of what is and is not possible from years of memorizing and spitting out exactly what teachers want us to say, most of us convincing ourselves that all the popularly accepted theories are laws.
Ridiculous. Without the proper training your ideas will be inherently simple, not thought out and ultimately unworkable. The rest of your writing about master's degrees and education is drivel, proper education in science is not just spitting out answers.
Monsterleg said:
Ideas, especially fantastical ones, are the foundation for any kind of progress. If you look at history you yourself can see patterns. Scientists ridiculed the idea of humans flying. Many people over the years tried to disprove them and failed. Yet the idea remained out there because someone proposed it without knowing exactly how to do it and someone finally made that idea a reality. If no one ever spoke of that idea because no one knew exactly how that would work then we would not have planes and everything resulting from that including the space program and the huge boon of technology off the 1960s space race. Actually let's just go back to being cavemen who don't know how to do anything. I'm not going to tell you about how if you rub your hands together it feels warm and we should try rubbing other things together to see what happens because frankly I don't know exactly how it works.
For a start it is a fallacy that even if scientists ridiculed in the past and were wrong that it is wrong to always point out the flaws. Secondly the
vast majority of knowledge and technology has been discovered and devised by scientists. You have a naive view that scientists occupy some clichéd ivory tower of dogma. You are also completely missing my point again. I have not said anything against coming up with ideas and proposing them, I was suggesting that discussion has to revolve around the exploration of the technological hurdles involved rather than a discussion of the ramifications of the technology.
Monsterleg said:
Basically your inherent idea of having to prove something before you even propose it being discussed is pretty much a paradox... Unless of course your some kind of science god and then you wouldn't need to propose it being discussed. I don't know if you realized but by responding to me you proposed the unfounded unestablished idea that in order for something to be discussed it must be established therefore your point is null and void merely by the fact that you posted that. AND even if you were right your response was discussing my unfounded and unestablished idea which apparently according to you shouldn't be discussed so by using our superior math skills you see your post does not equal what it would need to in order to be true therefore it is not a correct answer.
Rubbish, I have suggested nothing of the sort. Here is a very simple example for you;
I was opposing;
"Here is blue sky idea X. If we had blue sky idea we could do A, B, C, D, E..."
And encouraging;
"Here is blue sky idea X. I think that A, B, C, D, E...are all important technological hurdles to overcome. Here are my ideas about that, what are yours? I think it's important because with blue sky idea we could do A, B, C, D, E..."
So put simply I am encouraging discussion of the hurdles over discussion of the ramifications because without the former the latter cannot be done properly.
Monsterleg said:
I want to make it clear I am in no way supporting the references to He3 mining, merely his idea of rather than establishing human colonies instead establishing robot outposts used as colonies or gas stations or trajectory adjusters etc. That is in no way a bad idea and sarcastically mocking him for posting it is just wrong. Next time you go to the future is there enough room in your time machine for me to come too? Little bit of sarcasm there because without overcoming the huge technical hurdles ideas like time machines are just interesting fantasies.
Your tone here is completely out of order. I have not mocked anyone. You have completely misunderstood everything I have said and have then acted in an arrogant way towards a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man" of what I have said.
Our fathers and grandfathers said the same thing in the 1940's, but every time we get a little closer we find another very complex unanticipated collective phenomenon that makes it more difficult than we thought. I think our great great grandchildren would agree that fusion almost certainly will not play a significant role in the future of power generation, instead we will refine other, more elegant approaches.
