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Notes -
I had said:
Sure, I'd even agree to "a lot more". But "power" isn't necessarily the thing that we care about in rocketry. Nor are you seriously engaging with the exponential.
My brother in Christ, we are not disagreeing; you're just not engaging with the exponential. If we had an order of magnitude or two increase, that could totally transform our spaceflight scene. The moon could be routine. Mars could be like going on holiday. Even further could be an expedition. But the exponential is still the exponential, and in context of the insanity of exponentials and the universe, mere orders of magnitude only push back the hard stop a "little".
You're just bringing this exponential out of nowhere, how does it add anything to what I'm saying?
"In the big picture, everything we do on Earth doesn't matter" is true but it's a pointless thing to say. Things on Earth matter to us.
"Nazi Germany didn't conquer all the way to Ceres, so they're not a threat"
"Climate change isn't going to boil the oceans, so who cares"
"Covid isn't going to turn you into a rage monster from Resident Evil so it's a nothingburger"
Statements by the utterly deranged! But if you complicate it out so that 'biology is really complicated, the immune system is pretty good, epidemics often fizzle out and it's orders of magnitude from causing a zombie apocalypse' it suddenly sounds reasonable even when the realistic stance of the problem looks completely different.
It is not out of nowhere. It's the analogy you selected. It's literally a law of the universe. It's fundamentally just conservation of momentum. It's not some "utterly deranged" statement like your current examples, which are untethered from any mathematical reality of scaling. It's the actual fundamental law of how scaling works for the analogy you selected. In your analogy, they might not have realized where they were on the exponential at the time that they were making great gains; they might not have quite realized how far along they would be able to go before running into this fundamentally exponential scaling curve. But that was the underlying reality of the world.
I mean, how do you think this is supposed to go? "Let's use the analogy of flight, but it's absolutely forbidden to notice that there is a scaling law there, because that would be 'out of nowhere'"?
That there is a hard scaling limit is true but it's not remotely relevant to my point since the difference between a bird and a nuclear rocket is so vast as to make any comparison but the most galaxy-brained 'it's all specks of dust from 50,000,000 light years' ridiculous. This should be immediately apparent!
That there is a scaling limit is secondary to where the limit actually is. There is no reason to think we are anywhere near the scaling limit. In rocketry we are limited by our level of investment and our unwillingness to use advanced propulsion, not by physics.
Your whole framing is ridiculous:
In context, underwhelming because it isn't galactic scale? And by the way, it clearly is galactic scale in a fairly reasonable timespan. Galactic scale in space, why not give it a couple hundred thousand years? A million years is peanuts in astronomical time, in the movements of galaxies or the evolution of life. You're taking an analogy I selected, not understanding it and then producing mixed contexts while complaining about my single, relevant, assumed context of 'things that matter on Earth to real human beings' as opposed to the 'insanity of exponentials and the universe' which doesn't matter to anyone.
I mean, we're talking about the possibility of a super intelligence that is going to tile the universe with paperclips, and you want to say that your own analogy is too galaxy-brained? Ok, buddy.
Correct. There was a scaling limit back when the Wright brothers first took to the air. It was still there when we went to the moon. At what point did we realize what the scaling limits actually looked like?
Right now, there's not really that much reason to think that we're not, either. We have basically no theory here yet. No idea whether the scaling is truly exponential or something else or where we might be on the curve.
If you ignore the exponential that comes from physics, then sure.
No. It is "certainly not" that much more if we're thinking galactic scale. It's just underwhelming in general, in context of the exponential of the rocket equation. You can just look at the numbers and say, "Yeah, that's more, but it's not all that much more."
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