Why is the possibility of flight and the basic mechanism of “pushing air downward” supposed to be so difficult, either conceptually or as a matter of engineering, that we couldn’t have achieved it without the concrete example of birds and insects?
Because you need evidence to raise a hypothesis (like “heavier-than-air flight”) to consideration, and also social proof / funding to get people to take the ideas seriously. In hindsight the concept is obvious to you, as are the other clues by which other people could obviously have noticed the possibility of flight. That’s not how it feels to be in their place, though, without birds existing to constantly remind them of that possibility.
Out of curiosity, where do you think people got the idea of going to the moon from? By your logic, since we never saw any animal go to the moon, how to do so shouldn’t have been obvious to us and it should have been extremely difficult to secure funding for such a project, no?
I’m not saying that flight wouldn’t have happened at all without birds to look to. I’m saying that I think it would have taken somewhat longer, measured in years—decades.
I think this is plausible, especially if you make the range of “somewhat longer” so big that it encompasses more than an order of magnitude of time, as in years—decades. It’s still not obvious to me, though.
Because you need evidence to raise a hypothesis (like “heavier-than-air flight”) to consideration, and also social proof / funding to get people to take the ideas seriously. In hindsight the concept is obvious to you, as are the other clues by which other people could obviously have noticed the possibility of flight. That’s not how it feels to be in their place, though, without birds existing to constantly remind them of that possibility.
Out of curiosity, where do you think people got the idea of going to the moon from? By your logic, since we never saw any animal go to the moon, how to do so shouldn’t have been obvious to us and it should have been extremely difficult to secure funding for such a project, no?
I’m not saying that flight wouldn’t have happened at all without birds to look to. I’m saying that I think it would have taken somewhat longer, measured in years—decades.
I think this is plausible, especially if you make the range of “somewhat longer” so big that it encompasses more than an order of magnitude of time, as in years—decades. It’s still not obvious to me, though.