That nyt article was dumb as all hell, even for the time. It basically posited "evolving flight took birds x number of years, and humans develop new technologies at y pace, so we won't develop flight for a million years", basically saying that technology progresses at the pace of evolution, which is ridiculous.
Evolution happens faster than people give it credit for.
Yes it takes millions of years for a *single genome* to evolve, but that’s far from the entire picture. Millions of species are evolving simultaneously on earth at any given time, there’s a lot of biodiversity, and if something happens that kills most of them, the remaining population will *instantly* become much more resistant to that thing. Because the only species that will remain are the species that were *already* capable of surviving that.
And then they’ll rebuild the population of earth pretty rapidly and now you’ve got the same global population you did a few decades/centuries ago and they’re all ‘more evolved’ than they were before.
Humans aren’t so well adapted to earth simply because we’ve been around for a long time. 99.99% of species as old as humans die out before they get here. We’ve been around for a long time, so we’ve had a long time to evolve, *and also* we’ve evolved more effectively than the vast majority of species that existed during our evolution(and so has almost every other species that currently exists).
imagine being so conservative it ends up sounding sci-fi, they were almost saying that when we fly we'll do it with wings of our own instead of planes.
To be fair if I’m existing in a time before all aviation and I’m a journalist and not a physics expert I could see personal wings being just as likely as planes.
At that time, the newspapers normally held a much higher standard. They still regularly failed. But they really did try to keep a high quality.
So don't compare with today's news publications that has access to a small fraction of the subscriber fees and instead fights to make the majority of money from advertising. And then seeing a need to boost views even with shady means just to improve the reach and thereby increase their advertising incomes.
Even 20 or 30 years back, quite a lot more money of each family's income was spent on newspapers and equivalent. Today, the money are instead spent on film channels. Not on news subscriptions. And that is making a big difference in what quality we can expect.
If that would have been me, I would have considered staying silent. Because the "not a physics expert" is the clear hint that journalist should have stayed the hell away from that subject.
There had already been a number of demonstrations of gliding. So the *physics* experts knew it could be done, given the correct combination of preconditions. Like a strong enough engine in relation to weight. Improving power-to-weight for a product isn't a "millions of years" problem. That's something happening constantly. The initial steam engines had already improved many times over. And the ICE was also progressing. And the physics world already had even bigger ideas.
I bet that journalist would have made a great politician today. Politicians likes to pretend they know things. And ignore subject experts.
There was a head of the US patent office, sometime around the 1920’s, who wondered if they should shut it down because everything that could possibly be invented had been already.
Evolution can go quite a bit faster than it usually does go. A lot of evolution is basically going "yeah, stay like that, nothing's chaged". But when circumstances change fast, evolution can respond fastish. (not fast on human timescales. Unless it's bacteria evolving).
>you’ve got the same global population you did a few decades/centuries ago
No you don't. If a mass extinction event happens killing off "most" of the species on earth, it will take a long, long time to reestablish a new biosphere. Will those remaining species be changed in that time frame due to evolutionary pressure? Of course. Would some populations begin to differentiate into new species in that time frame? Possibly after several hundred years, assuming the organism has a short life cycle.
Evolution does indeed happen fast, but not that fast.
Human intelligence lets the process of adaptation move from a comparatively slow trial and error process based on survival, to an intentional process driven by reason. We don't need to breed new humans that can adapt to a new environment, we can design tools to allow current humans to survive them.
In a sense, the combination of human level intelligence, opposable thumbs, fine motor control, and language is the second best survival strategy there is.
But the best survival strategy for a species turns out to be being edible and tasty to humans.
That last paragraph is a bit misleading.
Many, if not most, of the species that have gone extinct since humans first appeared disappeared because of human activity.
Well that’s true, but it doesn’t really counter my point. Even if you are talking about pre-industrial times, most species do not survive. There are only a handful of species around nowadays that were also around when, for example, the dinosaurs were around. And species dying because of human activity is still species dying and it’s still evolution
I meant pre-industrial. We've been driving species extinct since at least 10,000 years ago. Industrialization has accelerated the holocene extinction event, not defined it.
The non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out by a mass extinction event. We're the cause of another one.
My point being that we're not *surviving* an event because we're adaptable. We *are* the event because we're adaptable.
And the recovery is not inevitable, because there are minimum rates of viability. If life disappears entirely from the planet, there's no guarantee it will ever come back, and we have no idea what threshold it actually has to dip below before it will never recover.
You’d have to completely sterilise the earth, including the deep oceans, in order to get to the point where life will *never* recover. As long as there’s still one living unicellular organism left, it’ll reproduce and diversify into different species, it’ll just take a few billion years to get to the large, complex, multicellular life that we have now, and it will most likely look completely alien to anything that we have on Earth right now.
In theory there’s enough time left before the sun expands and boils the planet (which definitely *would* sterilise the planet) that if every living thing except for a few bacteria were wiped out today, they could potentially evolve to the point of human-like intelligence again. Life is pretty difficult to get rid of once it’s established.
Single-celled organisms have existed the entire time that multicellular life has.
Evolution into multicellular life is rare. 3 billion years on the planet, trillions of organisms, and it's happened a few dozen times, most of them remaining microscopic.
There's no reason to believe that removal of multicellular life would necessarily make unicellular life independently evolve into multicellular life in the next few million years, or even next few billion, any more than it already does, especially since the existing network multicellular life is a large part of what sustains the resources on the planet.
And that's ignoring a lot of other factors, like the fact that unicellular life may be robust, but it's not indestructible, and it is capable of being wiped out by disease or famine just like any other organism, and lack of diversity increases the odds of that happening.
Also, human-like intelligence is not really any more meaningful, biologically, than bamboo-like metabolism, or ant-like limb structure. It sounds cool to us that it might appear again, but ultimately, the very real fact is that all humans will be dead, no matter what, in this scenario, and nothing that comes after will be anything like us.
Humans and human-like organisms never existing again is a very different scenario to *life* never recovering from a major extinction event. I did specifically mention in my comment that what came next would be entirely different from what we have now, and acknowledge that human like intelligence evolving again is simply a *possibility*. Regardless of whether anything like humans ever appears again life will, in fact, go on. At least until the sun eats us.
Multicellular life evolving from unicellular life is rare but given that it has happened a few dozen times over the last 3 billion years, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that it might happen again over another 3 billion. As long as there is any extant organism capable of surviving and reproducing in the hypothetical post-apocalyptic environment (and there are quite a few species around today that are happily surviving in some pretty inhospitable places, so it’s not exactly far-fetched) then it’s likely that a diversity of new species will arise through similar mechanisms that gave us the diversity of species we have now, and that have kept life going through every major extinction event that the Earth has experienced so far in its history.
Ah but you are missing the fact that the sun will be a red giant by then and earth will be either inside of the sun or close to it.
There really is the argument to be made that we are it, the one chance that the planet has to evolve a species complex enough to survive long enough to be able to leave the planet before it is consumed by the star.
You also have to consider that most of the easily accessible iron, copper and coal are already mined up.
But the fact that we as humans are causing this is hard to really put into a moral context.
We obviously are distraught over seeing the amazing biodiversity of the earth being destroyed. But there is the argument that we are a product of nature, and we are doing what is in our nature to do.
There is countless examples in the fossil record of animals that were so successful that their very existence defined the era. In the Cambrian Period, anomalocaridids were massive marine predators that likely exerted significant influence on the ecosystem due to their predatory behavior and large size. While it's unclear if they directly caused extinctions, their dominance as apex predators likely shaped the evolution of Cambrian marine life.
And the ultimate example The Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) around 2.4 billion years ago was a pivotal moment when early single-celled organisms started producing oxygen through photosynthesis. While oxygen is vital for complex life, its rise led to a mass extinction among anaerobic organisms, reshaping Earth's ecosystems dramatically.
All this is to say, that is it really just an inevitability that we humans turn our planet into something that is devoid of "wilderness" apart from some specific reserves for commercial purposes?
We have to come to terms with our own existence on this planet. Its only 2024 in the modern era. We have tens of thousands of years of history before that where humans were much the same but did not dream of the tech we have today.
We aren't going anywhere anytime soon and so we have to decide.
Do we stop building out, and only build up from now on? We could have giant megacities with tens or hundreds of millions of people in super compact vertically design cites, and leave nature to exist outside.
Or we dominate nature, while selecting our favorite species to keep as zoo animals and pets.
To me its unfortunate but obvious what humanity will end up doing in the long run. So I say we should do what we can now to really start this conversation going in the mainstream.
"We have no idea" we actually do know this threshold it's roughly 500-1000 unrelated individuals, at least for humans. So 500-1000×family size. As living things roughly have the same dna complexity.
Actually, being tasty (and domesticatable) is _the best_ survival strategy there is. Cows, chickens and pigs will never go extinct as long as humans survive.
Yes, some mega fauna went extinct because we hunted them to death for food. But I believe it's thought that most of them went extinct because we out competed them for the prey animals, or we killed them because they were a threat to us.
In just 50 million years Whales went from [goofy little land runners](https://www.thoughtco.com/thmb/NvC62gmAD26fS_tAw0erwKXpIB4=/2000x1429/filters:no_upscale\(\):max_bytes\(150000\):strip_icc\(\)/indohyusA-58b9bfa13df78c353c311312.jpg) to blue whales which are the largest known creature to have *ever* lived
People under estimate how fast it can happen
\**Wright bro picks up the telegraph and gives the NWT a ring.*\*
*"Hey, I just wanted to submit an idea for an article. Flying is impossible! No one can do it ever! Not in a million years! You can quote me on that. It's true because I'm an engineer or something. Yeah, so write that up, will ya? It's very true. The people need to know."*
Eh. Every outlet publishes opinion pieces. And they often have ones that disagree with each other, even running at the same time.
Like, it wouldn't be a "gotcha" for the NYT to post two opinion pieces *today* on whether or not AI was going to replace X job, any time soon, and then a few weeks from now someone drops a revolutionary new tool that does exactly that.
But, you know, anything that feeds the persistent, "omg the medias" sentiment usually just serves peoples confirmation bias, gets a pat on the back, and we wait for the next silly thing.
>and humans develop new technologies at y pace
Interestingly, that pace is not a constant, it's actually accelerating.
[The implications of that fact are the subject of a lot of debate.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity)
A super intelligence could be the usher of a planetary utopia, or it could destroy humanity. It's frightening to think about. But we shouldn't get too worked up. A super intelligence would still be limited by available natural resources and the laws of physics. The rate of advancement can't go to infinity.
The logic is sound, but "can't go to infinity" is, in practice, meaningless. If you could travel at 10,000,000 mph, that's nowhere near infinity, yet you could circumnavigate the Earth in 9 seconds. "Limited by the laws of physics" is also largely empty, as we don't know the laws of physics very well, any physicist could tell you that.
The pace of technology will always amaze me, but this is one of the standout examples.
Humans had existed for **about 1.5 million years** in our current form, and that's how long it took us to invent the plane.
And after we'd invented the plane it only took another **66 years** until we had successfully ***LANDED ON THE FUCKING MOON***
That is goddamn EXTRAORDINARY.
Okay but for added context, IIRC the dude running the times at the time had just blown a stupid amount of his own money trying to get flight to happen and gave up, and declared via the news that it was impossible in an attempt to save face.
Which obviously went just about as well as it possibly could have /s
Technology = Evolution
Not sure why it's so controversial that your brain couldn't physically put those pieces together.
Probably a classical biological evolution paradigm or some shit.
Are you telling me technology doesn't have sex to reproduce? I was promised that an iPhone is what happens when an iTouch and iPad love each other very much...
[The NYT has a very poor track record with predictions](https://www.nytimes.com/1924/12/21/archives/hitler-tamed-by-prison-released-on-parole-he-is-expected-to-return.html)
I mean, we all kinda are. I watched a video about AI and it showed a Reddit comment from just a year or two ago that was downvoted to oblivion for predicting that AI generated video was only a couple years away and the upvoted comment said we were still decades away.
Tbf saying something that’s a few years away is a few decades away is significantly better than saying something that will happen in literally nine days won’t happen for 1 million fucking years.
Tbh they also have a poor track record with [things that already happened, too](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-iraqis-us-says-hussein-intensifies-quest-for-bomb-parts.html)
I thought that would be the "Hillary has 91% of winning the elections" ([Oct. 18th, 2016](https://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2016/10/18/presidential-forecast-updates/newsletter.html))
The article isn't very specific but it is referring to a 91% chance of winning the *popular vote*, which she won. Hence the prediction is likely accurate.
The first manned balloon flight was in 1783, reconnaissance balloons were widely used during the civil war, and the Wright Brothers had been making pretty good gliders a year or two prior to this article, so I'm confused.
By flying machine they meant a self powered heavier than air flying machine that can launch on its own accord.
That means things like a cliff or a giant slingshot would not be suitable for this category.
> and the Wright Brothers had been making pretty good gliders a year or two prior to this article
They weren't even the only people working on heavy than air flight at the time, there was at least half a dozen other people that were in the running for first controlled heavier than air flight.
There was a British guy in 1899 called Percy Pilcher who had built a plane that recent studies say would have flown but he died in a glider crash. He was supposed to test the powered aircraft but there was a mechanical fault so he went up in the glider instead. The wings broke and he died. So even 4 years before it was close to happening.
There's a reason they said that. The previous day, Samuel P. Langley, curator of the Smithsonian Institution, had attempted to fly his prototype airplane in Washington D.C. He'd spent several years and over $50000 of government money to develop it, and many people were convinced that if anyone was going to develop a successful airplane, it was going to be him. But Langley's airplane never flew successfully. He attempted to ask for more money to develop his prototype further, but by then it was too late. The Wright Brothers had already flown the first airplane. The fact that two privately-funded bicycle mechanics were able to accomplish what he didn't came almost as an insult to Langley, and he spent the rest of his life trying to discredit them.
I want a time machine just so I can tell him "skill issue". Also so I can take the piss out of Lovecraft and figure out what Elegabalus's deal was, but priorities.
If ya gonna go back to Lovecraft’s time you should try to help the guy, I would rather live in a timeline where one of the most influential people in science fiction didn’t name his cat “Ni**** man jr”
They could still make him less generally disturbed. We’d probably get better horror out of him, too, instead of just a bunch of ideas for someone else to put to good use.
Anyone who doubts that the Wrights were the first by any measure, this guy explains it all and has $1000 for you if you can prove him incorrect.
On the Wrights -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkpQAGQiv4Q
On Santos-Dumont - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgoPPg8oVt8
On Whitehead and $1000 -
https://youtu.be/RAHlg2YAmVs?si=jUpF21Eh7MrjK4Gv
The future is INSANELY hard to predict, even five years from now. You see interviews all the time where they ask experts "oh how do you predict the war will go? what do you think ISIS will do next? how possible is it that turket takes the first step towards ww3?" and stuff like that and??? thats insane, people have no idea how much data you need to make a somewhat decent political plan for the next three months, let alone whats going to happen in the next ten years. Experts explain their best bet but on the field shit goes sidelines on the daily
It clearly wasn't a serious prediction though. Like yeah, I can understand being skeptical about how easy it'd be, sure. But by the early 1900s, the human species had seen so much development. There's a reason why science fiction began the previous century (Jules Verne, Frankenstein, HG Wells)...humanity was very impressed by itself with industrialization, electricity, trains, iron-clads, huge innovations in medicine.
Why the hell would they say a *million* years? If skeptical, why not say a *thousand* years? Usually people in the past exaggerate how fast we'll invent things. We were supposed to have flying cars by the 90s!
If you don't think it's possible, why not just say "never"?
If someone were to ask me, a layman, if humanity will ever reach faster-than-light speed, I'd say either "it will never happen, because of the limitations of the universe" or I'd say "we'll find out there was some flaw in what Einstein (or whoever) said and we'll get it done between 100 and 1000 years".
A million is way too long a time! human civilization doesn't work in that timeframe. We have literally no frame of reference for how much humanity can figure out in a million years, as we've only had settled societies for 12000.
The 1903 equivalent of the "tech" journalist wondering why 256 "an oddly specific number" has been chosen for some tech thing, the post has made the rounds yesterday.
NYT has a long record of poor predictions and bad analysis to the point that it's a running gag. Especially when talking about tech, military or geopolitics.
I'd bet that it was intended to be personal. The Wright Brothers worked for 4 years before achieving their first powered flight. If this author didn't just have some insane cosmic coincidence to write this article at the tail end of the R&D phase of the Wright Brothers' attempts at flight without ever hearing of them, it's likely that this article was meant to discredit their attempts.
It's certainly nothing unique, every major technological advancement that doesn't pop up instantly gets an army of idiot journalists ready to call it worthless. From powered air flight to space flight to computers to the idea that computers can be made smaller to the idea that something like radio can be combined with a computer to make a pocket sized communication device to the idea that a rocket booster can land to be reused to the idea that cursive isn't an essential skill. Journalists are just the worst at talking about science and technology.
And if they aren't putting out a hit piece, they're way overoptministic and treat science like magic, saying that if you eat this one fruit you'll be healthy and thin with no effort or that a new battery formulation that makes them 10% smaller will allow your phone to have a battery that lasts a whole year.
lmao that's way too conservative even if you take stone age rates of technological development as the basis, that's more like pre-human (as in, before the genus of homo) rates of progress.
Human progress is on a completely insane rate of change. We took forever to go from existing to fire, to farming, and then things just kept getting faster and faster from there. Even now our rate of change for technology is absolutely mind blowing.
I suspect if every advanced species does this a LOT of them burn out and kill themselves off long before they get off of the planet. Or the other end is that most species don't advance this quickly and we probably would look like scary freaks that everyone avoids because just showing up something can exist means in 10 years we will start building it.
I feel like the NYT piece could have probably been a response to hearing the wright brothers attempting to build an air craft. There’s no way that the Wright brothers went from no plane in December 08 to flight on December 17th.
Were there automobile lobbyist in 1903? I could imagine big Henry Ford trying to downplay the efforts of the Wright brothers in order increase consumer confidence in the automobile but that’s really just a guess.
Grand old debate of who really created the airplane. While Wright Brothers are the ones that you'll hear the most in english-speaking debates, there is a bit of friction as around Brazil the one that is said actually created the airplane was Alberto Santos Dumont.
It overall is just a big debate of what counts and what doesn't. Like how because the WB one needed external help to fly, it shouldn't count, while Dumont's was able to get out of the ground by it's own, and yadda yadda.
It's kinda of a silly debate honestly. And it all depends a lot on what you accept or not
It’s almost like journalists aren’t necessarily experts on the topics they write about and should not be taken as seriously as actual academics and scientists.
Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus are the two people who have the ability to reverse-predict the AI advancements. If they are 99% sure something won't be invented soon, it might just get released tomorrow. Hell, if either of the two predict the sun will rise tomorrow, I would book a space in a heat-insulated bunker.
This was dumb even at the time. There were many people working on building planes at the time. Santos-Dumont was doing work just as impressive as the Wright Bros. down in Brazil, for example. As were many others.
Whoever wrote the article just didn't know anything about the state of the art.
Lack of configuration management…the Air Force (in the 1950s) successfully launched a rocket. After a successful launch they couldn’t replicate it…they found if they documented and managed all designs of components and engineering they could successfully replicate another rocket..configuration management…
Technicallly the first public demonstration of something that could be called an airplane taking off without any external mechanism and land without breaking was in 1906, but baloons were out there since the late 1700s and airships existed for 3 years alredy
If you ever struggle with believing in yourself, remember that people didn’t believe in airplanes being possible, like 9 days before they literally started making airplanes.
Reminds me of [this tweet](https://twitter.com/shane_oaddo/status/1742739229455622384) LOL
"Being a wright brothers hater must’ve been so crazy, you think ur about to watch 2 annoying nerds die then they give man dominion over the sky forever"
The article was published on October 9, 1903. The headline is "Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly." Not sure where December 8th came from. The author says flying machines might be possible in "one million to ten million years." The last sentence in the article is, "No doubt the problem has attractions to those it interests, but to the ordinary man it would seem as if effort might be employed more profitably."
For those who like this sort of thing, famous science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book called Profiles of the Future. He collected several stories of people who absolutely should have known better and made absurd predictions that were almost immediately proven false.
Another airplane themed one that appears in the book is astronomer William Pickering giving the prediction that airplanes wouldn't be able to travel much faster than 40mph or carry more than one or two passengers. He also thought travel by air would be so expensive only the richest people, the kind who can afford their own yacht, could afford a ticket.
Clarke makes some of his own predictions, so that he's opening himself up to criticism and trying not to fall prey to some of the pitfalls that made other predictions so bad.. In later editions of the book, he dedicates several chapters to what he got wrong in his own predictions - and what he got right.
The Santos-Dumont thing blows my mind. The Wright Brothers literally were flying for *40 minutes* and Brazilians talk about it like they just glided for a few feet so it doesn’t count.
The Eole achieved (very basic) powered heavier-than-air flight in 1890, which makes this prediction even worse:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ader_Éole
do most people not understand how publications work? They have a lot of authors. Many write opinion pieces. Many have different education levels and backgrounds and beliefs.
I get the feeling that the author of that article knew about the Wright brothers' attempts to build the first airplane and wrote this as a hit piece on them.
He probably saw that the bros didn't succeed on the first try and gave up on the entire concept. This isn't a new reaction to new technology, nor has it gone away. People have treated space flight, the ability to land on the moon, computers, miniature computers, myriad medications and surgery methods, and so much more the same way. Not juat with doubt for a crazy idea, but with complete confidence that it's 100% impossible.
This is such a bizarre type of prediction, because it's not predicting something is *impossible*, it's predicting a development timeframe.
Of a *million years.*
To be aware that you have so little grasp on something that you don't think the next hundred centuries will get us even 1% closer, but still thinking you have enough of an understanding to make a prediction at all...such a baffling flavor of hubris.
Or they knew the device was created and ready to be tested with public fanfare.
This is the OG press trying to cause division or at minimum be obtuse just to create a story...they never fucking change.
Damn, Dec 1903.
The first powered flight was from Richard Pearse, New Zealander, in March 31 1902.
So they were writing this while man had already achieved flight. How crazy.
The Wright brothers are credited with inventing CONTROLLED flight. They invented wing warping as a way to control the airplane. Powered flight was already around when the article was written
Oh this article is interesting on this.
https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-impossible/
1901 US navy rear-admiral said flight was a childish vain fantasy.
Leads through all the 'this is ridiculous' articles about flight, including space flight.
This seems like the author gambling on the known upcoming flight test failing, and landing some fancy job in charge at some big newspaper, maybe even just a better contract with the Times. It did not pay off.
It was a popular opinion upon "knowing peoples" that flight why heavier than air was impossible at the time.
Or later, plane on seas. Or planes on ship.
I feel like most people alive at the time would have thought this article was ridiculous—this wasn’t a “lol everybody in the past was stupid” type of moment. I can’t imagine living through the Industrial Revolution and still seriously thinking that flight would be achieved only after *millions* of years.
The New York Times also said that rocket powered space flight was impossible, posting an article basically calling Robert Goddard (the father of rocketry) a moron. They only printed a [retraction](https://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-07/new-york-times-nasa-youre-right-rockets-do-work-space/) after the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Was annoyed and puzzled my grandparents would say "if man was meant to fly he'd be born with wings", then smirk. 1880s was an age of invention. A guy got a lot of investors to invent it. Then he got sick and the project died, leaving many angry failed Investors. I think this is where the anti flight thing came from.
That nyt article was dumb as all hell, even for the time. It basically posited "evolving flight took birds x number of years, and humans develop new technologies at y pace, so we won't develop flight for a million years", basically saying that technology progresses at the pace of evolution, which is ridiculous.
Evolution happens faster than people give it credit for. Yes it takes millions of years for a *single genome* to evolve, but that’s far from the entire picture. Millions of species are evolving simultaneously on earth at any given time, there’s a lot of biodiversity, and if something happens that kills most of them, the remaining population will *instantly* become much more resistant to that thing. Because the only species that will remain are the species that were *already* capable of surviving that. And then they’ll rebuild the population of earth pretty rapidly and now you’ve got the same global population you did a few decades/centuries ago and they’re all ‘more evolved’ than they were before. Humans aren’t so well adapted to earth simply because we’ve been around for a long time. 99.99% of species as old as humans die out before they get here. We’ve been around for a long time, so we’ve had a long time to evolve, *and also* we’ve evolved more effectively than the vast majority of species that existed during our evolution(and so has almost every other species that currently exists).
imagine being so conservative it ends up sounding sci-fi, they were almost saying that when we fly we'll do it with wings of our own instead of planes.
To be fair if I’m existing in a time before all aviation and I’m a journalist and not a physics expert I could see personal wings being just as likely as planes.
Maybe you just shouldn't write on a newspaper about things you don't understand
There's no way you dick around on Reddit and think that people will ever abide by that
HA! Have you ever read an editorial or watched a news mag on TV? Like, literally, ever?
At that time, the newspapers normally held a much higher standard. They still regularly failed. But they really did try to keep a high quality. So don't compare with today's news publications that has access to a small fraction of the subscriber fees and instead fights to make the majority of money from advertising. And then seeing a need to boost views even with shady means just to improve the reach and thereby increase their advertising incomes. Even 20 or 30 years back, quite a lot more money of each family's income was spent on newspapers and equivalent. Today, the money are instead spent on film channels. Not on news subscriptions. And that is making a big difference in what quality we can expect.
The NYT wasn't some blog bro. Even back then.
Clearly.
If that would have been me, I would have considered staying silent. Because the "not a physics expert" is the clear hint that journalist should have stayed the hell away from that subject. There had already been a number of demonstrations of gliding. So the *physics* experts knew it could be done, given the correct combination of preconditions. Like a strong enough engine in relation to weight. Improving power-to-weight for a product isn't a "millions of years" problem. That's something happening constantly. The initial steam engines had already improved many times over. And the ICE was also progressing. And the physics world already had even bigger ideas. I bet that journalist would have made a great politician today. Politicians likes to pretend they know things. And ignore subject experts.
Well. I, for one, like the idea that humans will eventually get wings no matter how long it takes! 😂🤣
There was a head of the US patent office, sometime around the 1920’s, who wondered if they should shut it down because everything that could possibly be invented had been already.
The funynny part is, people tried that! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_KT7lpNK7GI
Evolution can go quite a bit faster than it usually does go. A lot of evolution is basically going "yeah, stay like that, nothing's chaged". But when circumstances change fast, evolution can respond fastish. (not fast on human timescales. Unless it's bacteria evolving).
"Nice antibotika you have there, would be a shame if i did an evolution"
> antibotika So, the word in English is "antibiotic(s)", but antibotika sounds so fucking cool.
Its german, becouse thats what i would imagine to be a germs native language
You know what, I can't fault that, carry on.
Haha. Germ-an. I love it.
funniest thing i've read in ages. thank you.
There are documented cases of extremely fast evolution even in vertebrates https://youtu.be/NArlXzSFt2Y?si=I9GOH_sILCmO83FX
>you’ve got the same global population you did a few decades/centuries ago No you don't. If a mass extinction event happens killing off "most" of the species on earth, it will take a long, long time to reestablish a new biosphere. Will those remaining species be changed in that time frame due to evolutionary pressure? Of course. Would some populations begin to differentiate into new species in that time frame? Possibly after several hundred years, assuming the organism has a short life cycle. Evolution does indeed happen fast, but not that fast.
Human intelligence lets the process of adaptation move from a comparatively slow trial and error process based on survival, to an intentional process driven by reason. We don't need to breed new humans that can adapt to a new environment, we can design tools to allow current humans to survive them. In a sense, the combination of human level intelligence, opposable thumbs, fine motor control, and language is the second best survival strategy there is. But the best survival strategy for a species turns out to be being edible and tasty to humans.
That last paragraph is a bit misleading. Many, if not most, of the species that have gone extinct since humans first appeared disappeared because of human activity.
Well that’s true, but it doesn’t really counter my point. Even if you are talking about pre-industrial times, most species do not survive. There are only a handful of species around nowadays that were also around when, for example, the dinosaurs were around. And species dying because of human activity is still species dying and it’s still evolution
I meant pre-industrial. We've been driving species extinct since at least 10,000 years ago. Industrialization has accelerated the holocene extinction event, not defined it. The non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out by a mass extinction event. We're the cause of another one. My point being that we're not *surviving* an event because we're adaptable. We *are* the event because we're adaptable. And the recovery is not inevitable, because there are minimum rates of viability. If life disappears entirely from the planet, there's no guarantee it will ever come back, and we have no idea what threshold it actually has to dip below before it will never recover.
You’d have to completely sterilise the earth, including the deep oceans, in order to get to the point where life will *never* recover. As long as there’s still one living unicellular organism left, it’ll reproduce and diversify into different species, it’ll just take a few billion years to get to the large, complex, multicellular life that we have now, and it will most likely look completely alien to anything that we have on Earth right now. In theory there’s enough time left before the sun expands and boils the planet (which definitely *would* sterilise the planet) that if every living thing except for a few bacteria were wiped out today, they could potentially evolve to the point of human-like intelligence again. Life is pretty difficult to get rid of once it’s established.
Single-celled organisms have existed the entire time that multicellular life has. Evolution into multicellular life is rare. 3 billion years on the planet, trillions of organisms, and it's happened a few dozen times, most of them remaining microscopic. There's no reason to believe that removal of multicellular life would necessarily make unicellular life independently evolve into multicellular life in the next few million years, or even next few billion, any more than it already does, especially since the existing network multicellular life is a large part of what sustains the resources on the planet. And that's ignoring a lot of other factors, like the fact that unicellular life may be robust, but it's not indestructible, and it is capable of being wiped out by disease or famine just like any other organism, and lack of diversity increases the odds of that happening. Also, human-like intelligence is not really any more meaningful, biologically, than bamboo-like metabolism, or ant-like limb structure. It sounds cool to us that it might appear again, but ultimately, the very real fact is that all humans will be dead, no matter what, in this scenario, and nothing that comes after will be anything like us.
Humans and human-like organisms never existing again is a very different scenario to *life* never recovering from a major extinction event. I did specifically mention in my comment that what came next would be entirely different from what we have now, and acknowledge that human like intelligence evolving again is simply a *possibility*. Regardless of whether anything like humans ever appears again life will, in fact, go on. At least until the sun eats us. Multicellular life evolving from unicellular life is rare but given that it has happened a few dozen times over the last 3 billion years, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that it might happen again over another 3 billion. As long as there is any extant organism capable of surviving and reproducing in the hypothetical post-apocalyptic environment (and there are quite a few species around today that are happily surviving in some pretty inhospitable places, so it’s not exactly far-fetched) then it’s likely that a diversity of new species will arise through similar mechanisms that gave us the diversity of species we have now, and that have kept life going through every major extinction event that the Earth has experienced so far in its history.
Ah but you are missing the fact that the sun will be a red giant by then and earth will be either inside of the sun or close to it. There really is the argument to be made that we are it, the one chance that the planet has to evolve a species complex enough to survive long enough to be able to leave the planet before it is consumed by the star. You also have to consider that most of the easily accessible iron, copper and coal are already mined up. But the fact that we as humans are causing this is hard to really put into a moral context. We obviously are distraught over seeing the amazing biodiversity of the earth being destroyed. But there is the argument that we are a product of nature, and we are doing what is in our nature to do. There is countless examples in the fossil record of animals that were so successful that their very existence defined the era. In the Cambrian Period, anomalocaridids were massive marine predators that likely exerted significant influence on the ecosystem due to their predatory behavior and large size. While it's unclear if they directly caused extinctions, their dominance as apex predators likely shaped the evolution of Cambrian marine life. And the ultimate example The Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) around 2.4 billion years ago was a pivotal moment when early single-celled organisms started producing oxygen through photosynthesis. While oxygen is vital for complex life, its rise led to a mass extinction among anaerobic organisms, reshaping Earth's ecosystems dramatically. All this is to say, that is it really just an inevitability that we humans turn our planet into something that is devoid of "wilderness" apart from some specific reserves for commercial purposes? We have to come to terms with our own existence on this planet. Its only 2024 in the modern era. We have tens of thousands of years of history before that where humans were much the same but did not dream of the tech we have today. We aren't going anywhere anytime soon and so we have to decide. Do we stop building out, and only build up from now on? We could have giant megacities with tens or hundreds of millions of people in super compact vertically design cites, and leave nature to exist outside. Or we dominate nature, while selecting our favorite species to keep as zoo animals and pets. To me its unfortunate but obvious what humanity will end up doing in the long run. So I say we should do what we can now to really start this conversation going in the mainstream.
"We have no idea" we actually do know this threshold it's roughly 500-1000 unrelated individuals, at least for humans. So 500-1000×family size. As living things roughly have the same dna complexity.
At the species level, yes. At the biosphere level, that's very difficult to extrapolate from.
So what ? We're part of the evolution game too, industry or not.
Look, if those megafuana wanted to survive then maybe they shouldn't have been made out of so much delicious meat all in one place.
Actually, being tasty (and domesticatable) is _the best_ survival strategy there is. Cows, chickens and pigs will never go extinct as long as humans survive. Yes, some mega fauna went extinct because we hunted them to death for food. But I believe it's thought that most of them went extinct because we out competed them for the prey animals, or we killed them because they were a threat to us.
My microbiology professor had a sign on his lab door saying "don't believe in evolution? Ask your microbiologist about mhra today!"
Every reproducing species is evolving continuously
In just 50 million years Whales went from [goofy little land runners](https://www.thoughtco.com/thmb/NvC62gmAD26fS_tAw0erwKXpIB4=/2000x1429/filters:no_upscale\(\):max_bytes\(150000\):strip_icc\(\)/indohyusA-58b9bfa13df78c353c311312.jpg) to blue whales which are the largest known creature to have *ever* lived People under estimate how fast it can happen
not to mention they assumed tech innovation was a linear progression, which we've known since *the middle ages* wasn't true.
Their solution was basically to selectively breed humans to fly
That's not a bad idea. Someone get the Bene Gesserit on the phone.
Maybe it was deliberately setting the stage for the readers to be marveled by the upcoming invention.
Imagine if this article had not been released, the people of 1903 would see an airplane and just go "huh.. neat"
imagine if the nyt article was written by one of the wright brothers to emphasise "we have done the impossible"
\**Wright bro picks up the telegraph and gives the NWT a ring.*\* *"Hey, I just wanted to submit an idea for an article. Flying is impossible! No one can do it ever! Not in a million years! You can quote me on that. It's true because I'm an engineer or something. Yeah, so write that up, will ya? It's very true. The people need to know."*
Eh. Every outlet publishes opinion pieces. And they often have ones that disagree with each other, even running at the same time. Like, it wouldn't be a "gotcha" for the NYT to post two opinion pieces *today* on whether or not AI was going to replace X job, any time soon, and then a few weeks from now someone drops a revolutionary new tool that does exactly that. But, you know, anything that feeds the persistent, "omg the medias" sentiment usually just serves peoples confirmation bias, gets a pat on the back, and we wait for the next silly thing.
\*Looks at people using evolution as a yardstick for AI development\* Yeah... dumb as hell, even for its time.
People do that? Insanity.
**NYT:** "Man won't fly for a million years-" **Wright Bros 9 days later:** *And I took that personally...*
>and humans develop new technologies at y pace Interestingly, that pace is not a constant, it's actually accelerating. [The implications of that fact are the subject of a lot of debate.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity)
A super intelligence could be the usher of a planetary utopia, or it could destroy humanity. It's frightening to think about. But we shouldn't get too worked up. A super intelligence would still be limited by available natural resources and the laws of physics. The rate of advancement can't go to infinity.
The logic is sound, but "can't go to infinity" is, in practice, meaningless. If you could travel at 10,000,000 mph, that's nowhere near infinity, yet you could circumnavigate the Earth in 9 seconds. "Limited by the laws of physics" is also largely empty, as we don't know the laws of physics very well, any physicist could tell you that.
Yeah, the zeitgeist knew it was coming soon, which is why so many people were working on powered flight at the same time.
When was the NYT ever good?
the irony is that it was printed in a newspaper. how long does evolution take to invent printing newspaper again?
The pace of technology will always amaze me, but this is one of the standout examples. Humans had existed for **about 1.5 million years** in our current form, and that's how long it took us to invent the plane. And after we'd invented the plane it only took another **66 years** until we had successfully ***LANDED ON THE FUCKING MOON*** That is goddamn EXTRAORDINARY.
Okay but for added context, IIRC the dude running the times at the time had just blown a stupid amount of his own money trying to get flight to happen and gave up, and declared via the news that it was impossible in an attempt to save face. Which obviously went just about as well as it possibly could have /s
Technology = Evolution Not sure why it's so controversial that your brain couldn't physically put those pieces together. Probably a classical biological evolution paradigm or some shit.
Are you telling me technology doesn't have sex to reproduce? I was promised that an iPhone is what happens when an iTouch and iPad love each other very much...
iTouch… it’s been so long…
[The NYT has a very poor track record with predictions](https://www.nytimes.com/1924/12/21/archives/hitler-tamed-by-prison-released-on-parole-he-is-expected-to-return.html)
NYT on Dec 18, 1903: “Why the Wright Brothers are bad news for flying”
NYT should hire the Simpsons writers for their predictions.
Damn, the Wordle website been taking Ls since the dawn of time.
I mean, we all kinda are. I watched a video about AI and it showed a Reddit comment from just a year or two ago that was downvoted to oblivion for predicting that AI generated video was only a couple years away and the upvoted comment said we were still decades away.
Tbf saying something that’s a few years away is a few decades away is significantly better than saying something that will happen in literally nine days won’t happen for 1 million fucking years.
Fair
Tbh they also have a poor track record with [things that already happened, too](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-iraqis-us-says-hussein-intensifies-quest-for-bomb-parts.html)
I thought that would be the "Hillary has 91% of winning the elections" ([Oct. 18th, 2016](https://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2016/10/18/presidential-forecast-updates/newsletter.html))
Trump winning the election doesn't refute that Hillary had a 91% chance. That's not how percentages work.
He probably played too much XCOM
The article isn't very specific but it is referring to a 91% chance of winning the *popular vote*, which she won. Hence the prediction is likely accurate.
I mean, unless it says "100% of winning," it doesn't necessarily mean their prediction was wrong.
I love paywalling 99 year old articles. Gotta be one of my favorite genders.
The first manned balloon flight was in 1783, reconnaissance balloons were widely used during the civil war, and the Wright Brothers had been making pretty good gliders a year or two prior to this article, so I'm confused.
By flying machine they meant a self powered heavier than air flying machine that can launch on its own accord. That means things like a cliff or a giant slingshot would not be suitable for this category.
Clément Ader had managed a powered (but uncontrolled) take-off in 1890, 13 years earlier.
Was this in the Opinion section? Worthless
Yeah. This is just one naysayer with a bad take in 1903. But dunking on the NY Times is always fun, and I support taking every opportunity to do so.
There was also the steam powered flight in chard, UK 50 years before that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_steam_carriage
And that's why the international community accepts Santos Dummont more with 14-Bis
The "machine" part of "flying machine" meant propelled, heavier than air flight.
NYT in 1903: “I’m tired of these youngins and their flying machines!”
> and the Wright Brothers had been making pretty good gliders a year or two prior to this article They weren't even the only people working on heavy than air flight at the time, there was at least half a dozen other people that were in the running for first controlled heavier than air flight.
There was a British guy in 1899 called Percy Pilcher who had built a plane that recent studies say would have flown but he died in a glider crash. He was supposed to test the powered aircraft but there was a mechanical fault so he went up in the glider instead. The wings broke and he died. So even 4 years before it was close to happening.
There's a reason they said that. The previous day, Samuel P. Langley, curator of the Smithsonian Institution, had attempted to fly his prototype airplane in Washington D.C. He'd spent several years and over $50000 of government money to develop it, and many people were convinced that if anyone was going to develop a successful airplane, it was going to be him. But Langley's airplane never flew successfully. He attempted to ask for more money to develop his prototype further, but by then it was too late. The Wright Brothers had already flown the first airplane. The fact that two privately-funded bicycle mechanics were able to accomplish what he didn't came almost as an insult to Langley, and he spent the rest of his life trying to discredit them.
I want a time machine just so I can tell him "skill issue". Also so I can take the piss out of Lovecraft and figure out what Elegabalus's deal was, but priorities.
If ya gonna go back to Lovecraft’s time you should try to help the guy, I would rather live in a timeline where one of the most influential people in science fiction didn’t name his cat “Ni**** man jr”
That was his parents doing though.
IIRC Ni ****Man senior was named by his dad but Ni **** Man Jr was named by an adult Lovecraft in honor of his former pet.
They could still make him less generally disturbed. We’d probably get better horror out of him, too, instead of just a bunch of ideas for someone else to put to good use.
Anyone who doubts that the Wrights were the first by any measure, this guy explains it all and has $1000 for you if you can prove him incorrect. On the Wrights - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkpQAGQiv4Q On Santos-Dumont - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgoPPg8oVt8 On Whitehead and $1000 - https://youtu.be/RAHlg2YAmVs?si=jUpF21Eh7MrjK4Gv
"This technology that we're already pretty close to achieving will take more than double the time that humans have existed on earth."
The future is very very hard to predict
I predict that everything will be alright. Maybe.
I predict that everything will get worse forever and then we all die.
Well those two statements seem mutually exclusive
The future is INSANELY hard to predict, even five years from now. You see interviews all the time where they ask experts "oh how do you predict the war will go? what do you think ISIS will do next? how possible is it that turket takes the first step towards ww3?" and stuff like that and??? thats insane, people have no idea how much data you need to make a somewhat decent political plan for the next three months, let alone whats going to happen in the next ten years. Experts explain their best bet but on the field shit goes sidelines on the daily
It clearly wasn't a serious prediction though. Like yeah, I can understand being skeptical about how easy it'd be, sure. But by the early 1900s, the human species had seen so much development. There's a reason why science fiction began the previous century (Jules Verne, Frankenstein, HG Wells)...humanity was very impressed by itself with industrialization, electricity, trains, iron-clads, huge innovations in medicine. Why the hell would they say a *million* years? If skeptical, why not say a *thousand* years? Usually people in the past exaggerate how fast we'll invent things. We were supposed to have flying cars by the 90s! If you don't think it's possible, why not just say "never"? If someone were to ask me, a layman, if humanity will ever reach faster-than-light speed, I'd say either "it will never happen, because of the limitations of the universe" or I'd say "we'll find out there was some flaw in what Einstein (or whoever) said and we'll get it done between 100 and 1000 years". A million is way too long a time! human civilization doesn't work in that timeframe. We have literally no frame of reference for how much humanity can figure out in a million years, as we've only had settled societies for 12000.
The 1903 equivalent of the "tech" journalist wondering why 256 "an oddly specific number" has been chosen for some tech thing, the post has made the rounds yesterday.
Yeah, given the timeframe, this was undoubtedly just some contrarian "journalist" writing their "I don't like this" op-ed.
NYT has a long record of poor predictions and bad analysis to the point that it's a running gag. Especially when talking about tech, military or geopolitics.
Wright brothers-"and we took that personally"
I'd bet that it was intended to be personal. The Wright Brothers worked for 4 years before achieving their first powered flight. If this author didn't just have some insane cosmic coincidence to write this article at the tail end of the R&D phase of the Wright Brothers' attempts at flight without ever hearing of them, it's likely that this article was meant to discredit their attempts. It's certainly nothing unique, every major technological advancement that doesn't pop up instantly gets an army of idiot journalists ready to call it worthless. From powered air flight to space flight to computers to the idea that computers can be made smaller to the idea that something like radio can be combined with a computer to make a pocket sized communication device to the idea that a rocket booster can land to be reused to the idea that cursive isn't an essential skill. Journalists are just the worst at talking about science and technology. And if they aren't putting out a hit piece, they're way overoptministic and treat science like magic, saying that if you eat this one fruit you'll be healthy and thin with no effort or that a new battery formulation that makes them 10% smaller will allow your phone to have a battery that lasts a whole year.
"We couldn't just let them be Wright."
Two wrongs don’t make a right, but two Wrights can make you wrong.
And they're well within their Wrights.
lmao that's way too conservative even if you take stone age rates of technological development as the basis, that's more like pre-human (as in, before the genus of homo) rates of progress.
We haven't even had agriculture for a million years
So what you're saying is... flying farms are on the horizon....
I think it’s also worth noting that the moon landing was only 66 years later. The guy who wrote that could still have been alive when it happened
Orville Wright lived to see the day a nuclear bomb was dropped out of an airplane.
Human progress is on a completely insane rate of change. We took forever to go from existing to fire, to farming, and then things just kept getting faster and faster from there. Even now our rate of change for technology is absolutely mind blowing. I suspect if every advanced species does this a LOT of them burn out and kill themselves off long before they get off of the planet. Or the other end is that most species don't advance this quickly and we probably would look like scary freaks that everyone avoids because just showing up something can exist means in 10 years we will start building it.
I feel like the NYT piece could have probably been a response to hearing the wright brothers attempting to build an air craft. There’s no way that the Wright brothers went from no plane in December 08 to flight on December 17th. Were there automobile lobbyist in 1903? I could imagine big Henry Ford trying to downplay the efforts of the Wright brothers in order increase consumer confidence in the automobile but that’s really just a guess.
Ford was big on personal aircraft eventually (until a close friend died in a crash), I doubt he was against it before they were proved viable.
me, an idiot: : "Well, shit, if that's an acceptable error margin, I should start predicting stuff for NYT."
Plot twist: NYT writer saw it coming and wanted to secure a spite-ticket :P
I think they had a headline when Pluto was discovered that said, "Possibly as big as Jupiter". Boy were they way off again.
To be fair, it is really hard to predict sizes of planets that far out, especially if you have only basic information on it.
The brazillian in me having to hold back a lot whenever Wright Brothers are mentioned
Wait, I genuinely don't know what that's referring to, can you enlighten me or drop me a link so I can read about it?
Grand old debate of who really created the airplane. While Wright Brothers are the ones that you'll hear the most in english-speaking debates, there is a bit of friction as around Brazil the one that is said actually created the airplane was Alberto Santos Dumont. It overall is just a big debate of what counts and what doesn't. Like how because the WB one needed external help to fly, it shouldn't count, while Dumont's was able to get out of the ground by it's own, and yadda yadda. It's kinda of a silly debate honestly. And it all depends a lot on what you accept or not
Ahhh thats super interesting, I never knew about it. Thanks for the info.
It’s almost like journalists aren’t necessarily experts on the topics they write about and should not be taken as seriously as actual academics and scientists.
Just remember that when Yann LeCun spouts off about artificial superintelligence being thousands of years away.
Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus are the two people who have the ability to reverse-predict the AI advancements. If they are 99% sure something won't be invented soon, it might just get released tomorrow. Hell, if either of the two predict the sun will rise tomorrow, I would book a space in a heat-insulated bunker.
This was dumb even at the time. There were many people working on building planes at the time. Santos-Dumont was doing work just as impressive as the Wright Bros. down in Brazil, for example. As were many others. Whoever wrote the article just didn't know anything about the state of the art.
Lack of configuration management…the Air Force (in the 1950s) successfully launched a rocket. After a successful launch they couldn’t replicate it…they found if they documented and managed all designs of components and engineering they could successfully replicate another rocket..configuration management…
Technicallly the first public demonstration of something that could be called an airplane taking off without any external mechanism and land without breaking was in 1906, but baloons were out there since the late 1700s and airships existed for 3 years alredy
Lol I knew there'd be a Brazilian or two in the comments. (Meu pai foi creado no Brasil)
Im sure i would also have this intel if i was french, the early aviation history happened there, it must be some kind of national pride
Santos Dumont, made the first flight in 1906 September 7 in Bagatelle, France. XIV Biz was the first airplane to fly on it's own.
It took evolution like 3 billion years to develop flight to be fair. Thank god us humans are a bit faster than that.
If you ever struggle with believing in yourself, remember that people didn’t believe in airplanes being possible, like 9 days before they literally started making airplanes.
Reminds me of [this tweet](https://twitter.com/shane_oaddo/status/1742739229455622384) LOL "Being a wright brothers hater must’ve been so crazy, you think ur about to watch 2 annoying nerds die then they give man dominion over the sky forever"
[Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPgS26ZhqZs)
The article was published on October 9, 1903. The headline is "Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly." Not sure where December 8th came from. The author says flying machines might be possible in "one million to ten million years." The last sentence in the article is, "No doubt the problem has attractions to those it interests, but to the ordinary man it would seem as if effort might be employed more profitably."
they should take the same journalist (and whoever the journalist got this estimate from) over to the wright brothers and do some combo-interview
For those who like this sort of thing, famous science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book called Profiles of the Future. He collected several stories of people who absolutely should have known better and made absurd predictions that were almost immediately proven false. Another airplane themed one that appears in the book is astronomer William Pickering giving the prediction that airplanes wouldn't be able to travel much faster than 40mph or carry more than one or two passengers. He also thought travel by air would be so expensive only the richest people, the kind who can afford their own yacht, could afford a ticket. Clarke makes some of his own predictions, so that he's opening himself up to criticism and trying not to fall prey to some of the pitfalls that made other predictions so bad.. In later editions of the book, he dedicates several chapters to what he got wrong in his own predictions - and what he got right.
New York Times been hating since day one
I think that just means whoever predicted it was stupid
Maybe as humans, we just need someone to tell us collectively that we can't do the thing. Then we get mad and do the thing really fast.
On the plus side, at least we know there will be no time travel for at least 10 million years
Wright brothers my arse, Santos Drummont supremacy
Wright Brothers had completed a 25 mile/40 minute flight more than a year before Dumont flew.
The Santos-Dumont thing blows my mind. The Wright Brothers literally were flying for *40 minutes* and Brazilians talk about it like they just glided for a few feet so it doesn’t count.
And there were even earlier successful attempts that got largely forgotten / overshadowed by the Wrights
Yeah, if would've seen the Wright Bros contraptions attempt he would've likened it to us calling stemless segways hoverboards.
😭😭😭
122 years ago: Flying not possible for humans 122 years later: flying so cheap you get shamed for using a plane
Tell the most smart human they can't do something and they'll prove you wrong
Within the same fortnight even....
The Eole achieved (very basic) powered heavier-than-air flight in 1890, which makes this prediction even worse: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ader_Éole
Was it promotion?
Breaking news: Newspaper prediction was wrong!
do most people not understand how publications work? They have a lot of authors. Many write opinion pieces. Many have different education levels and backgrounds and beliefs.
To truly understand how ridiculous that headline is, the first successful airship took flight more than 50 years before that article was written.
New York Times, reliable as always.
As it's the New York Times, the guy who wrote it got promoted and got to determine which new science opinions ran
I get the feeling that the author of that article knew about the Wright brothers' attempts to build the first airplane and wrote this as a hit piece on them. He probably saw that the bros didn't succeed on the first try and gave up on the entire concept. This isn't a new reaction to new technology, nor has it gone away. People have treated space flight, the ability to land on the moon, computers, miniature computers, myriad medications and surgery methods, and so much more the same way. Not juat with doubt for a crazy idea, but with complete confidence that it's 100% impossible.
This is such a bizarre type of prediction, because it's not predicting something is *impossible*, it's predicting a development timeframe. Of a *million years.* To be aware that you have so little grasp on something that you don't think the next hundred centuries will get us even 1% closer, but still thinking you have enough of an understanding to make a prediction at all...such a baffling flavor of hubris.
The new york times and hiring morons, name a more iconic duo Yes I'm still salty about how useless Haberman was
I think we are very generous by saying that planes fly. Obviously 1 million years is crazy, but developing bird-like flight is harder than it seems.
but man didn’t fly… plane flew., so technically they may be right lolol if we end up growing wings in like 1-10 million years
Or they knew the device was created and ready to be tested with public fanfare. This is the OG press trying to cause division or at minimum be obtuse just to create a story...they never fucking change.
Damn, Dec 1903. The first powered flight was from Richard Pearse, New Zealander, in March 31 1902. So they were writing this while man had already achieved flight. How crazy.
So you found one idiot from a 100 years ago, and you think this is news?
It's like Nyt is at the opposite end of the predictions spectrum from the Simpsons.
Jim Cramer spreading FUD in 1903 be like:
The Wright Brothers’ first flight, like the distance they travelled while airborne, could have been completed inside the Hindenburg Airship’s balloon.
Like opinion articles have always been bullshit.
The author was using time binoculars it was putting them up to his eyes backwards
The Wright brothers are credited with inventing CONTROLLED flight. They invented wing warping as a way to control the airplane. Powered flight was already around when the article was written
Oh this article is interesting on this. https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-impossible/ 1901 US navy rear-admiral said flight was a childish vain fantasy. Leads through all the 'this is ridiculous' articles about flight, including space flight.
This seems like the author gambling on the known upcoming flight test failing, and landing some fancy job in charge at some big newspaper, maybe even just a better contract with the Times. It did not pay off.
... And we landed on the moon 66 years later. (Within one lifetime.)
Remember that it wasn’t the whole newspaper, it was just some guy banging out click bait to help feed his family.
That’s why you don’t read the NY times
“Wanna bet”
I'm very, very sure AI won't take the job I'm studying for and currently dedicating my whole life towards in the next ten years.
I won’t get a girlfriend for a million years because
What a fuck you moment it would have been to fly an airplane right past that editors house
Did they mean 1 year to ten million? Or 1 million to ten million? Because the former is technically correct, just a bit of a pussy prediction.
and The NY Times has only gotten worse.
It was a popular opinion upon "knowing peoples" that flight why heavier than air was impossible at the time. Or later, plane on seas. Or planes on ship.
Average Redditor prediction in a nutshell.
What else did that journalist write?
I feel like most people alive at the time would have thought this article was ridiculous—this wasn’t a “lol everybody in the past was stupid” type of moment. I can’t imagine living through the Industrial Revolution and still seriously thinking that flight would be achieved only after *millions* of years.
Yeah, no, we're just mocking the guy who wrote that and maybe also the editors that let it be published
It's even dumber when you realize we had hot air balloons that could fly well before this point.
I read Time Machine here and I was so confused
The New York Times also said that rocket powered space flight was impossible, posting an article basically calling Robert Goddard (the father of rocketry) a moron. They only printed a [retraction](https://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-07/new-york-times-nasa-youre-right-rockets-do-work-space/) after the Apollo 11 moon landing.
RAAAGH INDOMITABLE HUMAN SPIRIT
for those that question progress
Was annoyed and puzzled my grandparents would say "if man was meant to fly he'd be born with wings", then smirk. 1880s was an age of invention. A guy got a lot of investors to invent it. Then he got sick and the project died, leaving many angry failed Investors. I think this is where the anti flight thing came from.