I just read a 1992 piece by Niven and Pournelle, extolling the glories of capitalism, and talking about how awesome Columbus was, and suggesting that if only those evil governments like the US government would stop being so annoyingly anti-capitalistic, people would go to space in order to get rich. (Title of essay: \u201cWhere Next, Columbus?\u201d)<\/p>\r\n
But the reason I\u2019m posting about this piece isn\u2019t about any of the above; it\u2019s to warn against being too confident about what you think everyone knows.<\/p>\r\n
Excerpt:<\/p>\r\n
\r\nIn this year 1992 AD, anyone worth talking to has at least a vague notion that the wealth of Fantasyland is to be found in space. Test this for yourself. Ask a bright friend:<\/p>\r\n
What killed the dinosaurs?<\/i> (Giant meteoroid impact.)<\/p>\r\n
How does anyone know?<\/i> (High iridium content in the clay laid down at that time. It\u2019s vaporized asteroid. Meteoroids are rich in metals of the platinum family.)<\/p>\r\n
Iridium? That\u2019s valuable, isn\u2019t it?<\/i> (Yeah.)<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
\u2026I\u2019ve been more or less a space enthusiast for, oh, 40 years or so, and I\u2019ve read a little about Chicxulub and the K-T boundary event. I did not know any of the things in that parenthetical about iridium and asteroids until today. (It\u2019s possible that I had seen some mention-in-passing of iridium in the boundary layer at some point, but I definitely never took the further step of thinking \u201cThat implies that asteroids are valuable!\u201d \u2026Of course, sf has been telling me that asteroids are valuable all my life; but I\u2019ve never before seen anyone explicitly connect that to the K-T boundary.)<\/p>\r\n
I suppose that Niven and Pournelle might have taken that as evidence that I\u2019m not worth talking to, and\/or not bright. But I\u2019m more inclined to take it as evidence that sometimes the things that we think everyone knows are in fact things that not everyone knows.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18462"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18463,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18462\/revisions\/18463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}