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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| What we have done & what we may aspire to |
| 2012-01-02 |
| Jerry Pournelle: in 1940 – 1945, with a population of 140 million, half the work force conscripted into the armed services thus requiring building a new work force from women, apprentices, new graduates, and people called out of retirement, we produces a Liberty ship a day, thousands of B-17’s and other heavy bombers, clouds of fighters, and enough tanks to give numeric superiority over the best the Germans could produce. Once, told that the German Panther was ten times better than the US Sherman, we said that the solution to that was simple. We would build 11 Shermans for every Panther. We pretty well did that. We built the Empire State Building during the Depression in one year. We built Hoover Dam during the depression in 3 years. We built the P-51 from drawing board design to actual combat deployment in 105 days. We built clouds of P-47 close support aircraft. We build a mechanized army and the ships to take it to Europe. All that without computers, without robots, without Interstate highways, with a population of 140 million, beginning with an economy enthralled in the Great Depression. And we educated a work force fully capable of doing that. We turned out a generation that could read. If we could do all that then, can we not do it now? What man has done, cannot man aspire to? Suppose we were given the chance? You have the power, what will you do? ... Do we live in a true Dark Age in which we have forgotten what we can do? Many think so. When I mention Jaime Escalante and what he did, most scratch their heads unable to remember who he was. Yet what man has done man can aspire to. |
| Posted by:Anguper Hupomosing9418 |
| #1 Maybe "we" are not the same "we" who done all these things? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2012-01-02 11:46 |