Friday, February 4, 2011
Path Dependency
Slate's been running a series of articles called "Future Shock", wherein leading scientists discuss the developmental future of various technologies. The most recent article discussed the past, and future of rocket development, including the two main functions of rocketry: 1) delivering payloads into space and 2) delivering nuclear weapons across an ocean.
By the way, it doesn't get geekier than spending an afternoon reading about the development of rockets.
One of the author's central contentions is that rockets have developed to within a very small margin of their engineering envelope. This is partially due to the physical of gravity and thermodynamics, but is also a result of the path we used to develop rocketry. That is, the decisions made by Robert Goddard in developing the first rockets determined the universe of possible engineering solutions available to later engineers.
This phenomenon is known as path dependence (Wiki here). Path dependence explains how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant
It's true for rockets, and true for our lives. The unfortunate conclusion is that many of our early life choices establish a ceiling for our possibilities. But there is an upside to this fatalism. Despite our best efforts to screw our lives up, we've usually established a floor.
Labels: How we have we not blown ourselves to smithereens?
¶ 6:29 AM
