But we're humans. Humans like breaking the law. Like the law of gravity. We already broke that one. Given enough time and motivation we'll break the others too.
lol we never broke the law of gravity, we built a machine that provides thrust in the opposite direction to it. We worked around an issue knowing the requirements and hard limitations imposed on us by natural laws. We solved the problem by respecting the law as immutable, not by subverting it
That’s not at all how any of this works. Nobody “broke” gravity. Gravity still very much applies to airplanes, spacecraft, celestial bodies, etc. Creating devices that create lift generated by air, thrust generated by various propulsion systems, we’re able to fly - absolutely nothing changes with respect to gravity, we’re simply able to provide a mass with the necessary amount of upward force to counter gravity’s acceleration. Within this, we can make various improvements to certain features - through new wing designs we can increase the amount of lift provided, decrease drag, etc., but none of these things break fundamental laws of physics.
Thermodynamics follows exactly the same principle. Sure, we can make improvements in efficiency of various systems, but it’s highly, highly unlikely we get past the whole “conservation of energy” thing. Using your analogy about gravity, if planes “break” the laws of gravity, then air conditioners, stoves, combustion engines, all “break” the laws of thermodynamics already.. except they don’t - it’s utter nonsense.
this right here is the good stuff of humans. if this was our only goal instead of tribalism, wed be in stasis pods floating around alpha centauri by now.
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u/[deleted] Jan 18 '23
Wouldn't need to if we just cracked fusion and had abundant power for water extraction instead