Adventures In Impossibility

at many points in history, we were faced with a problem that intuitively seemed like we would not be able to find a solution. but then we found it

• examples
  • • Harnessing the elements
  • The story of understanding fire
  • Predicting the position of the sun (use BoI chapter 1 example)
  • what even is the sun to the first humans? genuniely. seems prima facie impossible to understand what that is. how do you learn about something literally one million times away?
  • moon landing
  • surely that is basically impossible
• there are probably examples of prescient futurists who could conceive of solutions to these, but they are rare (find who that guy was from the 1300s in tom's talk. it's a quote)
  • human-level artificial intelligence
• people will continue to tell you certain challenges are impossible
  • the hard problem of consciousness
  • and so on
• ANY explanation for why something is impossible must invoke the laws of physics. If it does not then the explanation is just that it's too hard, too difficult for that person to conceive of
• but if we chose to do it we could