Re:Serving Netflix Video Traffic at 800Gb/s and Beyond [pdf]
by Dylan16807 on Saturday August 20, 2022 @03:03AM
(#32529891)
> Eg enriching a tiny bit of uranium is 'relatively' easy. Enriching enough of the stuff to build an atomic bomb is a question of scaling. And, yes, in principle you can just use more and more centrifuges etc.
But we're not scaling for scaling's sake. We're scaling with the number of customers.
If it was profitable to enrich some milligrams by hand, then you'd be able to get more scientists and engineers and better equipment and automate some parts and make even more profit. If you go the centrifuge route, it's not because you had to do the harder methods, it's because it's massively cheaper per gram of product.
Such a scenario is very different from "we can't do it at all, and we need to build complex infrastructure just to make it possible".
Eg enriching a tiny bit of uranium is 'relatively' easy. Enriching enough of the stuff to build an atomic bomb is a question of scaling. And, yes, in principle you can just use more and more centrifuges etc.
Humanity has already built some small infrastructure off-earth, like the ISS or satellite networks. Also various unmanned probes that toiled away for years in space and on Mars.
Building a habitat big enough to plausibly keep humans alive for the decades or more it would take to get to the Alpha Centauri would involve enormous scaling efforts. And that's not even touching on propulsion, yet.
However, yes, grand feats require more than just scaling.