> It is remarkable how quickly we went from rudimentary powered flight to the moon.

I never got these kinds of statements. What on earth are you comparing us to? Somehow people who make the above statement never remark how slow it was moving from the development of agriculture to being sedentary, for instance.

Seems like that's exactly the kind of implicit comparison being made. We went very quickly from early flight to rocketry relative to how quickly we went from early agriculture to complex agricultural societies.

That doesn't seem that interesting—of course people were more interested in living life than in technological advancement. The kind of industrial mania that produced our current society is something we can't exactly opt out of.

I'm pretty sure that people at all points in history have been interested in using technology to improve their lives.

Funny that you say what on Earth are you comparing us to. It's just that Earth, look at the time it takes for purely biological evolution to take place. Flight is estimated to have first evolved 350 million years ago in insects, then dinosaurs 220 million years ago, then birds, and bats 60 million years ago. From insects to bats is 290 million years. It took us less than 100 to go from basic flight to leaving the planet. On nearly any scale we humans have evolved and adapted on an unprecedented timescale. Hell, humans only evolved 100,000 years ago or so. It's a blink of the eye compared to literally everything else on our planet.

We don't have data points to make comparisons. What I think it shows is that once you have the technology and science to successfully build a plane then space is actually not a big step.

In science and technology things develop in many areas concurrently and at some point stars suddenly align and boom things happen extremely quickly.

It's a bit like small drones these days. They require small powerful motors, high energy density batteries, and integrated semiconductors. All those technologies developed independently and then as soon as they all became available, boom, drones everywhere.

Likewise, we went from message and passenger service limited to the speed of a horse, to continent-spanning railroads and telegraph networks in one generation.

There's great articles out there that try to explain the innovations that unlocked rapid development; in the case of powered planes, it's a combination of aerodynamics (the wing shape), precise machining (engine) and materials science (weight, although the first plane was mostly wood and canvas). But also iterative design, the Wright brothers made a few gliders in the years leading up to the flight.