Development Lag and Medieval Flat Earth Legacy
The path into an interstellar society, the next step after an intercontinental society depends on those shapes of the continent as much as it does on many other factors. At some time such a society must have discovered gunpowder and made the application to cannon and bullet. Here we observe a significant time lag in the applications. Physical containment of fission in space will suffer the same time lag in applications taking time to move from the basic unreliable and dangerous primitive cannon to the ultra modern automatic gun. However the time lag also involved a block or leap between the Chinese "alchemy" of gunpowder and fireworks to the European "siege ender" cannon. Somehow this development was not foreseen by the Chinese but required European explorer's to bring the alchemist's gunpowder into the European armoury. It should not seem thus of much surprise that the physicist's uranium is not yet connected with physical containment in space. No oxygen is need for the chain reaction to occur and so the lack of oxygen in space is no hindrance. However critical mass is exactly that, a specific minimum mass for the almost "spontaneous combustion" to work. Hence most clever men in physics would regard the very size of critical mass to be too big to work with in space. No doubt the Chinese alchemists had some similar logic that blocked the leap to the cannon. However physical containment in fission is a long development, as impossible to see as for the early European cannon engineer tinkering with gunpowder and exploding breaches, the modern machine gun would be impossible to "see".
The path to development of the interstellar cannon apart from the viewer's determination to see technology as utilising limited resources for the benefit of the whole (as is the essential drive for economists or politicians promising higher standards of living) the issue will revolve around two impossibles. The first that physical containment of fission in space is impossible and secondly that Einstein's Law of Relativity makes faster than light theories stupid. If you insist on either of these two impossibilities then nothing will happen. Man needs to travel faster than light to make trade profitable and man needs to use Einstein or Oppehneimer's invention of the bomb in order to make that speed possible. Those trying to help but maintaining a belief in either of these two arguments are the "baked bean" group. As a basic food is the baked bean, how much would it cost to put into space and build hull storage for a crew of 25 travelling for 15 years in space the required supply items: baked beans, water and oxygen? The answer is travelling for 3 months out and 3 months in, 6 months is a reasonable calculation. Those insisting on the 15 years minimum (7.5 light years out and 7.5 light years in) are only a hamper to the complex project calculations, being better used to putting in a corner and let to make such calculations free of further involvement.
Development Lag and Medieval Flat Earth Legacy continued
The Theory of Relativity despite its vital uses in Quantum mechanics and exploration of the galaxy by instrumentation, is effectively the flat earth theory of our era. Columbus set sail to America without the blessing of the majority of intellectuals or well to do because the idea of a round earth was almost heretical. This was in 1492, a long period of Western growth for less than 140 years after the Black Death and plague in England of 1349. Is it not possible that the Western world was ready for the discovery of Columbus in 1349 but that the flat earth theory was a block to such development? That the radical alteration in state power and town/country balance following the massive loss in population as a consequence of the plague, was the only means by which the Status Quo in the Western World surrendered power? Thus Columbus could conquer the Americas 143 years later because the form of society that regenerated after 1349 was flexible enough to permit the sailor and navigator to sail away to the edge of the world? Einstein's association with the speed of light being an impassable barrier is this flat earth block, one that challenges where the afterlife or heaven is located and accommodating our innate suspicion that the Sun is God and a tendency for sun worship. Thus each ray of the mid summer sun bronzing the body is a deity, a speed of light deity that should not be challenged.
Is our world fated to leap from inter-continental to inter-stellar society in a manner more knowledgeable or less knowledgeable than a world whose continental plates by chance never created a flat earth theory, as the world was transferable right from the beginning. Such a transversal world would have never known a flat earth theory and a continental jump in development as astronomers would have long ago pointed out through observation of the constellations from various vantage points that the earth was round. By historical analogy we should know that like the Chinese, the Americans have invented the reaction but not the physical containment. Similarly by historical analogy we should be aware that the intellectuals threaten us with a bubonic plague because they have created a myth of man trapped on his planet, interstellar travel being not a voyage into the unknown but a simple falling off the edge of the world. Sailors used to be terrified of leaving sight of the land, not many accepted the earth as round and feared the waters that fell off the edge. With this advantage of hindsight, can we not agree that travelling faster than light is a very probable outcome of new inventions in space?