Nah, the principles can be worked out by trial and error, without having a bomb in mind when you get started. It'd just take a lot longer. The math is already there, and they had a workable conception of the atom (well, they will once they discover radioactivity). The problem is measurements, electronics, and precision tools - all three would need major advances before you can do much. I think 1900 might be a little early.
Early space flight--how early can we reasonably go?
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Nah, the principles can be worked out by trial and error, without having a bomb in mind when you get started. It'd just take a lot longer. The math is already there, and they had a workable conception of the atom (well, they will once they discover radioactivity). The problem is measurements, electronics, and precision tools - all three would need major advances before you can do much. I think 1900 might be a little early.
Maybe you should (1) read a little intellectual history on the actual idea package that Christianity introduced to the West over time and (2) you should discard your presentist bias and try to understand antique and medieval christianity in comparison to their likely replacements and in the context of their times, not in contrast to the Research Lab Church of Dawkinology, which swell as it might have been, seems to have left very little trace in the history of antiquity. Perhaps because the Pope suppressed it?
If you want to go back more than a thousand years, the Chinese could just build a really big rocket and tie somebody too it. 
I remember the stories of one Tang Emperor doing the same thing with large kites. He was experimenting on criminals (what crime? Who knows.)
Decent contact with India might bring Hindi Numerals (they invented the zero, and the Arabs borrowed these numbers and with them developed stuff like algebra) which could give them a boost in mathematics.
I remember the stories of one Tang Emperor doing the same thing with large kites. He was experimenting on criminals (what crime? Who knows.)
Decent contact with India might bring Hindi Numerals (they invented the zero, and the Arabs borrowed these numbers and with them developed stuff like algebra) which could give them a boost in mathematics.
Aaaand here is where you disqualify yourself from any intelligent conversation on the topic. I particularly like how you continue to ignore how your knee-jerk reaction had nothing to do with my post, which you apparently still haven't gone back to read, and how you set up an asinine little strawman to pretend that either Dawkins or I (and when the hell did I bring up Dawkins anyway?) have anything to do with dogma or antiquity. You've done a very good job here of completely ignoring everything I've said and doing your darndest to make me look like I've said something else. The meaningless non-sequitur about the pope was particularly inspired.
And when I say "inspired", what I mean is "insipid". I've already said twice now that this conversation is irrelevant to the thread. The OP wanted a lunar landing within 66 years of the POD, so a debate about early Christianity and its stultifying effect on rationality and investigation has nothing to do with it. You can keep coughing up your anti-atheist claptrap if you like, but I refuse to add more fuel to your ranting little fire. Feel free to call this a victory for yourself if you like--I have no expectation that someone who attacks rationalism as "the Research Lab Church of Dawkinology" will understand that an opponent is leaving in disgust at your debate technique rather than in awe of your amazing arguments--but I'm just not going to keep playing your game. Have a nice day.
I never knew about that "Pidgeon"! *plots down future writing ideas*
Would providing the crew with enough oxygen for months/years be difficult for a steampunk machine? (And, more to the point, allowing the crew to survive all the radiation being chucked at them.) As well as making it big enough for an appropriately complex difference engine, and at the same time making it light enought for a rocket to lift?
Would providing the crew with enough oxygen for months/years be difficult for a steampunk machine? (And, more to the point, allowing the crew to survive all the radiation being chucked at them.) As well as making it big enough for an appropriately complex difference engine, and at the same time making it light enought for a rocket to lift?
No matter how you look at it, the moon landing represented an absolute stretch of human technology. You will not get to the moon with a lower level of technology; you need to insert short cuts in history.
The required technology rests on developments in electricity, chemistry and metallurgy. By the early 1790's the French royalty had left the world a vast collection of mathematical theorems that would have little practical application until quantum physics and rocket science came about in the twentieth century. The French also took away a key player in science when they executed Antoine Lavoisier in 1794 at the age of 51.
The POD is simple: Lavoisier escapes to England and continues his scientific pursuits. In 1812, he is 69. That year, Michael Faraday is 21 and his education would have already benefited from a larger accumulation of knowledge in chemistry and electricity.
To get to the moon in 1940 or 1950, you will need nothing less than Apollo-era technology. To get it early, you need to accelerate developments in the critical path: chemistry, electricity, metallurgy, thermodynamics, electronics.
The required technology rests on developments in electricity, chemistry and metallurgy. By the early 1790's the French royalty had left the world a vast collection of mathematical theorems that would have little practical application until quantum physics and rocket science came about in the twentieth century. The French also took away a key player in science when they executed Antoine Lavoisier in 1794 at the age of 51.
The POD is simple: Lavoisier escapes to England and continues his scientific pursuits. In 1812, he is 69. That year, Michael Faraday is 21 and his education would have already benefited from a larger accumulation of knowledge in chemistry and electricity.
To get to the moon in 1940 or 1950, you will need nothing less than Apollo-era technology. To get it early, you need to accelerate developments in the critical path: chemistry, electricity, metallurgy, thermodynamics, electronics.
You are probably right, but this--"they had a workable conception of the atom (well, they will once they discover radioactivity)"--is where I think things could go wrong. But the OP is asking for the best possible space flight scenario, so, sure, lets say that experimentation with radioactivity gives them an atom model that's workable for developing fission earlier than in OTL.
Space flight may be the least interesting of the effects of this POD.
That's a pretty wordy way of "refusing to add more fuel to the fire." Sayonara, lumpen. Have fun with your new petrol-based flame retardant.
That's pretty much what I was thinking. IOTL, atomic theory seems to have been developed linearly from exploring around radioactivity. TTL research will suffer from the absence of 60 years of complementary advancement in other field of physics, which I tried to compensate for by immediately dropping the discovery of radioactivity directy into the laps of Gauss and Weber, whose work on electromagnetic field theory (already well underway by the POD, which was near the end of Gauss's career and early-mid-career for Weber) gives them the best understanding of complementary fields of physics necessary to develop atomic theory available at the time. I also tried to compensate by giving the research a political patron who would soon become extremely powerful (Bismark) so research into atomic theory would be actively pursued and fully funded from the beginning, rather than occurring in fits and starts until military applications become apparent and urgent as in OTL.
Admiral Matt brings up a good point about electronics and precision tools necessary to build a nuke. For an early nuke, even if the atomic theory is there, there's still a dillema in the engineering of the bomb. Once atomic theory is mature enough to build an experimental heavy-water reactor, purifying plutonium chemically from spent fuel rods is relatively straightforward, but building an implosion device is difficult with 1940s tech. A basic enriched uranium bomb is very easy to build from an engineering standpoint and could have been done with 1890 tech, but enriching uranium to weapons grade is extremely difficult even with 1940s tech. I don't know enough about the history of the techiques and prerequisite knowledge involved in either option to evaluate how plausible it would be for an 1890s Manhattan Project with accellerated knowledge of atomic theory to develop the techniques necessary on the fly.
Guidance, control, and life support are major concerns for any attempt to accelerate a moon landing, as is the metallurgical and design skills to build a craft that's light enough and strong enough for the job. That's why I focused on an Orion-type spacecraft -- the massive lifting power gives you a bigger margin of error for guidance and control, allows you enough surplus payload to carry more compressed oxygen to compensate for less effective pressure seals and less tech available for scrubbing CO2 (although by 1900, life support tech was already good enough to support submarines and deep ocean diving). It might not be good enough, but it's the best shot I could come up with to get to the moon by only accellerating one facet of technology.
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I think Chinese Gordon would disagree with you about that. The Mahdist movement, and similar movements which pre-existed it, shows that extremism had been a current within Islam long before the fall of the Ottoman Empire. I know it's fashionable in some quarters to blame all the woes of the Islamic world on the West, but it's really not true.
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I think Chinese Gordon would disagree with you about that. The Mahdist movement, and similar movements which pre-existed it, shows that extremism had been a current within Islam long before the fall of the Ottoman Empire. I know it's fashionable in some quarters to blame all the woes of the Islamic world on the West, but it's really not true.
Due to the unstable nature of the photosensitive chemicals involved, early photographers primed the photographic medium immediately before they took the photograph. There were no prepared photographic plates laying about until George Eastman developed the dry plate process in 1888. Allowing time for the dry plates to become common enough for Becquerel's accident to take place, the discovery of radioactivity cannot be pushed much back from OTL 1896.
After doing a bit of digging on wikipedia, I think I've found a workaround for that problem. The dry plate process was invented too late for my timeline (1871, actually, but that's still much too late -- you're thinking of Eastman's celluloid roll film, which was the next step in refinement after the wet plate process). Even the wet plate process wasn't invented until 1850. In 1848, the main process used was daguerreotypes, which involved mercury vapor as well as a freshly-prepared plate and appears even more unsuitable for accidental discovery of radioactivity than the wet plate process.
However, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calotype">Calotypes</a> were invented in 1841 and used a treated-paper medium that could be prepared in advance and stored several days before use, like a dry plate. Accidental discovery of radioactivity with calotype film would require an unlikely series of coincidences (since the ingredients were relatively expensive, the technique doesn't seem to have been widely used, the medium was considerably less sensitive than Bequerel's dry plates so they'd require a stronger radiation source to produce visible fogging, and the process was tempermental enough that a radiation-fogged photograph would very likely be assumed to be the result of mispreperation or mishandling), which pretty handily explains why radioactivity wasn't discovered IOTL until the dry plate process was in widespread use.
The moon landings took advantage of the limits of so many branches of engineering technology that I don't think there are any credible POD's that could bring it more than 20 or 30 years sooner.
The 4-cycle Otto engine was invented in the 1860's, yet it would be 40 years before the Wright brothers would use it to propel their first airplane. If somebody improves on the engine to take off before 1870, you will apply impetus to engine and fuel technology. After that, aviation and rocket science will still have to wait on the already rapid deployment of technology from 1870 to 1925.
Technology and communication will require the works of Edison, Bell, Tesla, and a host of others. Can transistor technology and microchip technology be pushed back into the twenties and thirties? What about the Kroll process for extracting titanium (1946)? Don't forget plastics.
If you butterfly away the world wars and push the military-industrial complex in a different direction, you can pick up a few decades on space technology.
What about atomic science? Is it really part of the critical path to space travel? I don't think it needs to come any faster to get to space. It's just that if you push the cutting edge of science to space, you will get to atomic/nuclear power along the way.
The 4-cycle Otto engine was invented in the 1860's, yet it would be 40 years before the Wright brothers would use it to propel their first airplane. If somebody improves on the engine to take off before 1870, you will apply impetus to engine and fuel technology. After that, aviation and rocket science will still have to wait on the already rapid deployment of technology from 1870 to 1925.
Technology and communication will require the works of Edison, Bell, Tesla, and a host of others. Can transistor technology and microchip technology be pushed back into the twenties and thirties? What about the Kroll process for extracting titanium (1946)? Don't forget plastics.
If you butterfly away the world wars and push the military-industrial complex in a different direction, you can pick up a few decades on space technology.
What about atomic science? Is it really part of the critical path to space travel? I don't think it needs to come any faster to get to space. It's just that if you push the cutting edge of science to space, you will get to atomic/nuclear power along the way.
The thing is, electronics aren't necessary with a big enough rocket. Clockwork computers can do well enough. Life support systems to scrub CO2 from the air were known long before 1900. Atomic science isn't necessary, unless you can't find another method of electricity production. How far back do thermoionic converters go?
Aluminum is the best material for a spacecraft, but steel will be needed for propulsion structures without titanium. So, to reduce weight, air-augmented rockets would be necessary. Odds of that?
Umm you want the ATL to do in-flight orbital mechanic calculations for delta-vee manuevers to control orbits on clockwork computers ??
Rather than judge your intelligence, I would prefer to ask you to clarify clockwork computers??? Is that like whats-his-names machine, that first programmable computer that his daughter programmed?
The full on Babbage machine, which is equivalent in computational terms to a Turing machine, hence perfectly capable of doing anything we ask a computer to do nowadays (albeit much slower). That is, I'm sure, what he was thinking of. I still disagree with him, though. The only "fast" PoD like what the OP was talking about that could accelerate space travel but not take too long to take effect would be one about the time that the Wright brothers are flying. Avoid the first and second world wars and end up with multiple great powers in a Cold War, maybe you'll be able to get there in the '40s or '50s. Heck, just have the USSR and USA decide they need a space race in 1945 instead of 1957 and you might speed it up to the late '50s.