# Things that are basically impossible **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [February 9, 2017, 4:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374 "2017-02-09T04:46:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2017, 6:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374/101 "2017-02-16T06:38:42Z")
Well, we have a tendency to think that we are smarter than our ancestors, but this is clearly not the case. Human intelligence has not changed in tens or hundreds of millennia, we just have different perspectives. As impressive as those ancient artifacts are, they are not really all that remarkable. There have always been very smart people who figure things out in creative ways. In truth, one might guess that these cellphone things have led to a general decline in intelligence, because we do not have to use our brains as effectively as we would have to without them. I no longer have to remember much, because I can always look it up on wiki-thingy. And we do not have to plan our activities thoroughly, because we can always call up that other person and coördinate stuff on the fly. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2017, 10:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374/102 "2017-02-16T10:33:00Z")
> [@eschereal](#): > > In truth, one might guess that these cellphone things have led to a general decline in intelligence, because we do not have to use our brains as effectively as we would have to without them. I no longer have to remember much, because I can always look it up on wiki-thingy. And we do not have to plan our activities thoroughly, because we can always call up that other person and coördinate stuff on the fly. If this is true, we must have been geniuses prior to the invention of print, and out-of-the-world super-genius beings before we developed language, and could coordinate based on convenient symbols instead of having to do everything ourselves. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2017, 12:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374/103 "2017-02-16T12:22:01Z")
Thanks for this thread, I needed a bit of perspective regarding the wonders of the world we take for granted so often. > [@Lemur866](#): > > Radio makes sense, but TV? You expect me to believe they can send moving pictures by radio? Sure, streaming video on the internet, that’s fine, even though it uses radio wifi signal to send the digital file to your goddam phone. > > But just send a radio to a box, and it somehow knows how to turn it into a picture, with no computers in there or anything? And like you said, they invented this in the 20s, with stone knives and bearskins? Even more preposterously, the thing that actually translates those ephemeral waves into pictures (or at least, used to do so before flatscreens became the norm). I mean, you have a lattice of dots that each flash in one of three colours if hit by an electron beam, and three such beams are directed across the dot matrix, line by line, hitting the right dots, steered by electromagnetic fields quickly enough as to be seen as a complete picture—and not just that, but producing pictures in succession fast enough that the human eye perceives them as a continuous motion? No. Just no. ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2017, 1:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374/104 "2017-02-16T13:02:39Z")
There are thousands of people who can hit small round ball with a narrow round bat with a half-inch contact point, consistently and with considerable strength, after seeing the ball in flight for less than a half a second, delivered with a variable spin and deceptive speed and trajectory. Many practitioners of this stunt are so adept, that you could put a thumbtack in the bat, and they would drive the tack in flush by hitting the ball with it. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2017, 1:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374/105 "2017-02-16T13:50:04Z")
Amazing how a shift in perspective works. [Paging through the various pages (and pages… ) of Genre Deconstruction at TVTropes](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreDeconstruction), I naturally thought about deconstructing “deconstruction” (that is, the lazy deconstruction which simply makes things Grim And Gritty) by “deconstructing” reality. (As in, sadder doesn’t necessarily mean “more real”, because good and amazing things _do_ happen, yadda yadda yadda… ) Anyway. I had a thought relevant to this thread. "You mean to tell me that there are these chemicals which can reliably kill infectious agents _at the cellular level_, but do it _without_ killing the infected person, due to handwave handwave ‘different cellular structures’, handwave handwave ‘different transport mechanisms’ handwave handwave? _And_ that a number of them barely make people sick, as compared to the horrible lingering death the infection would cause? _And_ most of the useful standbys are fairly cheap? Pull the other one. It’s got bells on. It doesn’t _work_. Infectious disease is a major killer. People die of infections. In wars, when people are deliberately trying to kill each other in large numbers, infections kill more than weapons. It’s been a constant throughout this whole thing. And now it’s not true in large portions of the world. You don’t _do_ that. Reality isn’t that nice. Injecting that note of fantasy just kills the whole thing." Antibiotics are amazing from the right (uh, overwhelmingly ignorant and cynical, I suppose) perspective. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2017, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374/106 "2017-02-16T14:40:32Z")
OK, now I just can’t stay away. Taking down ignorant cynicism is _fun_: "Cities. You wanna talk about cities? Let’s talk about cities. You have millions of people living in the same general area, all sharing the same facilities, all making their way down the same roads, the same sidewalks, the same public spaces. It would be _chaos_. It would be the Hobbesean war of All Against All, and I ain’t talking about laundry detergent. The violence would be total and never-ending. Nobody would be able to sleep nights. Nobody would be able to go to work… Work, Hell: Work presumes businesses, and there ain’t no business being done in a warzone. Even the gang-bangers would be forced off the street by the _real_ violent types, the thousands of complete murderous psychotics and sociopaths who kill because the voices in their heads won’t stop or because it gives them an orgasm or because they happen to have a gun that day. It’s all a matter of percentages: If even one percent, one tiny little percent of all human beings is a dangerous violent lunatic with a grudge against humanity, you have 50,000 of those monsters in New York City alone. Fifty thousand violent cases, unrestrained, unmedicated, with no respect for life and no reason to _not_ kill a few dozen today. Get the picture? One percent means it’s _over_. The simple fact is, if the next person you see walking towards you could think that killing you and wearing your head like a hat would brighten their day, you wouldn’t go out unless you had enough ammo to take on a platoon. The slightest provocation could cause a violent case to kill you, so you kill them first. Bang. It’s done. Society is done. The last person will please turn off the lights when they leave." And some people _still_ think humans are fundamentally evil. ---
**Author:** ![DesertDog](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/desertdog/32/11503_2.png) [@DesertDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DesertDog)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2017, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374/107 "2017-02-16T16:24:41Z")
> [@Machine\_Elf](#): > > Computer tech ought to be impossible on similar grounds. Got a 128GB flash drive? That’s 8 bits per byte, so you’ve got something in your hand the size of a stick of gum, with _over a trillion_ bits. That’s enough for about 366 million pages of text. Like a million books. Seriously, you can fit several libraries’ worth of information in the palm of your hand. How can we miniaturize things to such an insane degree?\* Decades ago I read a science fiction story about an alien civilization that had come upon the remains of our human civilization; there was no life left, just a bunch of moldering artifacts. An archeologist was tasked with finding out what had caused the collapse and the story was in the form of a report back to HQ. He (it?) had determined that the proximate cause was the total loss of knowledge. The information’s storage medium was denser and denser (I think the ultimate was “nudged electrons” where the displacement encoded the info) until the sum of all human knowledge fit into something the size of a shoebox. The _index_, though, took up whole planets. Then the key was lost. The report ended with the warning that the same could happen to them so they’d better watch out to ensure that it did not, then a series of terse notes back and forth between the author and the Head Librarian arguing over the proper classification of the report – they had already started down the slippery slope. To reply to the OP, I love movies. When I was a boy I used to dream of having a home theater and a collection of my favorite ones but knew in my heart of hearts the infeasibility of doing so. Today I have a collection of over three hundred DVDs and Blu-Ray disks I can view on my large-screen, 4k monitor but the accumulation of those disks has slowed down considerably because – you know – streaming. ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2017, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374/108 "2017-02-16T16:28:11Z")
> [@jtur88](#): > > There are thousands of people who can hit small round ball with a narrow round bat with a half-inch contact point, consistently and with considerable strength, after seeing the ball in flight for less than a half a second, delivered with a variable spin and deceptive speed and trajectory. Many practitioners of this stunt are so adept, that you could put a thumbtack in the bat, and they would drive the tack in flush by hitting the ball with it. This is especially impressive because, isn’t there a half-second lag between eye perception and brain reaction? ---
**Author:** ![Machine\_Elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2017, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374/109 "2017-02-16T16:47:41Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > This is especially impressive because, isn’t there a half-second lag between eye perception and brain reaction? More like a [quarter-second.](http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime) And that’s an average - which is to say that the average person would probably make a shitty MLB hitter. The front page of that site shows a nice histogram of response times, and at the left edge of the histogram there are plenty of people coming in at under 200 ms; that’s where you look for hitters. Good top-fuel dragster drivers [can react in less than 100 ms.](http://sports.yahoo.com/nascar/blog/from_the_marbles/post/How-much-does-reaction-time-matter-in-the-NHRA-?urn=nascar,242984) ---
**Author:** ![Enola\_Straight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dec6dc/32.png) [@Enola\_Straight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enola_Straight)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2017, 4:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374/110 "2017-02-17T04:28:46Z")
Scientists can make a proton fly at 99+% clockwise through a multi kilometer track, simultaneously, an antiproton races counter-clockwise on that same track, and right on cue, those to particles will collide at _this_ spot at _that_ instant. How the hell can you aim subatomic particles at _each other?_ ---
**Author:** ![mikecurtis](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mikecurtis/32/3284_2.png) [@mikecurtis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mikecurtis)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2017, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374/111 "2017-02-17T05:38:43Z")
you cant. from wiki: . . .A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to nearly light speed and to contain them in **well-defined beams**. . . ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2017, 6:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374/112 "2017-02-17T06:28:32Z")
Yeah, it does seem pretty preposterous that cities aren’t consumed by daily riots and mass murders. But we live in a world where if a riot breaks out, it’s a big fucking deal and makes the news! Crazy. ---
**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2017, 6:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374/113 "2017-02-17T06:34:09Z")
The EM drive is another “impossible” idea that has some mainstream scientific support. NASA has tested it and it seems to work at least a little. That is a huge deal because it apparently violates the known laws of physics. If it does really work and can be scaled up, it could be used to build thrusters that don’t use any propellant at all and could propel future spacecraft to extremely high speeds. We obey the laws of physics in my house but there may be something going on there that is even stranger than over the air TV. If it does turn out to work, it could be a huge deal. > **[It's Official: NASA's Peer-Reviewed EM Drive Paper Has Finally Been Published](https://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-nasa-s-peer-reviewed-em-drive-paper-has-finally-been-published)** > > After months of speculation and leaked documents, NASA's long-awaited EM Drive paper has finally been peer-reviewed and published. And it shows that the 'impossible' propulsion system really does appear to work.  The NASA Eagleworks... ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2017, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374/114 "2017-02-17T14:17:13Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Yeah, it does seem pretty preposterous that cities aren’t consumed by daily riots and mass murders. But we live in a world where if a riot breaks out, it’s a big fucking deal and makes the news! Crazy. Yeah, when a kid takes a gun to school and shoots a few people, the anchorette tears her beautiful hair and exclaims “Why does a kid do that?” – and I keep wondering why SO FEW kids do that. What restrains them to such uniform docility? ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2017, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374/115 "2017-02-17T19:00:09Z")
> [@jtur88](#): > > Yeah, when a kid takes a gun to school and shoots a few people, the anchorette tears her beautiful hair and exclaims “Why does a kid do that?” – and I keep wondering why SO FEW kids do that. What restrains them to such uniform docility? Evolution has rendered us so. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-basically-impossible/779374.md?page=5)