I am one of those who thought of UFOs as fictional entertainment. I never paid any serious attention to them until I read this informative story,
I took the time to read it in its entirety. While I was reading it, the holy grail of any invention, the S curve, came to my mind.
When you have a new invention, it takes time for it to get traction. That is represented by the lower horizontal segment of the S curve. Once it gets solid traction, it grows fast. This part is represented by the near-vertical segment of the S curve. Then it reaches a saturation state where new additions become marginal. This is represented by the upper horizontal segment of the S curve.
You can get an S curve sketch for about any new invention.
Digital computing started around 1940; I just googled it. FORTRAN was developed in the 1950s by IBM. WWW was new in the early 1990s. Then there was the .com boom a few years later. Today's robots are built on top of that and probably fall on the upper end of the S curve of computer science as of today.
The first satellite, the Sputnik, was launched in 1957 by the former USSR. Today, satellites in geostationary orbits are for common use. I can imagine an S curve for satellite technology as well.
Albert Einstein published his mass to energy conversion equation in 1905. By the 1940s, the atomic bomb was in the store in the U.S. that it decided to drop on the people of Japan. I heard recently that even the President of the U.S. who ordered that dropping didn't know that it existed in the store until he became President, if my memory of the story serves me well.
The process to discover the RNA may have stated more than a century ago. An explosive knowledge about it may have taken close to a century. Today, we have mRNAs that have been found to produce vaccines on a global scale for Covid-19. I think one can also draw an S curve for this discovery.
We can go on with other inventions like the electric light and traffic rules that have become foregranted in many parts of the world.
As my mind raced through all of these inventions and their imagined S curves while I was reading the story, I felt there was a void for one of the best inventions, call it the crown jewel of them, aviation.
The first flight by the Wright Brothers was back in 1903. That was a long time ago. Since then, Einstein's discovery has come into the picture and we have learned that there are people who keep advanced weapons so secret that even a U.S. political leader wouldn't know about it until he became its President. When I combined these three factors as I was reading the story, I could easily see UFOs on the S curve of aviation. My speculation could be wrong but I couldn't stop it. By the way, was Dan Brown talking about UFOs in his Angels and Demons fiction book when he wrote about very fast flights across the Atlantic?
I would take the British boy Mick West who blurt scientific-sounding words seriously if he can answer the following question correctly.
Suppose he wants to divert water to the household in the countryside where he grew up from a nearby river. He wants certain cubic feet of water, let us say d, delivered after certain cubic feet of water lost in conveyance, let us say l, from the diversion point on the river to the delivery point at his household. Let us say diversion is D and the loss is a fraction of the delivery or l = cd, c being the constant fraction. Which of the following two simple equations is the correct one in order to get the right amount of delivery?
A. d = D / (1 + c)
B. d = D * (1 - c)
It is a simple mental exercise to see if he can tell the difference between right and wrong.