Maybe the world has lots of forests, inviting people to live high in the trees, or high mountain ranges. Maybe there's a reason for people to look up at the sky more often - perhaps there are more comets, or more extreme auroras, or a second moon, or something else that makes scientists think, "Huh, that's worth studying." This has the potential to accelerate the study of physics and astronomy. Perhaps you can get by with gunpowder for the initial launch, then use the dangerous stuff once you get to space. If you need less energy to escape the planet, maybe you need less volatile fuels. Here are some things that could at the very least make it slightly less impossible to get to space: Renaissance people were several centuries behind on all of them. Plus - and this could arguable go under the section on propulsion - we didn't understand chemical reactions. We lacked calculus and numerical techniques to computer rocket trajectories. Kepler and Newton wouldn't come around for another century or two, meaning that we really didn't know why objects moved in space, nor how a spacecraft would move once it got up there. I'd also argue that computers would be needed once in space, to ensure that the engines burned exactly as needed. Figuring out paths by hand would be extraordinarily time-consuming. You don't need a supercomputer to calculate the right trajectory for a spacecraft, but you probably still need a computer. Back then, we didn't even understand how combustion worked, let alone hypergolic rocket fuels.Ĭomputers. That's strike one - I don't see a way for Renaissance people to, say, produce or store liquid oxygen. If you want to get to space, you need to know how to make and (more importantly) handle highly reactive, dangerous, explosive materials. There are some particular places where Renaissance people are scientifically or technologically deficient: Renaissance humans would need to make some enormous technological leaps to even fly like modern humans do, let alone go to space. Our understanding of science and our abilities in engineering are nowhere near where they were half a millennium ago. The technological gap between the Renaissance and the present day is enormous. I'm having a hard time being optimistic about this.
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