Drunk on Metaphor

It is counterintuitive, but innovation in some sense has to play it safe, because what eventually gets rolled out has to fit in the larger system over generations, as a piece of the puzzle, long after the buzz has worn off from the metaphors.

I always like to use the analogy of da Vinci's helicopter: He had the idea in the 16th century, but it took four hundred years to invent (or accumulate) all the technologies to make it viable. This then pushes a Mars colony back to 2418.

If language and metaphor are catalysts of ambition, alien civilizations must have an equivalent moonshot metaphor. But there's big difference from going from one stone to another in a solar system, and going to another star system. 'Starshot' is an even better idea if language is your 'propellant'. "Shoot for the stars" and the star-celebrity metaphors are now a metonymical Universals. Something insidiously powerful is going on with language that we don't always realize.