It's Not Rocket Science

The title of this piece is a common call to most people. Whenever something isn't understood, whenever things don't work the way they should, the aggrieved party, usually either the person who does understand it (or thinks he or she does, anyway), or the person who is inconvenienced (to put it mildly) when the thing doesn't work. It's the same as saying, "if we can put a man on the Moon, why can't we..." except that I don't think we could put a man on the Moon at the moment.

Why people always use rocket science or the space program as illustrative of the greatest complexity one might be forced to fathom is anyone's guess; they're both related, so there must be a good reason. Certainly, rockets and space are devilishly complicated things, and I don't pretend to understand them. Undoubtedly it comes from a time when they were some of the most complicated things humans could do. Now of course, I'd be willing to say that things having to do with computers probably fit that bill, but since the space program also involves computers, the comparison is still apt.

Study the failure rates of space programs, and you might come to the conclusion that we've been had, however. How many people have died as a result of space accidents? Proportionally few. I don't have figures, but if the failure rates on manned spaceflight were anything close to the failure rates on most normal gadgets, we'd be lucky if any rockets got off the ground, let alone into space.

So why are non-rocket-science things so hard to get working? Why can't simple devices have the failure rates of much more complicated and expensive things? Well, because failures of many things are much less catastrophic: if the toaster burns your toast, it's hardly the end of the world. But why can't they make these things work properly?

I doubt if I've ever met a computer program that did what it was supposed to without any hassle at all 100% of the time. And that's averaged out over all the computers I've met; most of them are much worse. Cars break down, people break down, and other things break down too, like the song says. Why can't things work right? It's not rocket science.

All I'm doing is outlining the problem and then complaining about it, but it is a problem. Which brings to mind another aphorism I've heard: "Make toast some time and then tell me whether you'd ever want to go into space." Maybe it's my inner Luddite, but I don't trust technology; it's never perfect, and most of the time it's far from it. If they can't get simple things to work properly, every time, with no hassle, in a well-designed manner, would you trust them to make complicated things work right? I have my doubts.