Dune quote:

> It is said that the Duke Leto blinded himself to the perils of Arrakis, that he walked heedlessly into the pit.

> *Would it not be more likely to suggest he had lived so long in the presence of extreme danger he misjudged a change in its intensity?*

Be careful of letting your deep, keen insight into the fundamental limits of a thing blind you to its consequences...

Highly competent people have been dead wrong about what is possible (and why) before:

> The most famous, and perhaps the most instructive, failures of nerve have occurred in the fields of aero- and astronautics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists were almost unanimous in declaring that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, and that anyone who attempted to build airplanes was a fool. The great American astronomer, Simon Newcomb, wrote a celebrated essay which concluded…

>> “The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.”

>Oddly enough, Newcomb was sufficiently broad minded to admit that some wholly new discovery — he mentioned the neutralization of gravity — might make flight practical. One cannot, therefore, accuse him of lacking imagination; his error was in attempting to marshal the facts of aerodynamics when he did not understand that science. His failure of nerve lay in not realizing that the means of flight were already at hand.