111–120 of 297 posts
I'm for space programs, but India is one of the poorest countries on earth, and spending that kind of money on social programs would actually have an impact on it's population. And then it looks like it failed on top of that, which is honestly not surprising, since space programs are so sensitive to minor quality issues and quality is the hardest thing for a 3rd world country. If I was living in India and struggling…
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> GP is just highlighting that India's ruling party made this unnecessarily political. I'm not sure why it's being downvoted when it's factually accurate and is interesting in the context of the discussion. Could you share some citations to justify your comment? There is no evidence out there that Chandrayaan was politicized by the Government. ISRO is funded by the Government and Department of Space directly comes un…
Why should there be something distracting on launch day ?
It's a good effort by ISRO and it's scientist. Just can't understand why so many countries reinventing the wheels. Space missions should be multi-country efforts continuously as it belongs to all. We should not extend our tribal nationalistic thinking to space. Best scientist can be in any nation and more diverse the group and experience the better chances of success. I know I am just dreaming, but hopefully we can c…
Reinventing wheels is hugely important to advancing technology, both between countries and between companies. The notion that getting rid of competition is beneficial because of the saving in redundant effort is an evergreen fallacy.
The problem with doing single efforts is the huge risk that the effort screws up, or is subverted for illegitimate purposes, and if there's no redundancy it blocks everything. Single efforts become breeding grounds of entitlement and rent seeking.
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Well let's revisit this statement in 500 years. Every decade has brought the world closer. Even the recent developments (brexit, trump) are reactions to increased pace of integration. You can find kfc, coca cola in socities as diverse as Mongolia and Madagascar. It will be extremely difficult to turn the clock back on this and this will only keep on intensifying in my opinion.
Integration is such an interesting term. Before we got to see what the internet actually became, it was a realm of endless idealism. It was going to be something that would finally unite people across cultures and any sort of boundaries. People would be able to share ideas, communicate instantly, and effectively turn humanity from a disparate group of people separated by arbitrary lines into simple a group of diverse…
The main problem with this argument and others statements similar to it is that we don't have objective evidence for the state of the world in 1200.
The information from before cheap printing is heavily biased, mostly hearsay from few individual sources that had their own agenda.
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> We’re different groups of people What sort of groups, precisely? Historically, the concept of a "nation" (as the "nat-" root implies) is a people born of the same ancestry, a people native to the same land. Parthians, Medes and Elamites, and so forth - sharing an ethnicity, a language, and a culture. Yet the first two "nations" to reach space, the US and the USSR, were hardly that. Sure, each had a majority ethnic…
“Groups of people” doesn’t need to mean “ethnicity.” There’s a lot of political conflict in the Us, but it’s not primarily along ethnic or religious lines, for example. But there are groups of people, and they are different. Farmers in Iowa are different people than programmers in San Francisco. Having government necessarily requires those groups of people to make decisions about the lives of other people under the s…
Again, I disagree with this. Plenty of programmers in San Francisco grew up on farms in Iowa. (And to be transparent about my biases here: my parents are Indian Christians, a distinct culture from the Hindu majority; my dad worked for ISRO; and I was born in the Deep South and worked as a programmer in SF for a few years. So the culture of "India" as a whole doesn't resonate with me, nor that of "the Deep South" or "SF" nor "America," and I don't feel like a lesser person for it.)
And I would claim that the fact that you can migrate from an area with one sort of politics / culture / economy / etc. to an area with another one (as a pointed example, anyone remember the "It Gets Better" videos from a few years ago featuring gay people who grew up across the country, half of whom seemed to say "and then I moved to San Francisco"?), and that people do that quite frequently, is evidence that there isn't much reason in attributing politics / culture / etc. to people as people in the way we've historically seen it, i.e., as correlated with place of birth or parentage or childhood culture, or proxies for those like religion.
If anything, the unrealistic part about Star Trek is that the various alien species had personalities influenced by their biology (the Vulcans with weaker emotional processing, the physically resilient Klingons, etc.). If they didn't, given pervasive interstellar transport, it's hard to see why so many people stay on their home planets. (And indeed the whole conceit of the Federation is that they don't have to.)
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This is the kind of fractious factionalist junk that is designed to stoke terrestrial xenophobic fears. Anecdotally I have traveled and met folks abroad as well as interacted with many immigrants domestically, at the end of the day I think it’s safe to say the basic nature of being hunt leads to us all having more in common than not. Now governments being divisive for short sighted power grabs? Sure, but don’t say it…
I completely agree with you, but I also think you cannot hand wave away the small differences. Islam is such a perfect example of this. Sunni and Shia Muslims have been literally killing each other for about 1400 years now. Why? One side believes that Mohammed's father-in-law should have been his successor, the other side believes that his son-in-law should have been his successor. Their fundamental views and values…
no, that difference is not the reason, that difference is the fabricated reason. The actual reason is the power transfer, and who gets to call the shots and be the "official" true heir.
I anything this example shows that conflict is always created by people and is about power and influence and never about "objective/valid" reasons.
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The convergence is massive and even faster than in the 90s. Languages die nearly daily (a language dies when its last speaker dies) and with them their culture, and people consume the same media and news all of the world. I'm not going to dig up some links on the net, you can do that yourself, but these are measurable phenomena. You're thinking in short, next twenty years or so. A resurgence of nationalism is a respo…
> You're thinking in short, next twenty years or so I suspect the drawdown of easily-accessible, dense, cheap fossil fuels will spell the end of global integration; consider a very low-energy future where most communication takes place via radio and travel for 99% takes place at a fraction of today's rate. We would expect regional differences to increase as groups adapt to local areas, ideally while carrying out exte…
I read that the maximum experiments are in the orbiter so this is a successful mission. The only thing for which it 'failed' was to let the ruling class do chest thumping by saying 'we are the fourth country to land a rover'. The ruling party had planned a great celebration today for it's 100 days in office, a date coinciding when the rover would land! They wanted to milk it for their nationalistic purposes while the…
Regarding Nehru, one good deed doesn't get rid of his other sins and royal screw ups.