Facebook is addictive. There's nothing addictive on Mars. If we discover space crack then we will have a real space program.
You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
101–110 of 230 posts
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#102Seems like we don't get Mars colonies and supersonic jets for good economic reasons? These are luxuries at best. It's a nostalgic idea of progress only tenuously related to actual progress.
More relevant questions might be why the cost of housing hasn't improved and why we haven't cured cancer yet.
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#103Mars colonies don't come from the private sector, Elon and Jeff notwithstanding. The problem is that public science has been starved of funding for decades through tax cuts. If the author would take off his (it's always a he) blinkers of technocracy he might see that profitability is not the only measure of "why." Some things are not profitable, yet are still worth doing. Andrew Yang-lite doesn't account for this at…
>Mars colonies don't come from the private sector, Elon and Jeff notwithstanding
Exploration has a long history of rich benefactors and private interests. Monarchs, Dutch East India Corporation, etc., are closer to Musk and Bezos than a modern democratic state
>The problem is that public science has been starved of funding for decades through tax cuts.
This graph suggests otherwise? In current dollar terms, R&D spending is double what it was in the 1970s.
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#104Am I the only one who feels weird reading this article on LinkedIn?
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#105Remember: Back to the Future?
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#106In a way, FB is more useful than Mars colonies could ever hope to be. How the hell do you even survive on a planet without a magnetic field to repel cosmic radiation? A few kamikaze will go, but it's lunacy to expect some kind of massive and growing settlement there. It'll likely be an extremely expensive counterpart of the ISS or an arctic research station. You aren't ever going to get it to more than a few hundred people. Inspiring? Hell yeah. But beyond that also pointless.
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the bigger lie is that you absolutely need VCs to finance your idea.
What do you think is a better way to fund a manned mission to Mars? It's hard to argue with the progress that SpaceX has made - and that wouldn't exist without VC funding. Meanwhile NASA continues to operate at the whims of Congress. It's doing fine, but it's not looking for any moonshots like it was 50 years ago.
While agree they are at the whims of government, they literally have a moonshot in planning.
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#108Forget mars colonies, i just want robots that can do household chores that don't cost more than a vacuum cleaner (and i think roombas are overpriced), where's Rosie?! That's hard, let's build the 10000th chat app instead, e.g. why did this cost $120 million https://qz.com/1194939/the-us-government-just-gave-someone-a... ? Can't we do better now with 3d printing? I dunno, i think we're getting there : https://www.yout…
Thought: is the migration of manufacturing away from western countries part of the problem? Lots of innovation in software in the US or UK, but less in manufacturing - perhaps because the skills aren’t there?
Is there really a lack of innovation in manufacturing? 3D printers (hyped though they are) are improving rapidly. Nanoscale stuff (not just graphene and chips, but also those) are seeing a lot of progress.
I’m not in hardware though, so I can’t tell if that’s part of a trend or not.
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#109I’m surprised this article is so upvoted. 1. The author took this nearly word for word from Thiel/Eric Weinstein, who have both discussed this point extensively, most recently on Weinstein’s podcast. 2. The author is using this click bait headline to discuss his own industry/company, and this looks like some content marketing piece.
Agreed. It's actually a worse version of the Thiel/Weinstein framing, because the author posits the divide between "connection driven" and "applied science" innovation, which is a less useful distinction than the "bits" v "atoms" distinction.
The "bits" v "atoms" distinction is better because software as a whole has seen dramatic innovation that is not confined to "networks".
Feels like a marketing piece for the author's company TBH.
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think is a better way to fund a manned mission to Mars? It's hard to argue with the progress that SpaceX has made - and that wouldn't exist without VC funding. Meanwhile NASA continues to operate at the whims of Congress. It's doing fine, but it's not looking for any moonshots like it was 50 years ago.
While agree they are at the whims of government, they literally have a moonshot in planning.
Sure, but it's obviously going to fail to meet its deadline. It's politics completely disconnected from reality. Let's see how much Congress is willing to increase NASA's funding to actually make it a success, especially as they continue to miss deadlines.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/another-nasa-moonshot-nope-you...
> "If NASA is not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the moon in five years, we need to change the organization, not the mission." -Mike Pence
I actually think this is a thinly veiled plan to defund NASA in the long run.