111–120 of 165 posts
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These are all factors but they pale in comparison with the fact that the US was at war, and was trying to catch up with the phenomenal lead of the USSR. Silicon Valley loves talking about "moonshots", but that parlance gets so much wrong. What is important is not the moonshot moment. It is the sputnik moment that is disruptive.
Interesting thought. I guess in a way AI is having its "sputnik" moment now.
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I still just cannot wrap my mind around how we could get people there, and then all this time later have lost that ability. What happened?
"Lost the ability" is an odd way of putting it. "Lost the budget" is better. Ideally we wouldn't have to pick and choose, but since I wasn't US Dictator during the 90s, the Hubble Space Telescope + a lot of probes throughout the solar system was probably more impactful for overall scientific discovery than the counterfactual where NASA invested in continued moon landings.
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The best minds of our generation are working on byzantine financial derivatives, making social media more addictive, and turning fake pictures/videos/bots as realistic as possible.
> best minds of our generation are working on byzantine financial derivatives, making social media more addictive, and turning fake pictures/videos/bots as realistic as possible Ten years ago, maybe. Today, I'm not sure. It's been a long time since I had that "wow, everyone here is ten times smarter than me" feeling at one of the big tech firms. And to the extent the system works, it's correcting. We're seeing layoff…
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Those are outlawed by international treaties.
So was the invasion of Ukraine, the usage of chemical weapons in Syria, and the enhanced interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib. Outlawed by international treaty doesn’t mean all that much.
Impressive feat. Got nervous when they couldn't contact the device, but turns out they did made history. I might be wrong, but from my research it seem like they did this with $118 million paid by NASA. India did it with around $74 million, for reference.
That's to be expected, a dollar in India goes much further than a dollar in the US. https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p... says a dollar in India can buy you about 23 times as much stuff as that same dollar could in the US, although I'd expect that number to drop significantly for highly technical projects like a moon landing.
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So was the invasion of Ukraine, the usage of chemical weapons in Syria, and the enhanced interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib. Outlawed by international treaty doesn’t mean all that much.
None of your examples are commercial.
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That's to be expected, a dollar in India goes much further than a dollar in the US. https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p... says a dollar in India can buy you about 23 times as much stuff as that same dollar could in the US, although I'd expect that number to drop significantly for highly technical projects like a moon landing.
Price difference applies only to wages and other non-portable costs. The prices for products and commodities which can be easily moved are roughly equal on global markets due to arbitrage. You can't get the raw materials or computer chips any cheaper in India.
OK, but there are a lot of these.
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Part of it is cost: In the mid sixties, NASA was about five percent of the federal budget. Another part is safety: Apollo was extremely dangerous. There were a lot of single points of failure, three astronauts died on the ground, three more were very very narrowly saved over the course of only about ten missions. One of the reasons the program was cut short was the political worry after Apollo 13 of having astronauts…
Re: who is right So long as; the participants are willing, the death rate is in the single percents per mission,the mission value add on terms of new capability is high, the risk is probably worth it. At least in my opinion.
The Challenger explosion was a moment that defined a generation. Some of that was that Christa McAuliffe was supposed to talk to millions of kids once she got into orbit, but some was just what people projected onto the astronauts generally.
When the three astronauts died in the Apollo 1 fire, no one shed a tear for the 30,000 man-years of effort that went into making the rocket that was destroyed. The effect was about the men themselves, who were considered national heroes, and also what it might have said about the United States that those men died.
Maybe we should treat this differently. Maybe in prior ages of exploration, we did. Back then we didn't have live TV or the internet though that could capture our emotion in the same way, and also in prior ages, not all expeditions were as closely connected with the nation itself.
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So was the invasion of Ukraine, the usage of chemical weapons in Syria, and the enhanced interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib. Outlawed by international treaty doesn’t mean all that much.
None of your examples are commercial.