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And still mostly wasted. Look after the people on Earth first. Once we show we can accomplish that, then and only then do we begin to earn the stars.
Sorry, but no. There's billions of people on earth; we can tackle many problems at once in parallel.
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And we haven't been back in 50 years, despite all the incredible technology improvements. The Apollo guidance computers had "several tens of thousands of transistors"[0], we now have 19 billion in our pocket! 0: https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/apollo-11-mank... .
Why go to the moon a second time?
In terms of usefulness and end user experience, I find no difference between the iPhone X (A11, 4 billion transistors) and my current 14. Seems to me that all that extra processing power is still looking for a use case.
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At some level, I think this is orthogonal to technological progress. One possible way of getting at this is to ask if people were more ‘happy’ when there wasn’t this level of tech available - and I’m not sure the answer is yes - I mean, there’s the mythos of ‘a simple life’ and ‘noble savages’, but from what I’ve read of life even a 100 years back - I would surmise folks were as unhappy / miserable then too - but lik…
Maybe happy isn’t the right word, but I think it’s pretty clear people were more content and felt a sense of purpose. Social media has made things worse, but it’s really the loss of community and religion that has led to the crisis of loneliness and depression among todays people.
For instance I’m sure that a major factor is the need for people to move great distances away from family and the community they grew up in to be able to find education, living wages, and other forms of opportunity. That breaks existing connections and makes it harder to form new ones, but I never see that talked about.
I've often struggled to really "grok" how complex chips are. They all kinda look the same. I write software, so I know how complex that is, but like the device itself -- it's this little black box. What's the difference between one little black box and another? Most people don't even get that far; they think the computer is the screen that lights up. I've been reading datasheets a lot at work. The datasheet for an ST…
I do miss working directly with small, simple (relatively), cheap chips. I don't miss dealing directly with the low level bus protocols though. I still have stress nightmares about diagnosing can bus and i2c bus problems with an oscilloscope. Like in the stress dream I'll either forget some important details about the protocol and not understand what is going on at all, or I will remember everything in perfect detail but be unable to speak and explain what's wrong to the other person who's there working on the issue.
I've often struggled to really "grok" how complex chips are. They all kinda look the same. I write software, so I know how complex that is, but like the device itself -- it's this little black box. What's the difference between one little black box and another? Most people don't even get that far; they think the computer is the screen that lights up. I've been reading datasheets a lot at work. The datasheet for an ST…
I've often struggled to really "grok" how complex chips are. They all kinda look the same. I write software, so I know how complex that is, but like the device itself -- it's this little black box. What's the difference between one little black box and another? Most people don't even get that far; they think the computer is the screen that lights up. I've been reading datasheets a lot at work. The datasheet for an ST…
There's no way in hell people can make sense of 19 billion separate concepts. Likely what's going on in the chip is just repeated patterns designed to make a very simple machine operate really really quickly.
But of course I'm not denying the complexity. But the 19 billion implication here is a bit too much. It's likely just as complex as say linux.
I consider myself very lucky to be born in this age of civilization where technology increases at such incredible pace. Playing games on an atari in my childhood, then sega master system, nintendo, snes, pc games, the first 3d acceleration consumer cards, all the way to having a supercomputer in my pocket. What a time to be alive.
It’s funny, but you’d figure as sophisticated as the manufacturering standards are they could give an exact number. Or couldn’t they?
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I did that in my first comment. How on Earth do you support the claim that one deliberately self-imposed limit on human progress can't be compared with another?
You defined the limitation as "looking after the people on earth first," which has basically no meaning, so no, I would not say that you adequately defined those constraints in your first comment. > How on Earth do you support the claim that one deliberately self-imposed limit on human progress can't be compared with another? You're being obtuse. There's a much more clearly defined intersection of human ethics when i…
I don't think it has less meaning than the idea that the most sere and hostile environment for our species that we've yet been able to access - the deadliest imaginable desert, accessible only at vast effort and expense - has for our taking the boundless cornucopia of riches that space maximalists constantly promise, and with no more support than you complain I offer.
Meanwhile you blithely argue that some significant fraction of a trillion dollars, available in this happy counterfactual from what had been the war department's budget, should be devoted to this and nothing else, with no thought to the opportunity cost - and demand I justify myself in arguing we should better do otherwise!
That opportunity cost would be measured in human lives, consigned to neglectful death in the service of your cause - but whether by neglect or murder, dead is dead. You'd be far from the first so to act; history is replete with examples, even ignoring the one we live among now. Such people are sometimes called to account. What would you say if you were?