71–80 of 86 posts
If we're discussing garbage content from the NY Times, then their criticism of Robert Goddard tops the list for me https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2018/07/19/the-corre...
It's a bit difficult to arrive at any number of years past 10,000 for any invention imaginable, past that they will all be unimaginable.
What about a Dyson sphere? Or time travel? Or FTL travel?
This isn't a prediction, it's a joke. The context of the article makes it clear that he's making a joking comparison to the evolution of birds.
What is the point of publishing such an opinion on a newspaper? People often point out how ridiculous these projections turned out to be, but seemingly nobody challenges their reason for existing.
So, the "Big Thinks" assertion here is that sometimes people are wrong and as a result incorrectly predict the future and that this pattern continues today. This is all so obvious and leads to no specific conclusion so I have to wonder, who is this article actually _for_? People who just don't like hearing the word "no?" The Navy general was partly right. The government was the wrong entity to pursue flight and it wa…
Whatever conclusion the big think article draws is on a misreading of the source NYT article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How exactly are you measuring "return" in this case? Because I feel that would be nearly impossible.
Right! Even taking "return" very literally, the lunar rock samples brought back are incredibly valuable to science. And the spinoff/technological stimulus value of the program is even harder to quantify--consider that during one year, Project Apollo purchased >60% of U.S. semiconductor production. This was a critical early market for Fairchild Semiconductor, e.g. [1] [1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=gXYItzQARVo…
The moon rocks, not so much. We have meteorites that came from moon. And from Mars! I could happily leave aside sending anything more to Mars.
Maybe it makes you feel good, but overall it was just a huge time waste for everyone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't just national prestige, it was a component of the arms race that defined all geopolitical relations in that era.
So few people seem to realize that the point of many of these technological/societal achievements wasn’t necessarily the deliverable itself, but the development and implication of capabilities required to achieve them. In simple terms, it was sending a global message: “If our propulsion and guidance technology can put people on the moon, imagine what else would be trivial for us?”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The moon program was extremely expensive and the return (scientific or otherwise) was rather small in comparison.
The Apollo program is estimated to have generated a ROI of $7-8 for every dollar spent by NASA. Today NASA has a budget of around $20 billion but they generate $70 billion in economic output. 0: https://nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/newspace3.html 1: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/3721375-how-much-does...