Scientists sent a rocket to Mars for less than it cost to make “The Martian”
backchannel.com
backchannel.com
My perception of it, growing up plugged in to the Indian science and engineering community is this: Indian Government organizations (essentially, the major employers till the 1990s) were quite progressive when it came to women in the workplace than you'd think based on population statistics of women-at-work, etc. The reason for this imbalance is inequality: millions of women suffering terrible inequality in the lower socio-economic and lower-caste segments of the population offset gains on the higher end.
I remember rubyconfindia 2010 - where 30-40% participants were women. Ola bini or one of the keynote speakers commented this is first rubyconf. where he has seen so many women and I could concur because I have been to many conferences here in US and there never were that many women.
Tech. meetups is another story though. Most meetups in India are organized on weekends and there are hardly any women.
Here is a link to explaining Quotas in Colleges for AP and Telangana. http://www.netbadi.in/reservation-quotas.html?showall=1
Women's Quota for both states in 33.3% (1/3rd has to be women).
Personally I think it worked well. The Quota was first implemented in 1993.
However once a country's quality of life goes up dramatically, women generally (this word is key, there are always outliers) will gravitate towards more traditional feminine occupations such as nursing, teaching, etc . See the Scandinavian countries.
I had to read that twice to follow you.
Be careful with your wording. What you meant was government funded social structures, as opposed to actual social structures (family structure, etc). Most Indians who move to the US will be quick to tell you how much worse the social support structures are in the US. In India, there is usually little need for daycare (relatives almost always look after the kids). Same goes for taking care of the chronically unhealthy people, etc.
In the U.S., for example, a bright young lady with opportunities can rest assured that, no matter what she chooses to study, life has a good chance of turning out alright for her. Her family, friends, teachers, and so forth generally agree. However in India, for example, it's far more likely that a bright young lady with opportunities will be thoroughly encouraged -- some might even say pushed -- to pursue only the most remunerative and prestigious occupations. In plain language: "Do you want to end up in the gutter?"
I wonder if these are the social structures that make the most difference.
I had no response to that.
Also - a lot of women in their 30s/20s now have seen - what it means to be a homemaker in India. I think neither their mothers and nor themselves want a life like that.
I always thought of it as a massive success for the war effort, someone had to assemble the planes, after all. Rosie the Riveter ended up becoming an iconic piece of propaganda during the war, IIRC.
Had a friend in Denmark employed as univerisy lecturer. His salary was very high, yet they were struggling with two kids and wife unemployed (due to language barrier).
This anecdote raises a few issues.
1. Not speaking Danish does not severely impact a job search in Denmark. Jobs from serving in a bar to working in an international company will be happy with an English speaker. There is a small language barrier but not anywhere near as big as e.g. Germany/Italy/France.
2. Denmark is definitely a country where two incomes are needed to live well.
3. The wage disparity between low and high status jobs is not that high. So if the second income is low status it will still make a big difference to household income.
4. Were your friends from outside the EU? There may have been a non language related reason for the wife to be unable to obtain work.
5. The Danish government provides free language lessons for foreigners living in Denmark - although the language is difficult.
6. Academic salaries cost of living adjusted are far better than in e.g. UK (but not as good as those for senior people in the USA).
7. At least your friend was a lecturer... In other countries their role could well have been filled by temporary staff. The Danish have rules preventing the eternal post doc situation that has developed in the UK and US.
As you said, it's just anecdote - one's experience.
There were not enough well-paying jobs (copywriter, creative, real estate agent, retail manager, etc. like in the US) like in the US for people with generic qualifications like English literature, etc. One way out for people with those qualifications was to write banking or governmental entrance exams for jobs. But these too leaned quantitative and had math components making them harder for liberal arts graduates.
From what I've heard from the few people I've met from USSR and China, the situation was similar there too.
It was rather interesting to see then when the bank signed a contract with an Indian company, women were like 50% of their IT folks with no gender devisions like testing/development. There were still less women at management positions from the Indian company, but the ratio is better than in the Norwegian bank.
We can both offer equal opportunities, and realize different genders want different things out of a job.
Or when they discovered the Higgs boson and they used comic sans for their slides and again people lost their minds.
I have to wonder what these people were reading or paying attention to as none of that ever occurred to me until it somehow made "front page" news.
One of the statements in the article that I really liked was this one, "I would star at the dark and wonder what was beyond it." That is the kind of curiosity you want to nurture in your children.
Well, CRISPR then :-)
Joking aside, I'm not sure if that could be done by some method. The raw, childly observation & perception of the nature are needed for that, I guess. The sky is the biggest part of the nature around us and you don't have that in urban areas, because you are not able to see the beauty of the night sky; there is a light pollution only. It's like "city lights is the limit!" in urban areas, while "the sky and beyond clearly is the limit!" in rural areas. Of course, not every child who grows up in country side has the same curiosity towards the nature. I suppose it essentially is the love towards the nature that drives curiosity. How can you put a love for nature into a child's heart? I don't know.. Teaching them the importance of trees? Buying a telescope and observing the moon closely? The smell of the soil after a rain? Telling them that we are all made of stars?[0] It's a tough mission overall :-)
In a country that makes more movies than anywhere else in the world, that's saying a lot.
You have a team there that managed to send a man-made object to Mars. Who CARES whether they are women or men? Some are women, some are men. You know why? Because they had to WORK TOGETHER to achieve a goal.
I think you guys are losing sight of this achievement.
As such acknowledging their accomplishments while acknowledging their gender is not a bad thing.
Transfer of wealth is not the same as consumption of resources
Perhaps I should've chosen my words more carefully, because I am emphasizing the 'consumption of "natural" resources', more than to "wealth".
(If we're going to keep using the word "wealth", a movie may produce intangible "wealth" in the form of happiness, among other things)
In other words, you can bake another pie, but not without using some of the flour in your pantry and some gas to run the oven. Once the flour runs out, you're done baking pies.
What I'm saying is your idea is insane.
Look, if you use land for farming then you can't use it for something else, right? And the Earth has a finite surface, right? So once all arable land has been farmed and all other land has been allocated for other uses, then necessarily land allocation will become a zero sum game.
If wealth can just be created ex nihilo then human population should be able to grow without bounds, no? The pie is a lie, after all. We can just bake more pies. I don't see how that's possible when both space and food production capacity are bounded.
Can you give an example of a form of wealth that's infinite in amount?
You are correct, this is a fundamental truth of reality. If the root of all things is limited, everything that extends from it is limited.
In fact thanks to entropy one can say wealth is not only limited, but tends towards zero.
This is the most important thing. A lot of military technology in India, especially missile tech, originated at ISRO. And was spearheaded by former President APJ Abdul Kalam, who worked at both ISRO and DRDO (Defense Research and Development Organization).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Guided_Missile_Deve...
Investing in space exploration may not give you returns on investment in short run but it helps humanity learn more about the vast expanse that surrounds us and affects our day to day lives.
I don't think the GP intended to make a comment on just how big or small the return was.
Sadly, almost anyone responding to you is not understanding this. I had the exact same thought when I read the headline (even before I knew this was about India or women - I was expecting some private enterprise...).
Your comment doesn't take away from the achievement. Comparing it to the cost of a movie is just pointless.
ISRO actually has a commercial satellite launching arm that does make money.
That exactly.
I don't know why, maybe the media's constant reporting of the worst things has taken its toll, maybe it's the government micromanaging everything, but most people today are afraid of risks of any kind.
No American astronaut died in space then, either.
On the other hand, if you just want to make a million doodads and sell them to consumers, U.S. costs are outrageous. I was trying to get 500 of a machined part made recently and the quotes from U.S. manufacturers were 40-100x higher than the quotes from China.
>The first New York City subway opened around 1900... it suggests costs of... $1-4 million per kilometer... inflation-adjusted equivalent of $100 million/kilometer today... a new New York subway line being opened this year costs about $2.2 billion per kilometer, suggesting a cost increase of twenty times...
It's unclear from Wikipedia whether the booster put it into LEO or closer to GTO, but it appears it has has the capability to put 3k lbs near GTO.
For contrast, a Falcon 9 can put 18k lbs in GTO for $62M, so maybe a 1,800 lb scientific payload to Mars. But that doesn't include payload costs and payload development cost, so probably well over $100M. And building a probe in 18 months has to be really hard.
It will be interesting if Falcon 9 prices drop because of re-usability, say to $30M, whether that will open up the opportunity to do lots of custom probes to inner planets and asteroid belt.
To be fair, the article's presentation rather invites them. It's basically presented as "Look what these Indian women accomlished for 10X less money than your male-dominated American groups spent." It's put Americans and males on the defensive, so naturally they will defend...
Btw - I'm a man.
But it's the difference between me saying "I did this cool thing, check it out." and "I did this thing, and it's way better that what you've been doing."
The former statement is likely to elicit praise and appreciation; the latter is likely to prompt a challenge to your assertion. It's just human nature.
These and other scientists who worked on the mission to be more precise.
There is a lot of value in law and order, education, clean air, and political stability.
As an aside, I don't hear many people complaining about the lack of diversity in other careers like plumbing, HVAC, or logging. Why do you think that is?
Maybe because by pure statistics[1] or by anecdote men tend to have greater upper body strength than women. This matters when replacing 50x 10kg condenser coils or carrying 10 meter long segments of steel pipe up stairs. But it doesn't matter at all when solving problems in front of a keyboard and a compiler.
[1] one example in hand grip strength - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17186303
In the short term, it means firing experienced people of one class to hire inexperienced people of another. Fast growth means that equality can be reached faster with just equal training and hiring.
It's because you're not paying attention. All of those have been mentioned on HN before, and each of them have programmes to increase the diversity of the workforce.
Here's a post from a year ago that mentions forestry, and plumbing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11232237#11234613
It also sidesteps the point that there's an orders of magnitude difference in how much effort goes towards getting women into safe and high-paying male-dominated jobs compared to dangerous low-paying male-dominated jobs.
Every single time this discussion happens someone will make the same stupid point - "What about women in X?" or "What about men in Y?"
And every single time someone has already posted a link to a programme to increase the numbers of women in X or the numbers of men in Y.
It's dumb and it's lazy, especially so because this information is trivially easy to find.
> there's an orders of magnitude difference in how much effort goes towards getting women into safe and high-paying male-dominated jobs compared to dangerous low-paying male-dominated jobs.
CITATION NEEDED.
sqeaky's comment offers an explanation. I don't fully agree with it but it's a productive step forward in a discussion. When you use words like ignorant, tedious, stupid, dumb and lazy while failing to refute the argument it doesn't make you or your side look any better. I look at sqeaky's comment and have to admit I can see where they're coming from, meanwhile I look at your comments and wonder why you think you've just knocked this one out of the park.
> CITATION NEEDED.
Do you really need proof that more effort is going towards getting women into jobs from Column A than Column B? You had to resort to linking one of your own comments from a middle-popularity post on a fairly small website from a year ago. I could easily find videos of world leaders saying "This is important"
But you can just clear your cookies, go to google and see how "women in ____" auto-completes, then see how many results each phrase gets. You may not see an "orders of magnitude" of difference but you won't be able to act like there's equal attention going in each direction either.
I laughed, that's some n-gate quality material right there.
There are likely many reasons as to why there are fewer women in STEM fields than men. Culture and socio-economics are two very big factors being completely dismissed here.
Chalking everything up to discrimination is intellectually lazy (unless there's good data presented and indicating that to be fact), and does nothing to help the situation. If you don't fully understand the root cause, how can you resolve the problem?
We should, of course, attempt to address and improve on all of the possible explanations except the last. If it isn't the last and we make the mistake of assuming that one, then there is harm in that assumption. If the last does contribute, then there is little harm finding that out after making an honest attempt to improve things. Because there are bound to be multiple contributing causes, and you'll at least make the situation better.
Such discussions are tedious, and tedium is an enemy here.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13896887 and marked it off-topic.
It's for the same reason that we ask people not to conduct political and other battles on HN. Those may be important but they're also extremely repetitive. Indeed, anyone who enters into any kind of battle needs to gird themselves for repetition, otherwise the more patient side will win. It's not hard to see how incompatible this is with intellectual curiosity, the guiding value of this site. Battles have to be off-topic here or a site based on intellectual curiosity becomes impossible.
However, there is a big difference in sending a rocket to Mars with 2015 technology vs. 1960's technology in terms of cost, reliability, materials, etc.
"Only 40 percent of missions sent to Mars by major space organizations — NASA, Russia’s, Japan’s, or China’s — had ever been a success. No space organization had entered Mars’s orbit on its first attempt."
Those first attempts were all on quite a bit older technology.
Don't get me wrong, the engineering is still really hard. And the sensor technology is cutting edge. But the breathless marketing prose could use some toning down.
Into the Wild was a movie about a homeless traveler. It cost $15million to make.
NY"rulez" -_-