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Comment by zeth___ | Hacker News Reader

The reason to hate on Bezos, Musk et al is the same reason why we hate cancer: an entity that is malfunctioning has found a way to maximize short term gain at the expense of long term survival.

Worse, while the billions they have can buy them a private island filled with whatever perversions they enjoy they are too poor by an order of magnitude or three to actually finance real space exploration.

It takes unfathomable amounts of time, effort and money to bring in a technology from R&D to the consumer market. "Entrepreneurs" merely privatize the gains in the last step of the process and call themselves a genius.

Space exploration is so far away from commercialization that the private market will not be able to finance any thing past low earth orbit for another generation or three. By then the climate change already locked in would make the world hospitable for Lizard People and put most of our major cities 0.2m below sea level.

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What a silly idea of entrepreneurship. The profits are a tiny percentage of the actual wealth entrepreneurs bring to the rest of the people. There's only limited resources and anyone who re-arranges them profitably have sply made all of us richer. The cumulative benefit of an Amazon to consumers must be in the trillions in the next decade or so

To put space launch into perspective: the fraction of a satellite's cost that is the launch ranges from 1/10 to 1/3, and only a small amount of that is launch profit. Meanwhile, cheaper launches means there's cheaper consumer prices for satellite Internet and more satellite TV channels, in addition to more earth observation satellites. And more earth observation satellites means we have better weather and climate prediction, better disaster recovery, more safety for boats and planes, and less inexpensive communications in rural areas. All of these are excellent things for humans, and all of these get a little better as launch costs fall.

What is your definition of benefit? Pushing workers to pee in bottles is not a cumulative benefit to humanity.

>> real space exploration

I assume you are the arbiter of real space exploration, then? The last fifty years don't show real progress on this endeavor, so I'm not exactly sure who is going to do this for real if it isn't the status quo or these two billionaires who are engaged in a pissing contest.

>> "Entrepreneurs" merely privatize the gains in the last step of the process and call themselves a genius.

Ah yes, another person who thinks Musk is not an engineer and that SpaceX somehow doesn't... manufacture all their engines and 95%+ of their stuff here in America... while NASA was using Russian equipment and most private companies were launching using foreign material, land, and resources.

Right. He's just free-riding. Then what were we and everyone else doing before SpaceX undercut ULA (leaning on Russian tech) by massive amounts?

>> By then the climate change already locked in would make the world hospitable for Lizard People and put most of our major cities 0.2m below sea level.

I should really read comments back to front before spending any time on them.

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