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Comment by Chathamization | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the excuses for spending billions of dollars hosting the Olympics. "All the infrastructure improvements will help the locals!" Well, yes, but if infrastructure is your goal there are a lot less costly ways to go about it. I'm sure a country that decided to build an underwater amusement park would end up acquiring some technical know-how on engineering, but that doesn't make that a practical goal.

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A lot of Olympic infrastructure is wasted since it involves stuff like building stadiums that are then unused after the Olympics.

Investment for an Olympics-type event can be useful if it results in the creation of durable multipurpose infrastructure like transit lines though.

The US Space Race helped us become a leader in satellite launch, which is a productive industry on its own terms now. Weather satellites, GPS, telecoms all benefit from it and provide tangible benefits to the population.

I’m not sure if Indian investment in space is more toward the useless or useful side of the spectrum though.

US Space Race was toward the useless side, given that GPS or comsat do not require human spaceflight. Soviet Union was more sensible.

There's more than GPS. Human spaceflight has produced many valuable non-invasive wearable biomedical devices because sending up a doctor to monitor the astronaut was not an option. NASA research into nutrition has given us better infant formulas. Research into protection of astronauts' eyes has lead to UV-blocking sunglasses. Etc etc.

Not sure, the Soviets also put men in space, did MIR, and they tried to go to the moon and build a space shuttle too, just failed at it.

The thing that I do wonder is when a country like India is just replicating the work already done by the USA, how much of the innovation / potential has already been tapped. (Or now with the USA return to the moon program, is developing Orion and SLS and the gateway really going to do much that the Apollo program didn’t?)

Life is not linear. You have a proportion of your budget to spend on moonshots (literally). Developed countries can spend more while less developed countries spend a lesser proportion on such moonshots. It’s up to the respective country to decide where they’d like to spend their proportion on. In this case, India decides this mission.

An underwater amusement park would be a nice goal to develop underwater construction technology actually. I could see that being important if the surface of the Earth becomes inhospitable and it perhaps could be popular enough as an attraction to be able to get early returns in the investment.

There already is an underwater hotel in the Maldives...

Wouldn't special lines of credit open up for a country/city willing to setup olympics ?

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