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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

> Jeff hoped not only that he would get that dream job with Nasa, but that the organisation would start to work with the USSR rather than competing with it.

> "Even when I was fairly young, I could see the potential for collaboration between the US and Soviet Union," he says. "It just never made sense to me that we were pointing nuclear weapons at each other, when we could be collaborating to do extraordinary things in space."

Oh, kids. Nasa's raison d'etre was to research how the US can watch the soviets from space or shoot them from space. That's why its budget peaked in '66. Doing "extraordinary things in space" was just a means to that end. But I do appreciate the sentiment.

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The world would be a much better place if curiosity was the main driver instead of power.

As long as you have limited resources to manage, your curiosity will go nowhere without the power to obtain resources to satisfy that curiosity. I too love to dream about how great life is going to be once we all have unlimited resources.

We have more than enough to go around and we have for a long time.

Do we?

Fresh water isn't unlimited - in fact much farming today is done unsustainably by pumping ground water faster than it can be replenished. Desalination plants are expensive and not necessarily viable.

Oil is obviously limited, and while there are energy alternatives it's not quite that simple. Not to mention the abundant use of petroleum in every day items we take for granted such as plastic. Sure, we can imagine a world without oil, but right now that world does not exist.

Land is limited. Minerals are limited. Medicine can be limited (I'm fairly certainly whoever develops a vaccine will find it used nationally much more densely than internationally until it is ubiquitous).

> Fresh water isn't unlimited...

Yep, but we have more than enough for the time being.

> ... in fact much farming today is done unsustainably by pumping ground water faster than it can be replenished.

Yes, however a lot of that is done to produce products that are unnecessary (a single almond requires 1.1 gallons of water to produce), a political exercise (40% of all US corn is grown for Ethanol, which produces more carbon emissions than it saves), or otherwise in support of our largesse (49% of all US corn is grown for animal feed).

> Oil is obviously limited, and while there are energy alternatives it's not quite that simple. Not to mention the abundant use of petroleum in every day items we take for granted such as plastic. Sure, we can imagine a world without oil, but right now that world does not exist.

Substantially less oil would be consumed for power, making it available for plastics, etc, if we actually invested in nuclear, wind and solar. The amount consumed for the manufacture of plastics is pretty limited and plant-based alternatives are coming to the fore.

> Land is limited. Minerals are limited.

The density of the US is 94 people per square mile, with more than enough minerals to go around. There's effectively no limit to how far up you can build in a metropolis if the city council chooses to permit it (see: San Francisco vs. Miami, Houston).

> Medicine can be limited (I'm fairly certainly whoever develops a vaccine will find it used nationally much more densely than internationally until it is ubiquitous).

Medicine is always going to be limited, the question is how we choose to ration it -- based on luck (aka free market capitalism, to whomever can afford it) or based on need (via socialized scheme).

> Food...

Consider that America wastes 40% of all the food it produces -- 80 billion pounds of food per year -- enough to feed the entire rest of the planet. [1]

There is enough to go around, we just choose not to let it.

[1] https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/

> with more than enough minerals to go around

I think we actually agree on most things except for this. China is hoarding rare Earth minerals, mostly the kind you need to develop batteries to transition away from our dependency on oil.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2019/07/10/china...

So no, we absolutely do not have enough minerals to go around, at least if you want to transition to alternative energy resources.

Rare earth minerals aren't exactly what you think. They're pretty evenly distributed across the entire earth's crust. The amount in China is equal to the amount in the Brazil and Russia combined. There's a lot in Australia, the US, Greenland and a whole ton in Vietnam [1].

Yes, China produces a lot right now, and yes they're considering it a strategic issue, but it's not because China is the only place that has it -- far from -- many countries have similar quantities. China only has 1/3 of the world's known rare earth supply. The name is misleading, because they're anything but rare.

The reason China produces so much is because they're willing to pay the environmental cost of extracting them, nothing more. There's plenty of those to go around, too.

[1] https://geology.com/articles/rare-earth-elements/

Sure, but you're implying China sources most of its minerals locally, when in fact they do most of their mining in Africa. So they are hoarding a larger than proportional amount of rare minerals in order to benefit themselves.

> The reason China produces so much is because they're willing to pay the environmental cost of extracting them, nothing more.

They're offloading it onto Africa, so they aren't really paying it themselves.

They're also hoarding a lot of the world's population—keep that in mind.

"The major cities in which rare earths were mined are Shandong, Inner Mongolia, Sichuan, Jiangxi, Guangdong, Fujian, Hunan, and Guangxi." [1]

Africa has relatively little in the way of discovered rare earth deposits. There are 50X as many known rare earth deposits in China as in South Africa, and that's the largest source in Africa. They are very much mining it at home. If they're getting them from abroad they're not "hoarding" them, there's a market, and other countries could just as easily buy.

Lots of articles can back me up here, it's blighted the land. [2, 3, 4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_industry_in_China

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra...

[3] https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...

You seem to be right - I overestimated the mining efforts of China in Africa and assumed it was related to specific Earth minerals incorrectly.

This is a little off topic, but are rare earth minerals something that could be mined from asteroids?

While the idea of humanity becoming an interstellar species as depicted in sci-fi seems pretty far off to me, it seems like asteroid mining via drone could be viable in the near future if the incentives were right.

> Yes, however a lot of that is done to produce products that are unnecessary

If you have to figure out which product are “necessary” and which are not - you don’t have enough resources “to go around” by definition.

It depends, I suppose, on whether you treat humans boundless ambitions and desires as necessary or not. I don't mean to address this question here just to shine light on the discrepancy.

>> Fresh water isn't unlimited...

> Yep, but we have more than enough for the time being.

Ehm. Yeah. No. Maybe start by lifting your rich-western-country view and look around a bit. Middle East and Africa have desertification happening at a shocking rate. Wars are being fought over water. The Nile is about to "run dry", it will stop actually having anything left to empty into the Mediterranian Sea. What's left is full of garbage, toxins and wells are pumping up salty water.

But don't worry, it's going to come to the U.S. sooner than you may wish. The Ogallala Aquifer is being relied on by farmers all over and is continuously used for irrigation. Just a matter of time until that runs dry.

Oh, btw, the Colorado River has "run dry" already. If people keep thinking like you, this will just get worse.

The problem word is 'enough'. For some its never that, how much ever they might have.

It not an unnatural phenomena. Biological cells sometimes do that too.

We need therapy for people like that. I understand where it comes from but it doesn't align with contemporary pressures.

There will never be unlimited resources. The earth has a finite amount of space, minerals, water, and energy (mostly from the sun).

Even if we gained access to exoplanets the problem would still remain. People can and will continue to demand more. Individuals will stake claim to entire planets for their own.

The problem is that satisfaction comes from relative success, not absolute. Look at folks like Bezos and Musk. The only thing that will slow them down is aging and eventual death.

Musk has set a very clear end goal for his ambitions, unlike any other billionaire I can think of. He wants to make humanity become an interplanetary species. That’s the goal. Not power for power’s sake, but to accomplish a specific thing.

Which is, of course, not to say that power doesn’t corrupt and that once he hits his goal, he won’t want more, but for now at least, he has a specific aim.

Power isn't the main driver, it's the desired outcome however. The main drivers would be control to be able to maintain a certain status or behaviour - arguably that you can't maintain due to what society deems is acceptable or that you couldn't lawfully gain ethically/legally.

The ability to control other's behavior is called power.

People want that power for a reason, there's an underlying reason - that reason is the driver.

Are you sure? 1984 asserts otherwise, that those who seek absolute power do it for its own sake. It certainly seems plausible that people who seek power for its own sake will do so with more consistency than people who have an ulterior motive.

If only the other side felt the same way.

I did an internship at NASA and found them to be very motivated by curiosity and a desire to educate the public.

Granted this was long after the Cold War ended and it may represent a difference between the motivations of the people who work for NASA and the motivations of the politicians who fund NASA.

The end of the Cold War definitely changed things. We even have an ISS, now.

The other part is that if you've work in a large R&D org, you know that doubling the size of an organization definitely doesn't 4x the velocity or magnitude of work and discoveries. It doesn't even 2x it. It's more like 1.25x-1.5x. Competition might also be a better driver of innovation that cooperation.

But at least they turned one of those 5 Hubble telescopes around, and instead of reading Russian car plates they are now fotographing deep space.

Still Nasa got to work with Soyuz space launches to the ISS which is sort of along those lines even if the USSR had collapsed by then.

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