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Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

It feels like the death of American ingenuity.

We've fallen from the era where we sent echoes to our neighbours and the stars. When we found clearings in jungles and turned them into monuments to humanity. The time when we put our best foot forward and reached ahead, into the future, racing towards a brighter tomorrow for humanity.

I mourn for what has been lost.

The American century wasn't punctuated by a war, but by callous neo-mercantilism and disregard. The fall of America's aspirations from the heavens to the bottom of a sinkhole.

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This is your take on the day before SpaceX attempts to fly the worlds first fully reusable spacecraft to 15 km and land it? That if successful will put larger payloads into space at less than one hundredth the cost of the Space Shuttle, and enable manned deep space missions to Mars and beyond?

Just weeks after Apple unveiled the worlds fastest CPU core running on only 15 watts (with credit to a Brit architecture)?

If you look at the world through a filtered lens, of course you only see what you want to see.

My take on it is that many of the fundamental advancements in the last couple of decades are increasingly shifting from the public sector into the private sector.

SpaceX benefits NASA, but it is beholden to itself and it's shareholders, not the public (this being said as a massive SpaceX fanboy). Same with Apple. These companies exist to benefit themselves first, civilization second.

Conversely, if the development of the fastest CPU was funded by direct government funding it would be available as a foundation for future use by all, instead of other manufacturers needing to (re)discover the techniques themselves.

Maybe his take is after the USA didn't manage to contain an epidemic, used its power to steal medical equipment from other countries, developed a marvelous vaccine that will sell at a high price for other countries after vaccinating itself.

Like I said, the world is what you filter it to be.

>Maybe his take is after the USA didn't manage to contain an epidemic

Combined with the crucial failure of China that kept it under lid for too long, and followed by most of the rest of the world who also failed to contain it.

> used its power to steal medical equipment from other countries,

What are you talking about?

> developed a marvelous vaccine that will sell at a high price for other countries after vaccinating itself.

Good thing the world is capitalist by nature and we have two more (cheaper) vaccines ready to go, and Moderna will have to lower its price or sell it to those who are willing to pay them a premium for whatever reason. Right?

And I'm not sure if this is even a thing, but even if it is, what is your problem with each country requesting their labs to provide for their host nation's citizens first, specially in a case where all labs AFAIK received funding in some form by taxpayers?

This is what I mean: USA Divert masks of other countries: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/03/mask-wars-coro...

Uh, no. Arecibo was quite a low priority for the NSF/NASA for good reasons -- there are other, better, telescopes and facilities to fund.

If it was deprioritized, which it seems it was, it was still done in a disappointing and rather eye-opening manner. Just letting an expensive and important scientific instrument deteriorate and just collapse is not the same as properly deprioritizing and decommissioning it.

No doubt. But how many scientific tools also become cultural icons? in an era where we need more young people becoming passionate about science and space, the loss of Arecibo feels like the loss of the Challenger to many.

Should we really be allowing James Bond movies to choose where we spend our scientific resources? Just in the telescope domain the James Webb Space Telescope should finally launch next year and if it works will be an enormous step forwards.

who?? if not for goldeneye no one would even know this thing existed

I was thinking of Contact actually.

So many people commenting about Spacex and such but I feel they're missing the point. This marks the end of an era where publicly funded science was driving the frontiers of human knowledge faster than ever before.

We went from having never left the ground under power to the moon in 65 years.

65. Years.

And in the subsequent 51?

We've gotten really good at making cheap electronics and our consolation prize is a low cost-to-orbit with no concrete plans to do anything extraordinary with it. Cool.

This feels truly like the end of an empire.

Not only that, but all of the cheap electronics/computers that we have now are because of the money spent on Apollo.

You're joking, right?

2020 is a year where SpaceX flew humans to space for the first time ever on a commercial vehicle, we created and started to distribute a vaccine for a never-before-seen virus in under a year, and we began to hook rural people who've never had access to high-quality internet up via a constellation of thousands of micro-satellites in LEO.

Sure, not everything is rosy, but we're still capable of some impressive feats of engineering.

Oh, and AlphaFold made an incredible leap in protein folding prediction. Like, a true "paradigm shift" in one of the most historically intractable problems in biology.

If you want to assign countries to companies or divisions of companies, I think Deepmimd is (still) more representative of British ingenuity.

> I think Deepmimd is (still) more representative of British ingenuity.

It’s kind of like the strategy in World War II: combine British ingenuity (DeepMind) with America. resources(Google).

Technology-wise, the vaccine you mean was developed in Germany by a German company. Pfizer is the manufacturing partner and did logistics for clinical trials (except in China, where Fosun licensed it).

$445 million in funding came as a grant from the German government, the rest from licensors. The German government has split another ~300 million or so on two other companies also working on vaccines. The US government did not contribute any funding to Pfizer's license.

I'd rather say it's a cool example of international collab and winning together than an American exceptionalism narrative ...

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