I've never understood this assumption that focusing on one thing must necessarily always be to the detriment of another.
- Digital Flight Controls
- Food Safety
- Space Blankets
- Quake-Proofing
- Rechargeable Hearing Aids
This list does not impress me at all and I find it hard to believe we wouldn't have come up with those 5 items + a lot more without spending billions to go to the moon.
It's cool to go the moon but just like all things government is involved with, it could've been done a lot cheaper without involving bureaucrats.
> Rechargeable Hearing Aids
Apparently you don't have a family member that has hearing problems, making it difficult for them to have a 'normal life'. I have one. I remember buying a €4k (a few many years ago) pair of hearing aids and see the tears coming down when one was able to hear again.
I see this as a prosthetic leg. You lose a basic function, this technology helps go back to having a slightly better life. Some stats on the matter. DDG returned US statistics on the top results; I believe these can be proportional for all other countries.
https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/quick-statistics...
-About 28.8 million U.S. adults could benefit from using hearing aids. (HB Note: isn't that 9% of the population? - that's a big number - almost 29 million people??)
-Among adults aged 70 and older with hearing loss who could benefit from hearing aids, fewer than one in three (30 percent) has ever used them. Even fewer adults aged 20 to 69 (approximately 16 percent) who could benefit from wearing hearing aids have ever used them.
-As of December 2019, approximately 736,900 cochlear implants have been implanted worldwide. In the United States, roughly 118,100 devices have been implanted in adults and 65,000 in children.
Since it would've been cheaper to not go to the moon and let a private company step in to provide the need there would have been more resources to spend on improving more lives than were improved now.
It's all speculation of course, but if you look at the rate of technological advancement pre-Moon landings compared to post-Moon landings, it does look a lot like the Apollo programme was an inflection point.
But it was an effort that cost X amount of dollars, and since then it has helped 20-50-100 (?) million people globally to have a better life, go shopping, talk with friends and loved ones, listen to music, etc.
Not everything is about being profitable on day1. But if we do put a price tag to everything.. think of the jobs/profits/dividends/taxes created by the "hearing aids" industries. We now have 20-50-100 (?) million people that are 'more' integrated to society. That generates money to recover the 'losses' of the moon efforts.
https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/industry-reports/hea...
-The global hearing aids market size was $6.47bn in 2020.
If you run this number for the past 30-40-50 years, it adds up. And now add the $bn that the (hearing aids) users contribute to the global economy by integrating more/better to society.
I see this as a win-win. We explored the moon. We improved people's lives here on earth.
Something like "food will become safer" is trivial only in the most generic sense. It's entirely possible that something that we eat today will be found carcinogenic tomorrow and people will still take ages to accept and act on that new knowledge.
At least in my part of the ivory tower I see a strong shift away from meat, even my and my SOs parents (in their 60-70s) have (on their own behalf) cut out most of their meat consumption.
So if I had to make a Nostradamus prediction, I would bet on real meat becoming a pure luxurious item, something that only gets brought on the table for special occasions, over the next ... 50 years.
This libertarian tilt is soo yesterday :)
Following the market and money signals alone leads to such amazing "innovations" as bitcoin and crypto -> people betting the next idiot will be left holding the bag and burning tons of energy and hardware while at it. Plus wasting a bunch of engineering hours on pointless endevours.
Or such amazing innovative endevours as Ad optimisation and network tracking.
Sorry but following money alone leads to some pretty pathological scenarios and results in a shitty society. I used to like libertarianism, the "don't touch me if I don't touch you" foundations and the logical framework is neat - but it just doesn't work out in reality - at least it doesn't lead to a world I'd like to live in.
It is not libertarian economics but keynesian economics that drive people to bitcoin and other bubbles.
Libertarian economics is not "soo yesterday", accepting bad policies from bureaucrats is.
Ps. if ads are the worst thing in your life then your life must be pretty good. Maybe install an ad blocker.
Bitcoin is an extreeme example of something that's built in to markets - you're trying to guess how much someone will be willing to pay for an asset and this leads to natural bubles - it stops being about determining the value of something and it starts being about playing the market. You can spin whatever rationalizations you want arround it - bitcoin is the most degenerate manifestation of this. If you find a market full of idiots willing to buy bullshit and pump it's valuation, if the idiocy is strong enough that it wont easily go away, you have a really good incentive to join in and prosthelytize to grow the bubble more, even if you don't beleive it - just the fact you beleive there will be more idiots buying in makes it rational for you to get in.
And if you skip out on trading on it you'll be punished with below avarage returns.
Let's agree to disagree on politics. Just let me know if you're ever about to be chosen as Supreme Chairman of the Party so I know what country to avoid.
The Earth is a zero-sum game, possibly the most real example that exists. Every gallon of oil, every mineral that doesn't find its way back through recycling effectively disappears. Everybody reading this website has spent their life in an era of such excess, such profligacy, that this fact is easy to ignore: "we can just reallocate a little and do both!"
The trouble is we're moving towards the end of that era. We're moving onto oil fields with increasingly poor EROEI. Arable land is decreasing. We're going to have to make some choices very soon which will be to the detriment of something else.
As a species we have a high tolerance for wasteful nonsense—what is life without recreation and creativity after all? But it's perfectly reasonable to consider a very resource-intensive project like "life on mars" and decide that should be low on the priority list.
"resource-intensive project like life on Mars"
- its pursuit will lead to unintended tech advances
- it's such a small expenditure relative to other wasteful crap we engage in.
- there is a valid argument for diversifying life, the next gigantic asteroid isn't following your timetable
- it's private money and isn't negatively impacting you and doesn't have its hand in your pocket, as long as externalities are being taxed you're not worse off
I see so much hand wringing about this but I'm sitting here wondering why we are wasting so much money on movies and video games instead of these aspirational projects.
"I don't take this perspective seriously"
Yeah. They say "resource-intensive" like we're not spending many MANY more resources on making big sticks to shake at each other.
And they say this as if the resources on this planet were a significant fraction of what's available in the solar system.
They say things like "earth is a zero sum game" as if sunlight didn't exist and materials we mine from the asteroid belt won't fall down a gravity well.
Or as if the resources required to put life on mars are a significant fraction of any meaningful measure.
It's almost like they think earth is big. ;)
No, it's not zero-sum. As you noted, "arable land decreasing" shows that. And similarly you can create arable land, you can enrich soil, use more drought tolerant crops, use tools and automation to harvest resources with less labor, at a lower cost. The allocation of resources is also not zero sum
I realize this is a hell of a caveat, but if we ever get fusion running in a real way, our problems of resource scarcity are essentially solved. Like you said, the elements we have on Earth right now aren't actually consumed, they just get shuffled around. Make electricity cheap enough, and un-shuffling what is needed becomes economically viable in a way that energy-as-provided-by-oil could never achieve.
Calling the project 'resource intensive' is one thing, but pointing out exactly where it consumes an unreasonable amount of resources is a totally different ball game.
Context matters, and things can look very different depending on what you compare against each other. Arguably, the actual rocket, astronauts and supplies send to Mars only count for a negligble fraction of what's available on Earth. But things change when you take a step back: there are many layers to the story. You need infrastructure and people here on Earth to actually assemble the mission: specialists, technicians, management, buildings, factories, supply chains,... And if you zoom out even more, you see that you need sturdy civic infrastructure to support all that: education, roads & bridges, domestic and foreign policies, international trade deals, defense and so on. And all the people involved to support all that have to attain a living standard above the poverty line which allows them to focus on all that. So, now you're looking at essential economic sectors which need to support all of that.
Turns out that the 'resource intensiveness' isn't concentrated on a specific point. It's diluted, it's hard to track, and there's a fuzzy line with questions like 'is this resource clear cut spend on an, arguably, wasteful Mars mission or something else?'
> As a species we
I always get skeptical whenever 'we' is used in an argument. Especially in reference to humanity as a species. Humanity isn't a collective consciousness able to think with a single mind. It's billions of individuals that all act on their own accord and any collective behaviors that can be observed are emerging dynamics.
Sure, you could argue that sovereign nations consists of millions of individuals rallying together and aligning their behavior towards common goals. But those are always informed by a complex interplay of trade-offs, incentives, benefits, external conditions, and so on. In the grand scheme of history, even nations aren't forever: they come and they go over time.
The hard reality is that either going to Mars, or curbing climate change aren't self-fulfilling prophecies simply because several vocal groups want them to become reality. They only become reality through complex dynamics over which individuals have far less control then we might assume about ourselves.
Probably mostly because popular news / media has endeavoured to simplify things way beyond the point they should have been simplified -- nuance, rationality, critical thinking, are under-promoted.
https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
Although I am not sure if it will be practical to move iron from that place to the Earth, without some significant break through in space travel, probably not.
As a springboard towards the Outer Solar System, Mars makes a lot of sense. It is a lot more Earth-y than anything beyond, with the possible exception of Europa and Titan. So our contemporary technologies need less adjustment to work there.
First you get to feel comfortable with lifting 20kg before you move to 30kg, 50kg, etc. improve your wrist angles, how you spread your toes on the groun, etc. Mars is our 20kg. We take it for a spin, iron out the wrinkles, repeat it perfectly, then move to the next target.
Meanwhile we 'studied' Mars for 'so long' that we know there are very few things that can surprise/wipe the effort with e.g. a single volcanic erruption/earthquake/mega-storm.
I totally agree with you, having a bright, exciting vision of the future is a huge motivator and technological driver to help with our problems on earth.
This website really gave me a good laugh in a positive way. I would say, space exploration made it again possible to look at our homeworld in a more appreciating way!
What are you referring to ?
It assumes that these secondary advancements would not have been achieved if research into going to Mars was not done.
How about just doing research about renewable energy for earth instead of Mars? You could argue more could be achieved if this was done because we will not be distracted by Mars specific problems that won't apply to earth
You're probably right. And 640K aught to be enough for anybody, too ;)