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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

> the disconnected dumb home microcomputer of 1985 to the globally connected iPad of today

But the microcomputer of 1985 was globally connected too! And that did seem like quite a technological advance: here in one's own home, a machine that, via phone lines, can exchange messages worldwide!

I agree that the number of people globally connected has increased, but it seems more incremental; a matter of economics and incremental improvements, bringing down the prices and upping the speeds, so now many more people can experience that magic of global connectivity in your own home.

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Extremely few C64s and Amstrad CPC 464s were globally connected; that's the class of machine I had in mind. If you think this is just incremental, then I'd say that putting a man on the moon is just an incremental improvement in bomb-making, the culmination of the controlled release of chemical energy; a matter of slow refinement over centuries.

The moon example is advances caused by technological improvement, though, where something previously technically impossible (going to the moon) eventually became possible.

By contrast, I think much of the global connectivity improvement, at least at the basic level of connectivity, is social/economic. The technology existed in 1985 to hook people up with at least basic global connectivity; unlike going to the moon in 1920, it was not technologically out of reach to get on Usenet in 1985. And many people did get hooked up to various kinds of global messaging. That many others didn't was mainly a matter of price, education, and interest, imo, not a technological issue. It's certainly technologically conceivable to have an alternate-reality 1980s where the average home had a C64 or AppleII, and dial-up access to a global messaging/email service, using no technology that didn't exist in 1985.

There are innumerable things that are technically possible today that were not technically possible in 1985. What I'm really objecting to is this veneration of explosively moving a certain weight of flesh over a certain distance as a thing, an achievement, which we are lacking now.

Clearly, sending a man to the moon captured the imagination of a certain generation, a generation that is growing older. But it didn't capture my imagination particularly strongly; it was before my time, and now it seems to me like an massive achievement in the same way as the pyramids were massive achievements. Literally massive, in that the scale is impressive, but monuments essentially without purpose other than aggrandizing those who achieved them.

So I don't see them as a big thing that was done in the past that is lacking in the present. I don't see a need for them. You might as well ask why we haven't built a bigger pyramid than at Giza.

Unfortunately, this is one of those points where the two opposing camps are generally not able to come to any sort of agreement. I grew up reading Cosmos and straining my eyes through a bad telescope and looking up and wanting to be there instead of stuck here.

And, unfortunately, it's all too common on HN that we can't have a discussion about value that doesn't involve a concrete measurement of actual dollars, and since I am not one of the three wealthiest people on the planet, I cannot quote any kind of significant figure for what I personally would be willing to pay to leave the planet in a permanent way.

But, I will say that historically, the populist argument against exploration has always been that it wasn't worth the cost, and that that argument has almost always turned out to be wrong. The technological improvements required to accomplish the exploration have always further benefited human technological development, to say nothing of inspiring later generations to continue pushing boundaries, or of showing us just how possible it is to break through certain boundaries, or of discovering unimagined treasures along the way.

I am steadfastly amongst those few remaining people who thinks that real space exploration is not only worth it, but is essential to our species.

I tend to think of it like this: keeping all humans on one planet and expecting long term survival is like keeping all of one's servers in one data center and expecting 100% uptime. And that data center has a tendency to be hit by extremely large rocks going very fast every now and then.

Yep, but just FYI, the common counter-argument on HN is that the survival of the species doesn't matter to the individual, so they still don't think it's worth spending money on.

Yeah, I never really figured out how to argue against that... it's kind of a built in urge for me, and it's not strictly logical except from a "I'm partly driven by my genes, which have been optimized to protect my tribe" standpoint. I figure most people have that, but if someone doesn't, you probably can't really make them care.

Think about this.

The first cell phone was developed in 1947 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones

The Internet starts in 1950 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

Tablet computers were prototyped in 1968 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

It's the economic improvement since that created the iPad. iPad is not in anyway comparable to the technological innovation in 1960 that put a man to the moon.

It's like someone using VS2010 and C# 4.0 seeing the SICP book for the first time, or a chance encounter with LISP. And you would know we didn't improve that much since the days we put a man on the moon.

And gunpowder was invented in China centuries ago. That's the kind of technology that put a man on the moon, in the same relation that your examples have with an iPad.

If you really think that Lisp by itself embodies all the technology that is in C# 4.0, rather than merely being able to encode and implement such technologies, then I don't think you know what you're talking about. To get Lisp to do everything C# 4.0 can do, you'd have to write a compiler for it in Lisp macros. That Lisp has a macro system that can do this is, to me, no more interesting than that I can also write a compiler in assembler.

Gunpowder is not even remotely close to "the kind of technology that put a man on the moon". That's absurd.

Lisp might not have everything that C# 4.0 does, but so what? Most of the world still runs on C. Hell, for that matter, a depressing amount of the world still runs on Fortran and COBOL. C, Fortran, COBOL ... they are adequate, if not exactly fun, tools that can generally be used to get there from here. I promise you that there is nothing you can do in C# 4.0 and WTF 11.12 that I can't do in C.

But just go ahead and try to get to the moon using gunpowder.

Mass production and magnification is a qualitative change.

Neal Stephenson knows better than he shows in this article.

The

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