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Comment by stephc_int13 | Hacker News Reader

"The UKSA will now provide £2.9 million (around $3.52 million) of funding for the project."

A nuclear reactor on the moon?

I don't get it.

Meta spent north of $30 Billions to build a "metaverse" that I would not even consider to be alpha-level quality, and some people at Rolls-Royce think they can build a nuclear reactor for how much?

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FAANG spending isn’t the norm, the total program cost of the Mars 2020 rover was $2.7 billion.

Meta spent $30 billion on something that looks like SecondLife on the Wii…

But also this ain’t the total cost just how much money the UK government is funding the project for right now.

It’s really mind boggling how much money Meta spent on this thing.

Any time someone complains about the government buying $600 toilet seats as an example of how the government wastes money, just point them to the MetaVerse.

$600 for a virtual toilet seat.

Did they seriously spend that much money on it??? How???

I don’t know if that’s how much they spent on it or was that how much they “spent” on it.

But the cumulative cost of Reality Labs was apparently indeed $36B over 3 years.

And let's not forget India's Mars mission (orbiter, not a rover) was even cheaper at "just" $75 million [1].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/saritharai/2013/11/07/how-india...

Imagine if we put effort into humanities and science instead of trying to get people to buy stuff they don’t need.

They’re already building small modular nuclear reactors for power stations and submarines. This is just for the work to make it work in a lunar environment

1. Meta had to have spent vastly less than $30 billion on their "metaverse". That's ~80,000 person-years of senior SWEs.

2. Literally half the companies who have video games as their core competency would have been able to build way more for way less.

They’re just adding money to the pot, from my read of it.

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