Some things never change, eh?
I’m definitely glad we did it.
However, the Apollo program was expensive. It was 2.5% of GDP for 10 years.
https://www.herkulesprojekt.de/en/is-there-a-master-plan/the....
Imagine today if we said we were going to try and cure cancer(s) in 10 years by spending 2.5% of GDP over the next decade.
Think people would support that? Doubt it.
2.5% of GDP would be... 500bn a year?
Coordinating that would be wild. What about a race to negative emissions for 2.5% GDP? With the promise of well paying jobs, cleaner air (long term saves money due to reduced asthma, etc), reduced foreign energy dependence, and increasing the number of products we can sell abroad (long term positive), reducing climate impact (long term saves money in reduced disaster relief).
Fuck cancer.
Of course that’s half of people going forward…forever
Yeah we built fancy new labs and educated a new generation of scientists, but what does it matter that we made an algorithm that can cure each individual person's cancer? Those people would have studied something else, and you can just git clone the cancer algorithm nowadays.
The whole cure for cancer project was nothing but a tumourdoggle for big research. Hospitals and universities across the country feasting on public money. Labcoat manufacturers and those guys who make beakers, suddenly getting wealthy off what is essentially a photo-op where where we stick it to the Chinese.
[edit]
Upon closer reading I think it means that over a 10 year period they spent 2.5% of the annual GDP, which would work out to a 0.25% GDP spend each year.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/feb/01/nasa-b...