The mission to go to the Moon wasn’t just a mission to go to the Moon, it was also a mission to come back from the Moon. This was basically a blank check and a massive cross-disciplinary exercise.
Our next focus should be on Mars with exactly the same criteria: get people to Mars and also get them back as part of the same mission. It will be much more difficult than getting to the Moon and back and that’s exactly the reason to do it.
For half a century we have been massively slashing science spending. From a peak of 2.5% GDP in 1962 steadily down to about 0.5% today. There's not much left.
That's not to say you shouldn't invest in abstract research with no obvious goal at all, but probably you should consider it a much higher risk investment and not fund all your research that way...
There's also the fact that money now is more valuable that money later even if you adjust for inflation (one of the reason countries run a deficit) so the expected return should be much higher than $1 to be worth investing in.
Next, there's the fact that investment is finite, so the expected return has to be higher than the expected return you would get elsewhere.
Finally there's the fact that as you invest more, the effects of all three of those factors increase, so it has diminishing returns.
That's always the problems with these types of discussions though, isn't it? You can't know what that next leap is going to be and how it is going to benefit everyday life.
For some, like myself, that next leap will be just as revolutionary and will send us to the stars. We imagine a blank check with a direct, long-term goal leading to things we can't even dream of today.
For others, however, they struggle to see what that leap will be. For them, it's just getting to Mars and maybe coming back, maybe with some new tech for the military. Nothing that will affect their own lives or the lives of their children. That was the problem in the 50s and 60s that led to so much backlash against the projects. And even though we saw the fruit those projects bore, who is to say it will happen a second time?
Some people just can't or won't imagine what might come from another Apollo-esque program. And that's who you have to convince.
- shipping solar energy to the dark side of the planet
- ending the COVID-19 pandemic (N95s, air filtration, far UV-C, timely vaccine updates)
- intercontinental high speed rail (low emissions travel)
- preserving the biosphere by removing deforestation incentives w/ international assistance, technology transfer
- interplanetary space infrastructure incl. orbital launch
- high quality durable goods that barely break and are easy to service
Cold War spending probably kickstarted Silicon Valley:
Even a 700% IRR can be not worth it, if you have alternatives with similar or lower risk with a higher annual return.
Sorry to derail, but I'm utterly confounded that cancer research, life extension research, brain-computer research, etc. haven't been given this "by-all-means" approach. It's one thing to defeat a geopolitical rival, it's quite another to escape annihilation for just a bit longer.
One might assume religiosity is the cause, but atheist nations aren't investing in it either.
If anything was deserving of another moonshot / Manhattan project, I think that would be it.
The Manhattan project and the moonshot were implementation problems, not theoretical ones. By 1939 we knew that a runaway nuclear reaction was possible and Werner von Braun probably could have worked out the fuel you’d need to get to the moon on the back of a napkin. It took a lot of ingenuity to get there, but both problems seemed achievable given enough resources.
On the other hand, we don’t even know where to begin to “cure cancer”, because it’s thousands of different diseases with different causes and prognoses. There are cancers that essentially are curable with enough of a headstart. Of the ones that we’ve “cured” there’s little in common in their origins and they all have wildly different treatments. Curing cancer isn’t dumping money at solving one achievable problem - it’s an open-ended investment in tackling thousands of independent problems.
There are ideas for universal treatments for cancer and aging - hundreds of them. Which ones do we dump our billions and billions into investigating?
Cancer survival rates are constantly getting better. The payback for investment in biotech research has been huge and even bigger dividends are on the horizon.
Look at the Hepatitis drugs and weight loss drugs that actually work. These along will address the leading causes of death today.
Coming soon is xenotransplantation. Already we're experimenting with hearts. The outlook is that in 10 years we'll routinely be doing this. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10143783/
> There are ideas for universal treatments for cancer and aging - hundreds of them. Which ones do we dump our billions and billions into investigating?
There really aren't. The basic technology is mostly the same. And we have a system for deciding what to spend money on: scientists write grants, get some funding, show results, and then we repeat at a bigger scale seeing who can deliver the best results. It's not perfect, but it works.
Cancer deaths today are a choice we make as a society to not invest in research. We can't "cure cancer" tomorrow, but even with the tiny resources allocated today we're making significant progress. We could do so much more!
For example, in the 70s 5-year survival across all cancers was 58%. Now it's 85%.
I'm pretty sure Apollo was a political model for this ongoing "war on cancer" launched in 1971.
"Cancer" is a nebulous area. You can't really study "cancer". Cancer isn't a disease. It's a class of diseases characterized by a breakdown of your own cells' reproductive process. Not to mention, it's a breakdown that can just happen. You can take every precaution, avoid every carcinogen, and still get cancer. The biggest predictor to whether or not you will get cancer is time. The longer you live, the greater your chances.
And we might "get" cancer far more often than we realize. It's just that our bodies do have ways to excise cancer from our own bodies. It's just that sometimes, it's not enough.
And there is a lot of research that goes into cancer prevention and treatment. But it's not like one day we'll have the anti-cancer pill. That's just magical thinking.
Life extension research is also in a weird place. Because, like cancer, there isn't just one thing that ends our life. It's a host of things. And a lot of those things are being looked into. And we've already made amazing strides. We are able to get way more people to advanced ages than before. Prior to modernity, it was basically luck as to whether or not you'd make it to 60.
And I don't even know what you want to mean by "brain-computer" research. But I assume it would eventually involve fucking around with living brains. You absolutely cannot make a mistake there. You don't go poking around in the brains of healthy people unless you want to make them very unhealthy, very quickly.
So each of the things you've picked out are vague and/or fraught with their own perils.
Chucking a meat-filled metal tube at a space rock and getting the meat back is an objective with a clear goal.
And also, I'd like to point out, that failure was an option. Michael Collins was trained in everybody's job just in case he had to come back alone. During the first orbit, when he was out of contact with everybody for 48 minutes, he had no idea what he would find when he came back around. That and this was a process of years. The mission that landed on the moon was Apollo 11. Preceded by the Gemini program, whose main purpose was to lead into the Apollo program. 8 years for the singular goal of having a man go to the moon and return.
"Curing cancer" is not the same. "Brain research" is not the same. "Life extension" is not the same. Pick one thing. One simple goal. Not "cure cancer", but something like "make non-nauseating chemotherapy". Then dedicate 8 years to achieving that one task, no matter the cost. Which is something they do do. Any time you see something about "targeted cancer medications", that's to end-run around chemotherapy. Because chemotherapy is kind of like setting your house on fire to get rid of termites.
Outside of blowing stuff up, the NSF distributes roughly $10 billion a year to research. And while a lot of that funding gets redirected back to universities, a healthy amount of it goes directly towards research that all of us benefit from tremendously. Think about how much open source software was developed at universities, funded directly, or indirectly via NSF or similar grants.
One of the problems with indiscriminate spending on science is people who oppose to the spending will attack it. We often see news articles like, "government gives professor $4 million to study of shrimp". Of course, the article is biased, so it ignores that half that that money goes back to the university to pay for "research facilities" or that the research may have direct military application. So people get the impression that there's these scientists out there playing around with aquariums and getting paid millions to do it.
It's a crime that all of that money isn't accessible to people outside of universities...
> So people get the impression that there's these scientists out there playing around with aquariums and getting paid millions to do it.
I mean... that's the optimistic case. At least in your imaginary scenario there's actual work happening from 9am to 10:30am and from 3:00pm to 5:00pm...
It's hard to really grasp, kind of like insurance which I swear a lot of people also don't really get but in reverse (where you throw a lot of money seemingly down the drain until possibly the day where it completely makes up for it).
How do you tackle budgeting for something with zero guarantees? Not very easily.
I wouldn't say that at all. There are lots of small, tangible positive outcomes that occur along the way. Inventing interplanetary travel is great. But even a failed project gives smart people experience, generates research that might have application elsewhere, funds general economic development.
Lots of indirect development comes from R&D. Think a chemical engineering PhD student designs some software to solve a problem specific to their research, then finds out that there's a broader market for that kind of software and leaves his research to pursue that as a business.
I think that a lot of people think R&D is only about achieving a specific goal. When, in reality, it's about researching and developing a lot of smaller things in the general direction of a particular goal.
Invisible in rich coutnries like the US, I mean. The USSR space raced itself into recession.
Did they? The USSR had a lot of expensive losses, from the war in Afghanistan to the cleanup of Chernobyl. But I'm not sure the space race fits in that category; like in the US it pushed tech advances within the USSR as well, and their launch capabilities generated a lot of revenue for them down the line.
http://www.energycrisis.com/reynolds/SovietDecline.htm
> To summarize, the period 1988 to 1992 was the world's third oil crisis in 20 years. This one brought down the powerful Soviet Empire.
>It is suggested that because the Soviet Union had out-of-date oil technology that production decreased. However over time, even in a closed system such as the Soviet Union, information about technology and technology itself must increase.
Why? The Soviet Union had numerous important failures in technology that killed their advancement, often caused by valuing personal loyalty (often treated as party loyalty) over all else, an act that will drive any system to failure eventually.
>There is no reason to believe that management was much better in the 1960's when oil production skyrocketed then in the 1980's when it stagnated
Again, asserted without evidence, as if there aren't hundreds of examples of good management being replaced with bad management, regardless of economic ideology or societal structures.
>Subsequent discontent pushed them toward democracy. The Soviet Union was left trying to simply keep NATO troops out of Eastern Europe but still letting the Eastern Europeans become democracies.
So now rolling tanks into at least one of the revolting countries is "letting the eastern Europeans become democracies"? Russia fought, and continues fighting to this very day, any and all "I don't want to be a part of russia anymore" ideology, including with lethal force.
The Soviet Union degraded over time because it was structurally and socially organized to encourage rewarding people who were loyal and projected strength than people who got things actually done. From the very top with Stalin himself, the way to move up was completely divorced from the way to improve efficiency. This importantly isn't about the economic system, but the ideology of leadership. The Soviet Union would have run into plenty of troubles with a system based on syncophantry even if it were a free market capitalist system. Allowing that kind of blatant corruption and suffusing it through all levels corrodes society. Or at least this is my opinion.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24808741
Assuming JSTOR still works for anyone.
Regardless, my thesis wasn't that the USSR collapsed entirely because of an oil shock. It was that the USSR had severe structural problems and couldn't weather adversities such as the oil shock.