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Comment by simpaticoder | Hacker News Reader

>Half a century of operation.

The stability of society (specifically American, specifically California/Caltech/JPL/Pasadena) must also be marveled at. That's 2 or 3 generations of engineers and scientists that were trained well enough to actually get things done. This is a marvel of teaching, technical communication, and societal infrastructure. Notably, NASA/JPL has maintained its prestige and funding for that entire time, as has Caltech.

There are many institutions (Sears), and world superpowers (USSR) from 50 years ago that seemed like they would dominate forever, but are gone.

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Yes, indeed, when so many projects get started and stopped, this continuity is notable, and we need more of this.

And then, this puts me in absolute awe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda_mahavihara

A residential university that ran for ~750 years. What a marvelous achievement of human culture and spirit!

It survived multiple royal dynasties.

This is a really good point, especially for a country that is so young and that has grown so fast. Maybe the instability resulting from that growth is yet to come but it doesn't detract from what NASA and JPL have accomplished so far.

> especially for a country that is so young and that has grown so fast

USA gained independence 247 years ago. That puts it in a minority of countries that have been sovereign as long or longer.

IIRC a good chunk of the voyager team is "first generation"

The thought occurred to me some years ago that a key aspect of governmental institutions is their durability, particularly in the face of adversarial politics. Though the inefficiency of government services is quite often grossly exaggerated, there's much consideration which has to be made of the trade-offs between efficiency and durability.

This should be front-of-mind whenever someone proposes a start-up to address some long-standing social, societal, and/or political issues:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345506>

The other institutional forms which seem to tend toward durability are educational and religious institutions. Which often overlap considerably.

> The thought occurred to me some years ago that a key aspect of governmental institutions is their durability, particularly in the face of adversarial politics. Though the inefficiency of government services is quite often grossly exaggerated, there's much consideration which has to be made of the trade-offs between efficiency and durability.

Governmental institutions are durable even when they are detrimental to society, as long as the government has enough police and military might to prevent insurrections. The society must put up with grossly inefficient institutions simply because the government has a monopoly on some sectors.

Durability, as with virtually any other characteristic or technique, has two edges. However where it is useful to have, it is indeed useful to have.

As to the other substance of your comment, I suspect you would benefit from reading this and its references: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37366751>

Education on an ongoing project is far easier then rebuilding fresh, even with better science and engineering.

We often see this in infrastructure, like train electrification, tunnel boring and so on. Trams is a good one, so many cities got ride of their tram system, 50 years later they want to build it again and many of them issues.

You're going to be blown away when you discover people have been reliably passing down information to future generations for many many centuries.

"Reliably passing down information" includes a lot of stuff a lot less impressive than "reliably passing down the information required to keep operational a spacecraft mid-flight at the edge of our solar system."

Well the systems controlling Voyager are quite simple, being 1970s technology. Obscure by today's standards perhaps, but not terribly complicated. 70KB of memory, programmed in Fortran and probably some amount of machine or assembly code.

Edit: apparently, due to the post-Apollo budget environment in the 1970s, the Voyager program had to keep costs down so while some new systems were developed, they also reused technology from the Viking program, not even updating or enhancing it.

"The Voyager CCS and Viking CCS would ultimately have the same amount of memory (just under 70kB) despite the routines and programs for Voyager being much more complex. In-flight programming allowed for new routines and programs to be uploaded regularly in non-volatile memory and eliminated the need for large amounts of memory to be required onboard."

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-annive...

I didn't take the GP seriously because of this. Papyrus and clay and stone carvings do not equal operating a network of brittle, bespoke devices across the scale of a solar system. The existence of language, or writing, or even cathedrals or pyramids, do not eclipse this accomplishment. The odds of losing control of a system is proportional to both time and complexity of the system, and the GP ignores the latter factor.

How are you measuring reliability? I actually would be kind of blown away if this was actually true.

"Reliably" passing down information for future generations is a recent phenomenon. Just go and look at the history of mathematics and there were multiple periods where information was lost and rediscovered.

The mastery of reliably passing down information is likely older than anything you've read.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedas

> The Vedas have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques.

That's at least 4000 years of lossless transmission.

We are talking past each other, I would not consider a few religions being able to pass down information about that specific religion to future generations as humanity as a whole being able to pass down information reliably. Especially given that the "Vedas" is wholly useless information while things like the Pythagorean theorem were discovered, lost, then rediscovered. We've only recently rediscovered how Romans created concrete?

Also given humanity has existed for many years longer than 4000 years and 4000 years really only represents 160 generations of humans I don't consider that impressive.

> Pythagorean theorem were discovered, lost, then rediscovered.

And documentation to an average software project is lost in 1 year.

> 4000 years really only represents 160 generations of humans I don't consider that impressive

But 3 generations at Nasa is?

We literally have clay tablets from ancient babylon and books that are thoisands of years old. We have traditional crafts like blacksmiths and pottery that were taught for thousands of years.

Conoaring this to 3 generations ia peak absurdity

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