In 1903, NY Times predicted airplanes would take 10M years to develop
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
The Navy general was partly right. The government was the wrong entity to pursue flight and it was best left in private hands.
The New York Times was partly right. It took a lot of work to develop commercial and military flight to the level it is now. They were also on the verge of a worldwide communications upgrade, so those 10m person years came together faster than imagined.
The other article is also partly right. Flight is not so cheap that it is widely available, there are billions of living people on this planet who will never fly because they will never have enough money to afford it before they die.
The British astronomer just wanted a telescope instead of individual space travel. He was arguing about the best way to use a limited amount of money and specifically disclaimed any ability to predict the future.
Finally.. the original idea of the Apollo program was incredibly ambitious and was put forward in a top down fashion by the president. This was unprecedented for peace time America. Even then, they have to acknowledge that half the country was on board, and a vast majority actually sat down and watched the spectacle.
I hate articles like this, they try to wash away all nuance to end up with a self serving conclusion designed to mollify the "move fast and break things" crowd. The "Big Think" does some of the smallest thinking I've ever seen.
Claims on other advances might be taken with somewhat more skepticism, particularly as regards the ISS, STS, and wholly too numerous Mars landers, but it would be hard to justify complaints about the cost of Galileo or Cassini/Huygens.
Whatever conclusion the big think article draws is on a misreading of the source NYT article.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2018/07/19/the-corre...
According to the legend I've heard - this was published the day before the Wright Brothers first flight in Dec 17 1903.
I didn't see the publication date in the article.
>Only nine weeks later, the Wright Brothers achieved manned flight.
Nobody believed them until 1908ish, when they flew over crowds in France and could no longer be ignored.
The NYT article mentioned is in their archives [1], dated October 9, 1903, which would be 9 weeks and 6 days. Close enough, although I'd probably round up to 10 weeks.
[1] https://nyti.ms/47ZyE3D (subscription probably required)
Maybe it makes you feel good, but overall it was just a huge time waste for everyone.
The mean time between paradigm shifts in the natural sciences [1] is 25 years. (Max: 144 years, between Copernican cosmology and Vesalius's work on anatomy in 1543 and the transition to classical mechanics in 1687. Exempting that, the mean time is 18 years.)
I would take that, which is remarkably close to to the length of a generation [2], as being a fundamental factor of the maximum extent of our technological forecasting abilities. A century, 4x that factor, strikes me as the upper bound, though I could be convinced of even 10x in a very stable field. 400x, on the other hand, seems absurd.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift#Natural_science... ranges taken at midpoint
People often point out how ridiculous these projections turned out to be, but seemingly nobody challenges their reason for existing.
Who says I amn't
There can be long periods of minimal quantitative progress, even quantitative regression, before a massive qualitative leap that's the result of making a few small changes.
Planes either fly or fall.
The difference is that a super-intelligent AGI could provide immense value in secret. It's somewhat hard to keep a plane secret. It's value is largely in moving people, so people have to know about it and they fly right there in the sky for everyone to see. Also, massive rockets are hard to hide, and a lot of the value was publicity.
I expect that somebody somewhere is going to have AGI for a period of time when the rest of the world doesn't know they have it... and right now feels like that time. People are openly publishing LLMs that float awfully close to those motorized gliders that decidedly, definitely didn't fly... until suddenly they did. It's only a matter of time until someone figures out how to make these fly, and the question isn't when, but when we'll find out.
I think he was right.
Astronauts! To the Moon! Nya Nya Nya Nya Nya!
it would have been cheaper to send the astronauts to the moon without returning them to earth
more seriously, the work that went into developing microelectronics returned a lot to the economy.
the human genome project has only just started returning its benefits
the R&D for manned moon missions didn't have much in the way of spinoffs.
[1]:https://books.google.com/books?id=gXYItzQARVoC&pg=PA127&lpg=...
The moon rocks, not so much. We have meteorites that came from moon. And from Mars! I could happily leave aside sending anything more to Mars.
The manhattan project cost roughly 56 billion in todays dollars vs. 149 billion for the Apollo program. The manhattan project effectively ended global great power conflict, likely saving hundreds of millions of lives from the inevitable catastrophe of a Warsaw pact vs. NATO conflict in Europe and Asia.
The F-35 program cost 1.5 trillion dollars, but this program was also effectively an omni-spending program for the military - sustaining fighter development and arguably deferring several major global conflicts.
We should judge projects by their individual merits rather than the justification that we're wasting less money than the alternative.
0: https://nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/newspace3.html
1: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/3721375-how-much-does...
Of all outcomes one might imagine, this seems among the better. An alternative reality in which all this wealth is invested solely in the welfare of humans is unrealistic; one in which it is squandered on terrible weapons and endless war is all too plausible.
It's not so much the money spent as the "we get to recruit all the smartest researchers and new grads for 2 generations to focus on a sole achievement" aspect.
Getting to the moon was inspirational, but functionally curing even one type of common cancer or ushering in the information revolution a decade or two ahead of schedule would be an order of magnitude more valuable.
This is like, your opinion. Who knows what would have happened, or more importantly what might not have happened if the US didn't focus on getting to the moon. The context of the times is important - at the time it was important to beat the Soviets to space. Curing cancer, while admirable, wouldn't have given the US any sort of advantage over the Soviets.
Maybe ushering the information age in sooner would have been meaningful. But what captures the attention of the 50s/60s American public more - a couple of bits of electricity pushed around abstractly, or the raw power of a rocket heading to the Moon? Which is more effective in showing the Soviets that the US has true hard power - controlling tiny amounts of electricity or demonstrating that they can send a rocket, potentially loaded with missiles, into space?
I can do that. I can imagine the Apollo program just like it happened, with one spinoff being computer chips and microelectronics. If it wasn't for Apollo we'd probably still be using rotary-dial phones owned by the local PTT.
Going to the Moon was an engineering challenge. We knew what was required, we "just" needed to do the necessary work. Some research advancements in material science were needed, but they were incremental. We also got some computer advancements out of the deal too, and sensors.
Even the reflectors placed on the Moon proved to be very useful.
For cancer – they are several diseases with the same name. We don't necessarily know what we have to do to 'cure' them (in many cases, once we figure out what actually causes an illness, treatments become relatively straightforward).
Even if we just focus on one type, would throwing the same amount of money as was spent in the Moon program (or the Manhattan project) be all that's required to 'cure' it? I don't think that's necessarily true. Funding helps, to an extent. But many things in medicine just take time and there's no way around that.
We still have no consensus on what causes Alzheimer's. A lot of research on amyloid plaques that may or may not be a red herring. Once we can know with a high degree of certainty what causes it, treating or preventing should become much more straightforward.
That said, throwing money at any kind of research seems to be beneficial. Be it the Moon, health and even military. We wouldn't be discussing this without military funding decades ago that enabled what eventually became the Internet. Although we, as in humans, have been wasting too many resources in wars.
> ushering in the information revolution a decade or two ahead of schedule would be an order of magnitude more valuable.
That's hindsight.
When coherent light (what we know as lasers) was discovered, it was regarded as a novelty but with zero practical application.
We can fund many types of research simultaneously – and we have to. You can't take a doctor and get them to engineer a rocket, and you can't take a rocket scientist and get them to work on curing diseases.
A JFK speech calling the nation to adventure + a blank cheque to your org + Walter Cronkite on tv & your nephew at school calling you a hero researcher can get a lot of basic science done.
Is that basic science better aimed at a moon landing or better aimed at stopping people from dying from colorectal cancer?
A moon landing is inspirational (and theoretically achievable) whereas stopping colorectal cancer is a big abstract "maybe".
A moon landing gets you "don't mess with us because we have amazing rockets & targeting systems" cred.
A "we can now save millions of our citizens from this one cancer" gets you "our capitalist society is more advanced than your communist society" cred.
I'm not saying Moon Landing wasn't the obvious choice or wasn't the right choice. I'm saying it wasn't as generally valuable as other choices.
That sounds scary, because there's a lot of encryption in use that is not quantum resistant.
In simple terms, it was sending a global message: “If our propulsion and guidance technology can put people on the moon, imagine what else would be trivial for us?”
Personnaly I think it was way worth it and we should keep going to further science and knowledge.
Totally worth it imo.
But again, the stuff we got from the space program makes it all an extreme bargain.
That’s a massively expensive prestige project.
Considering that the soviets concentrated on building space stations, yielding hardware that is still in use for active scientific purposes I would argue it wasn’t a good way to spend that value.
probably one of the best US government investments ever, especially compared to some of the braindead modern programs we throw away money on
Absurd! You never know what's just around the corner!
/s
Even Hacker News is cited in the piece!
The list of similarly cynical responses to great innovations and great businesses is a long one here.
All in all, thinking about it, would have been better to have a world without flight, since I think it favoured globalisation and shrinking of working class rights, pollution, hypertourism and another kind of pollution, as italian i’d summon inhabitants of venice to see what they think of the americans flying in, I’d argue flying is a net negative discovery
I don’t have to push anything, I think it’s the planet itself that will push its own brand of antitech by displacing populations and becoming less inhabitable, hope all the servant of capitalism will be happy when they will die thanks to the effect of climate change thinking that thanks to them their corporate overlords will be mostly ok, will they have consumed enough? Will they have worked enough? Will they have been good subjects?