Who's got the guts to go to the moon? | Hacker News Reader

Who's got the guts to go to the moon?

experimental-history.com

32 pointsctoth26 comments

> Maybe curing cancer in the 2020s is way harder than going to the moon in the 1960s. I have no idea. But it doesn’t sound like we’re even trying to cure cancer.

Yep, that's the problem. After 1969, a moonshot means two things:

1) It's hard, very hard.

2) It's possible in a short time frame.

Curing cancer is hard. Check.

It's not possible in a short time frame. They are just lying. They call it a moonshot to sound cool.

Curing cancer in 10 years is like promising to open a hotel in all planets and all major moons in the solar system. And curing cancer is perhaps harder.

On the other hand there have been a lot of small improvements. I know someone that got like 10 years on no cancer grow with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormonal_therapy_(oncology) . It's not a cure, but 10 more years is a good step.

There is no financial incentive to cure cancer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25LUF8GmbFU

I've never understood this take. So you seriously think that if you developed a cure for cancer there isn't economic value there? If you ever find one i'll pay you a million dollars to be nice and take it off your hands

Under the current medical system a cure for cancer will mean financial problems for hospital systems, doctors, nurses, and the entire medical establishment.

Under the current medical system a cure for cancer would safe the medical industry billions of dollars a year.

If you can make random assertions, I can too.

Saving money doesn't put food on the table for hospital execs and doctors and medical staff. BILLABLES DO. Surgeries, pills, in-person care. What don't you understand?

You can make shit up all your want to justify your own position. Its made up.

It puts food on the table for pharmaceutical execs, and any hospital execs who offer a cure when their competitors dont

So i don't disagree with that, but i think you're way off on how a cure would play out.

a). it wouldn't be developed by "the medical community" but by a specific group of profit seeking people. They don't and won't care if they put other people out of work

b). I can't think of a single example where what you're talking about has been true. Every huge economic shift has had winners and losers but don't seem to be suppressed successfully right? maybe i'm missing some cases but just doesn't seem realistic

yes, but It would be a trillion dollar invention for whomever created it.

Inventors and researchers are motivated by their potential rewards, not second order consequences for other parties.

Hundreds of billions of dollars flow into oncology research trying to make improvements.

That did not seem to bother Gilead when they cured Hepatitis C and stole business from their competitors, who were only making ongoing treatments, by ruthlessly undercutting them so that Gilead would get tens to hundreds of billions of dollars for themselves and their shareholders instead of the executives and shareholders of their competitors.

> It's not possible in a short time frame.

This is not true. Cancer is wide, it's not "one thing" but lets talk real world.

We have saved millions with hardcore anti-smoking campaigns. I don't agree with them, but they cured millions none the less.

Ozempic will cure millions of cancer if it works, which so far it seems to.

We can and do jump.

If we do as the article warns, be losers and pretend 'cancer' is a mysterious Satan and accept it's fate then we won't.

I agree that we can cure somo cancers. But a cure for all cancers is probably impossible.

Interestingly, those mammals that are highly resistant to cancer (such as bats or whales), tend to be resistant against all cancers at once, for decades.

Maybe a stronger immune system, such as the bats have - it is really incomparable to humans - can whack cancer cells reliably regardless of their particular genetic signature. Much like it can kill various germs without analyzing their DNA/RNA first.

You are conflating "curing" with "preventing through abstinence via social means". Both are good, but they're also very different.

> We have saved millions with hardcore anti-smoking campaigns. I don't agree with them, but they cured millions none the less.

Can you expand on that last bit? Why don’t you agree with them?

The author doesn’t explain why their “give someone 200k for life” funding idea works but tenure doesn’t.

Also no reference to if/whether/why DARPA had a good funding model or not.

Very strange to say "nobody has gone to the moon." Not only a few did the real thing, the idea that those moonshot does not reach their target depends upon the wrong idea that there is, say, one cancer and one cancer cure. As we cannot hence we are not there. But we did a lot and some move so much that a lot of patients are saved. And like we all know now about the mRNA but that is not given as an example, but why?

Strange article. Just argue for clickbait or what?

I get what the article is trying to argue for, but using cancer moonshots as his example of what is wrong feels is far less convincing in light of him admitting that he has no idea of how oncology works.

Am I the only one that immediately nopes out of articles that have popups / subscribe. The article has to really be on a topic I care about to take the time to x those out.

Have you tried installing an ad-blocker?

Fair enough. I do use ublock on Firefox mobile. Just enabled all the filters not enabled by default and I'm not seeing it anymore. Modern Internet is a dumpster fire.

Aha, that must have been the issue. All those extra filters (for "annoyances" etc.) seem to avoid some of these issues, but for some reason they're not enabled by default, I guess to try to avoid affecting performance too much.

You didn't miss much with this one.

You are not the only one.

I've made life changing decisions based on them.

I do industrial automation. Wanna know why I (and my entire integration team) don't use Labview? Because when I went to their site to learn about their product, they were more interested in my email address then telling me what they make.

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