One Giant Leap to Nowhere | Hacker News Reader

One Giant Leap to Nowhere

nytimes.com

66 pointsams137 comments

I've been thinking about this a little bit lately, with all the hoopla around the 40th anniversary.

The moon landing, in the public mind, was like Lewis & Clark -- it was exploration, trail-blazing. But the point was that once the trail was blazed, everyone else could follow, like pioneers going to California in the early 20th century. There would be space colonies, the West was no longer West, it was... Up! Out!

But none of that happened. It turned out that space travel was for supermen, not the everyman. And the everyman turned away. Space was just another place, like the corner office of a skyscraper, that rich, privileged, educated people -- other people -- got to go. And with that, and the conquest of the Soviets that Wolfe describes, we turned away.

The companies trying to do it faster, cheaper, better, and for anyone who wants to go are the heirs to the original impetus. They may eventually deliver on the promise that originally attracted the national attention: that this was a new beginning.

It is all true. I am constantly hoping that the world, whether it be the public or the private sectors or a partnership, will return to the stars properly. It is long past time to begin the true exploration of mars.

The Vietnam War killed our spirit for a generation. We had been defeated and were thrown into inner turmoil. Kennedy died and we got a succession of presidents with no vision, no spirit of wonder. NASA went from leadership to mediocrity. Wolfe gives us the metaphor of single combat, but we thought then that the space race was way better than the arms race. Then Johnson and Nixon dragged us through the Vietnam mud.

I think it's an accident of human history that we went to space so early. Can you imagine landing on the moon with computer technology circa 1969? It's an amazing accomplishment. It would have made more sense for the information technology revolution to come first. It's only now that more widespread space travel is even beginning to seem reachable.

But the point was that once the trail was blazed, everyone else could follow, like pioneers going to California in the early 20th century.

California had been explored by Europeans early by the 1500's, and you are talking about settlers in a period 400 years later. It's insane to expect that the process of settling a different celestial body would take a mere fifty years from first setting foot there. And that's just the moon - we haven't even set foot on Mars yet.

When it comes to space travel you can't think in terms of things happening during your lifetime, which I suspect is really why the public has lost interest. People don't seem to care in the least about anything they won't live to see happen, be it environmental destruction, the results of reckless economic policy, or long-distance space travel.

"I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach. "

-Bruce Sterling

The big mistake was declaring the moon a public commons. Instead it should be private property, first come, first serve....get there and stake a claim!

I don't know that it would have made much difference, given the lack of harvestables on the moon. We don't even know how much water is up there, and there's no shortage of its main mineral elements - silicon, iron, calcium, aluminum - here on earth.

I'm deeply saddened that manned space exploration has atrophied - it was so inspiring to me as a kid (b 1970), then I grew up and realised that the spacefaring sci-fi I enjoy most is just not going to happen in my lifetime. I suspect I'm not alone in feeling cheated out of the promised future. At the same time, I'm unable to come up with a good economic argument for why we should go back to the moon or establish a moon base.

>Gloom<

He3 is a fuel that can be used for aneutronic nuclear fusion -- a type of nuclear fusion with far less of a radioactive flux putting less demands on the wall material. The moon is one of the only sources (apart from the solar wind).

Which is not to say that it's a good idea, just that, were small fusion power-plants (for military applications, for example) ever achieved technologically, it may quite possibly require aneutronic fusion, and that a fuel source would start to really matter.

+1 - excellent point.

Reading this and a lot of other similar pieces makes you wish you were in a position to do something. Really though America's the only nation that could really pull off any real space progress at the moment and even that would be questionable with the current state of the enconamy.

Really though with a trillion dollar bailout, imagine the jobs that could be created and the uniting of the people with something like another space race but to mars.

Historically the way out of these sorts of downward trends has been war of some sort. It would be interesting to see if a "science" war such as a renewed space race without the militaristic/jingoistic overtones of the moon race would serve the same purpose. I think I read too much utopic sci-fi, though.

Moore's second law states that `fabs' to produce chips are increasing exponentially at about the same rate as chips get better.

If this law holds in the future, the building of fabs will force GDP growth on a race of its own. (However even if world GDP would stagnate, the cost of a producing a single fab would overtake GDP no sooner than 2040 or so. (I should dig out my calculation for that..))

War in no way creates wealth, it is an act of destruction and while it may employ people and kill off lots of people, everyone's standard of living is lower and they lose wealth. Instead of producing goods to improve the lives of those around them they waste time, effort, and material on tools of destruction.

I am certainly not saying that with approval, but I think it is undeniable that war has served, intentionally or otherwise, throughout history as a way of getting out from under economic crises of various forms. We can see examples of this in many of the British Empire's colonial conflicts.

Without the growth sparked by WW2, it's hard to imagine the American economic boom of the post war period.

Obviously this doesn't mean everyone benefited from it or that it was good, hence my musing about the benefit of a "science" war, although perhaps I should have been more clear that I am using the term as analogy only. I mean it as an intense period of competition, which surely you can agree can be beneficial.

This is the standard broken window fallacy (http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html#broken_window). Just a hurricane destroying a city doesn't improve its economic well being even though there will be a boom in construction and other such industries -- at the end of the day everyone involved is poorer. If you want to talk about the post war boom, it could be explained by the complete destruction of europe and an industrial america able to sell to them.

There can be big technology improvements during war due to individuals working night and day to save their lives, but in general the same thing can happen in peace time by people working night and day. It won't happen because they want to enjoy their lives.

It seems that a somewhat flippant comment has ended up with us talking around one another and me appearing pro-war in some weird way, which honestly couldn't be further from the truth. I'm not sure what is to be gained by continuing this discussion, so I will concede the point. I probably could've avoided this whole thing by quoting the word war instead of science. Mea culpa. All I was really trying to say is that I'd love to see a space race to Mars.

War in no way creates wealth

I'm not sure that's actually true. How much wealth was created via the development of jet engines, radar, satellite communications, antibiotics, computers? The unprecedented economic growth of the latter half of the 20th century was driven by civilian applications of technologies developed for the purpose of fighting WW2.

In the fifties Germany used industrial technology from the thirties to get back on her feet. Had the Reich used the twenties years in between for something other than destroying itself and the rest of Europe, it would have surely been richer and more advanced.

"In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly and efficient -- a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete -- was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, [...]" (from "Chapter 3: War is Peace" of Emanuel Goldstein's `The Theory of Hierarchical Society' (from 1984))

Anyway, the greatest life-altering technologic advances have been made during the long and relatively peaceful period of the 19th century. And no, it was not all an application of inventions from the Napoleonic wars.

Jobs are not created, only reallocated.

Since we live in a world of scarcity, there would alway be work to do.

The only reason why people don't have jobs is that resource are not reallocated yet, or worse, something is preventing the reallocation of resource.

Let's not forget minimum wage. Though there are arguments for it, minimum wage creates a floor on the price of labor above the equilibrium price, which creates a surplus of labor, and that surplus is part of what goes into our unemployment numbers.

Mostly. But there are some other factors, too. Wages tended to be sticky on the way down.

There's an interesting book full of interviews on the subject: ``Why Wages Don't Fall During a Recession'' by Truman F. Bewley. It used to be that managers rather fired a some employees instead of letting them work for less money.

See http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/news/bewley/tfb_00-02_wages.htm for a copy of the book's review in the Economist.

Lately we have seen wages fall, so that this rigidity might be on the way out.

"Jobs are not created"?!? What nonsense!

There were ~1.7 Billion people on the planet in 1900. Are there only ~1.7 Billion jobs to go around for the ~6-7 Billion people on the planet today?

Wealth is created from industry, which creates jobs to build that wealth. We do not live in a world of scarcity -- scarcity is imposed by nonsense such as a command economy's forced reallocation of resources.

> "Jobs are not created"?!? What nonsense!

Try to understand what Kiba means, even if it is a big simplification. He probably agree with the rest of what you say.

What is there to left understand in Kiba's statement? It's nonsense and I'm surprised it's been up-voted as much as it has.

Jobs are created by wealth. They are not a constant bestowed through the universe by fate.

We don't live in a world of scarcity. Scarcity is created by artificial constraints imposed by those who believe wealth (and society's employment) is a fixed quantity to be allocated by a central force of some sort.

"I'd have plenty if only those who have much more than me would give up their fair share." That's idiocy.

Jobs exist as a result of demand for them. Demand goes up as the population increases. Demand is much greater now than it was in 1900.

I am thinking that you severely misunderstood Kiba's argument... he is not a central planner nor did he ever claim that jobs are arbitrarily created by a king who wills it.

You have totally misunderstood me.

Because we live in a world of scarcity(limited number of t-shirt, computers, cars, yacht, etc), there is alway enough jobs to go around barring government regulation and attempt at central planning as well fluxes in the general economy.

You also got your economic relationship wrong. Jobs are not created by wealth. Jobs create wealth.(No, digging up holes and filling it in doesn't count nor do I believe that an object's value is defined by how much work is done.)

I don't know where you got the idea that I believed that wealth is fixed and that we need central planning to work. Quite the opposite, really. I believe that the free market system has created unprecendented wealth that men in the last 200, 100, 50, and 10 years ago never imagine.

>I don't know where you got the idea that I believed that wealth is fixed and that we need central planning to work

I'd say the statement "Jobs are not created, only reallocated." did that. Whatever your beliefs and intended context, your statement is completely incorrect.

You are describing things backwards: Jobs do not create wealth -- individuals seeking wealth create jobs.

Individual 'A' hires individuals 'B through n' to realize their vision to build wealth. Jobs do not spawn themselves spontaneously and seek out individual 'A' to bestow upon them the wealth generated by the working individuals 'B through n'.

> Really though America's the only nation that could really pull off any real space progress at the moment

Well in my opinion, given the current state of the american economy in particular and the western economy in general, I'd think it's upto China and India to be the innovators in space for the next decade or so. After all both of them did do successful man and moon missions respectively, quite recently.

India? They certainly have the brain power required, but India is still figuring out how to feed its multitudes.

IEEE Spectrum ran an issue devoted to the Mars mission recently. Very interesting read.

Per my reading, the technical challenges are orders of magnitude more difficult on landing on the Moon. The problem does not appear to be one of mere political will (and subsequent funding). The barriers are principally technical in nature, and US and Russia (and potentially EU) are the most likely candidates to address these technical challenges.

Special Issue: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/static/special-reports

Why Mars is hard: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/mars-is-...

China: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/could-ch...

[edit: +links]

They certainly have the brain power required, but India is still figuring out how to feed its multitudes.

America also has hungry people, look around the Appalachians. Having an underclass does not mean you can't go to the moon. Perhaps it should, but it never has and still doesn't.

Perhaps (they are equivalent fractions) but I rarely meet American movers and shakers that worry about the American underclass.

You should read my statement as a positive consideration of the priorities of the Indian elite.

Well since US, Russia and the EU are not going to be spending billions on space tech with their economies in shambles, I'd still think it's upto India and China to innovate.

India might not have the tech required now, just as India did not have the tech required to make nuclear warheads once. Any country that has sufficient monetary and educational resources can most definitely innovate.

Also, you seem to be contradicting yourself: You say India has the brains but not the tech to go to the moon???

> "[...] with their economies in shambles [...]"

I guess going to Mars will take longer than the current crisis.

I remember when I first heard of the fact that people have really landed on the moon, why such missions aren't commonplace now that its been 30 years since the first moon landing. I think I have never heard of people going to the moon in the past 2 decades of my living memory, maybe that's one of the reasons that people have come out with this conspiracy theory that people haven't really gone to the moon !

Wow, Wolfe writes like a God. Not a dull sentence (I read Bonfire of the Vanities and it was like stepping into another world).

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