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Comment by tuna-piano | Hacker News Reader

While I see your point, I think there are two important things to remember here. (Note: I understand the long term implications of an interplanetary species, just providing context)

A) whatsapp improves the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people. You don't necessarily need an absurd customer lifetime value to get a $19b valuation with that many people using your product.

B) SpaceX provides almost no current value to anybody. And the people it does provide value to are "free riders" in the sense that they love watching space travel and get to watch SpaceX regardless of whether or not they pay for it.

Just an inexact thought experiment. Let's say we poll the roughly 1b people living in first world, and ask them each to pay $10 to see SpaceX do whatever SpaceX does. How many people even think it's worth $10?

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Let's say we poll the roughly 1b people living in first world, and ask them each to pay $10 to see SpaceX do whatever SpaceX does. How many people even think it's worth $10?

I just wan't to add that the problem is not that SpaceX provides less to humanity than WhatsApp.

The problem is that most people are not really far-sighted, but only see things which benefit themselves in a predictable amount of time.

Why companies like SpaceX (or NASA) are important has already been answered with Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa

https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4372563

>The problem is that most people are not really far-sighted, but only see things which benefit themselves in a predictable amount of time.

Because most people are not upper middle class to wealthy. They are forced to be concerned about paying for food/healthcare/education so their life tends to have different priorities.

The other problem is that your line of 'far-sighted' is completely arbitrary. Someone could easily argue that SpaceX is wasting its time with rockets and we should be spending more time studying theoretical physics to figure out better ways to travel long distances in space.

> Because most people are not upper middle class to wealthy. They are forced to be concerned about paying for food/healthcare/education so their life tends to have different priorities.

Which is a problem because if only they could (not that the system will let them do that easily) stop and think a little further, in a little less selfish way, they'd likely figure a way to improve their living conditions.

But hell, that applies also to the "upper middle class to wealthy", especially in terms of convenience. See NIMBYsm, or people fighting tooth and nail for their right to use cars cheaply in dense urban areas. People tend to defect instead of cooperating, for their own demise (and of everyone else who knows better but can't do much against an uncoordinated mob).

>Which is a problem because if only they could (not that the system will let them do that easily) stop and think a little further, in a little less selfish way, they'd likely figure a way to improve their living conditions.

This is a completely uninformed view of what it's like to be in this position. Everything in life for them is essentially a borderline crisis (I witnessed my parents going through this). Finding new jobs is extremely difficult so you have to make major compromises to keep your current one. This is even more important when you can't build any savings to cushion the impact of unemployment.

What exactly do you think they can do to "stop and think a little further"? This might be an option if you have no family to support, but otherwise it's a ridiculous notion.

I don't think that argument would be particularly easy. You need a mix of practical and theoretical experimentation.

Practical experimentation doesn't equate to rocket use at all if someone fundamentally believes that rockets are not the way forward. e.g. We don't try to launch things to other solar systems with sling shots, but that doesn't mean we aren't doing practical experimentation.

People are already chipping in - SpaceX gets a big portion of its income from NASA which is funded by US taxpayers, and also indirectly by all the ISS partners (Russia, Europe, Japan, others?).

While I can see how whatsapp can be valued higher than SpaceX, I don't see how this logic makes sense on any level. You could use the exact same logic to make any B2B company seem worthless when compared to a consumer app.

"SpaceX provides almost no current value to anybody."

Well, someone payed SpaceX for a delivery flight to the ISS the other day, they're certainly providing value in that context

This discussion is in terms of value to WhatsApp users ( average-joe user) to SpaceX users ( niche rich-audience / billion dollar agency )

A naive way of looking at it:

Benefit to humanity = Number of people it affects * Impact per person.

The advancement of science is of quite significant benefit to humankind in the long run and it affects everybody in a way a brand product implementing a known design does not. In fact, if it staves off extinction, even if it only matters in the far far future, the number of people affected could well be more than the one hundred billion who have lived on earth for the past 40,000 years.

Maybe so, but does SpaceX really advance science in a significant way? That is, compared to the best next alternative?

They're definitely advancing engineering. They're also significantly improving space transportation infrastructure, which is crucial to getting more space-related science (and that includes a lot of stuff that is of terrible importance to biotechnology, which is likely to be The Next Big Thing after IT). Apart from that, they're directly working towards making humans interplanetary species and - as we just learned - fixing communication infrastrucutre before that.

Add to that the amount of interest they generate among people - they're beginning to achieve what Star Trek did once, making space cool again. I personally know people who are dreaming (and some moving towards) aerospace career because of SpaceX, and with the amount of hype you see around the Internet, I'm pretty sure we'll soon have a generation of engineers inspired by Elon's companies.

Oh, and they do all that for dirt cheap.

I don't know how good they're on an absolute scale, or compared to the next best alternative, but they're definitely very cost-effective in terms of current and potential benefits to humanity.

If SpaceX succeeds in significantly reducing launch costs, then they will enable a tremendous increase in all sorts of science (and industry, but you're talking about science.) There's tons of stuff to learn outside of Earth's gravity well, but right now we're restricted by the absurdly high cost of getting there. Most of the money now spent in all areas of activity that take place off-Earth is spent on or because of the high cost of getting there: launch services, making the machines light enough to launch affordably; making them robust enough to survive without maintenance; making them super-fancy to justify the cost; doing lots of simulations because you can't afford to test in the real environment.

For one small example: Space is by far the best place to put observatories. Yet only a few special--and small ones--are there. What if observatories were routinely space-based?

SpaceX may not be doing the science themselves, but have the capability to act as a huge multiplier to those who are doing it. A much higher multiplier than any feasible amount of money shovelled into the existing system would create.

I totally agree. WhatsApp right now affects a lot of people a little. SpaceX right now affects small amount of people a lot, but if that satellite project pans out this will turn into affecting a lot of people greatly. SpaceX has a much, much bigger prospect for benefiting humanity than WhatsApp can dream of.

I am not so sure that is the reason for WhatsApp crazy validation. I feel that the reason for that was that it represented a danger for Facebook and Mark wisely acquired at any cost.

WhatsApp is big outside of the US because (at least in Panama, were I was born) text messages are not included in the mobile phone plan; however, you can get a data plan for a monthly fee and keep in contact without additional charges. In the US most people use text messages to communicate.

C) SpaceX also has considerable risk of failure so you have to factor this into a valuation and investment. Whatsapp has eliminated much of this risk and is already a developed and implemented product.

I am not saying Whatsapp has anywhere near the potential value of SpaceX but it is important to factor the amount of risk given the stage a project is at.

they uplift communication satellites, this is quite a value, isn't?

"improves the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people" really? I bit grandiose dont you think.

.. by a small amount, yes. Communication is valuable to people. Having a better alternative to SMS is evidently something people prefer, however slightly.

Agreed communication is valuable, but there are many options available. Just when I see "improving lives" I think of say clean drinking water in parts of Africa that don't have it.

Yeah I am being pedantic, but sometimes I get annoyed at how much these tech companies big themselves up when in the big scheme of human things they are largely irrelevant.

This comes from a guy that loves tech by the way!

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