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Comment by leemac | Hacker News Reader

Seems like this entire Pluto mission has opened up quite a few questions for Geologists. For such a small world so far from the sun, it sure has some very interesting features and characteristics. The recent mountain range photo/3D map was incredible.

We live in some exciting times. Every few months we have a new probe somewhere teaching us so much about our tiny corner of the universe.

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"We live in some exciting times".

Here's another perspective about the times:

"The dark future of American space exploration" http://www.vox.com/2015/2/23/8052365/nasa-budget-europa

Submitted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9906017

"If NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto is extended beyond 2017, the entire active human presence at the outer planets will consist of a single probe the size of a grand piano"

you're right. Yet what do you want from an ape species who makes beheading videos and posts them on entertainment sites? There are huge chances that we may be at some bifurcation point before very possible fall into Dark Ages or into collapsing into a planetary-sized self-centered ant colony (which i think is among the main traps what most early technological civilizations in the Universe fall into (other trap being of course is an all out nuke war)).

ISIS and their ilk are such a small percentage of what humanity is all about. Don't look at them and think that we're moving towards a new Dark Age. Life in much of the world is as good as it has ever been.

I would love it if NASA's budget was ten times bigger but the U.S. already spends more than everyone else combined.

The last time the NASA budget was this low as a percentage of the federal budget was 1961. It's really bad that this isn't well understood on a site like HN. If we can't justify it here...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:N...

I imagine many of the most expensive years were due to the space race with Russia. Basically, a side-effect of the cold war. Can that really be taken to represent the peak of human interest for the sake of science alone?

Why is a percentage a relevant measurement here? I think you would just want to measure budget compared YoY adjusted for inflation. The reason it doesn't make sense is that the US budget doesn't need to be balanced. It's not like spending a ton more on subsidies for something new (e.g. renewables/electric cars/healthcare) means that NASA lost money).

You have managed to derail the conversation away from the science and imply that America is falling behind in space. Claiming the US should be even more dominant in space seems odd given the lopsided reality. Maybe you are invoking American exceptionalism.

I'm not sure why you're looking at space exploration as a competition where we want to dominate. It's not a competition. We should welcome everyone. Even if no one else participates we should still increase our effort, not reduce it. There's so much more to learn.

As I mentioned earlier, this article explains it much better than I could:

http://www.vox.com/2015/2/23/8052365/nasa-budget-europa

If there was real competition it would be easier to raise the budget. Anyway the science from NH will be very interesting.

> I'm tired of saying this, but I have to say it again. The NASA budget is four tenths of one penny on a tax dollar. If I held up the tax dollar, and I cut horizontally into it, four tenths of one percent of it's width, it doesn't even get you into the ink. So I will not accept a statement that says, we can't afford it!

> Do you realize that the 850 billion dollar bank bailout; that sum of money is greater than the entire fifty year running budget of NASA.

> How much would you pay for the universe?

[1] "We Stopped Dreaming" - Neil deGrasse Tyson - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIZU8cQWXc

> Do you realize that the 850 billion dollar bank bailout; that sum of money is greater than the entire fifty year running budget of NASA.

I'm not disagreeing with the general sentiment, but I don't like when people mis-use this example. The bank bailout was repaid in full--it was a loan. It didn't in the end cost the government anything.

Do you have some more details on this? I can't find any specific statements anywhere that it was repaid in full, nor even that it was supposed to be repaid; but then again I'm not knowledgeable about this area and could be issuing the wrong search terms.

I don't have any links to the details, but I do recall that the US government put some restrictions in place to its debitors, especially on bonuses. This gave the banks a strong incentive to pay back its loans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program

"TARP revenue has totaled $441.7 billion on $426.4 billion invested.[3]"

America could stop spending so much money on killing and death, and be a real space-hero nation.

Its an uncomfortable truth, but there are a lot of better things America could be doing with its war economy.

What is your excuse for other nations who don't spend enough on space programs? Or is the US the only country with an obligation to explore space?

Plenty of nations should be spending more on space, but all of them should be spending less on war.

That's a pretty rudimentary and tired view. Having a single super power that acts as playground bully seems to leave the world in a pretty stable state. It's hard to ignore that fact. A massive cut in the military budget could have unintended consequences of another cold war, etc.

> leave the world in a pretty stable state.

I genuinely can't tell if you believe that or if you're being sarcastic.

US + others military intervention has left many bits of the world in a terrible state.

I don't think you understand how relatively stable it is now compared to the era of world wars we just exited.

Perhaps you are not seeing the destruction and utterly dire circumstances of the people on the receiving end of America's military might.

FWIW I keep writing to my politicians asking them to scrap Trident and spend the money on space instead.

Exciting times is a bit of a stretch. I was cutting black and white pictures from newspapers of Viking on Mars when I was a kid. 40 years later we're finally checking out Pluto.

Things will get exciting when the cost drops 100x and we're beaming back hi-def video and images 24x7 from all the planets and moons in our solar system.

Let's dream a little bigger and set the goal much higher.

Some people will always see the glass half empty. They are no fun to be around.

Half empty? We put a drop of water in the glass! :-)

Don't worry someone is working on making space flight cheap. In 20 years, the drone craze will go interplanetary. Gonna fund my Kickstarter?

It takes a certain personality flaw to belittle such an engineering accomplishment.

Either he's editing his posts, or people are going a little nuts with the downvote button. He's not belittling anything, just expressing the same impatience that many of us feel when we regard how little progress has been made in space exploration during our lifetime.

No editing. At least one person got it. Cost me a lot of karma. If you're 20 something, everything seems great. Guess we're not getting NASA's budget doubled.

Too bad "NERVA" never was developed for unmanned missions like this. Forget the little thermocouple can for electricity - give me an ENGINE, "Heinlein" style!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA

I was in my teens when Voyager was a thing, and I am really impressed with the volume, variety, and quality of the modern space probe fleet. (Of course I want more, like Uranus and Neptune orbiters, but between Pluto and comets and asteroids and all those things on and around Mars, 2015 is a really incredible time for space)

I think the really unfortunate aspect of the question is highlighted by the proverbial "problems here on Earth." Namely, there are still only three DSN sites, and mission planners are said to have to fight with each other for receiver time. The fact that planetary science still has to contend with Voyager-era terrestrial resources is a crying shame.

Thanks for the turn-of-phrase, below, that made my day :-)

No, it takes a certain personality to want great engineering accomplishments to be routine. Because if they're not, we'll probably be trapped on this rock for several more centuries.

[UPDATE to answer without burning karma]

Someone says "We live in some exciting times." and I try to explain how exciting it could be.

Unless we actually have the "glass is only half full" discussion there's little chance of improving the situation. We have this political correctness problem where you need to always be positive.

Everyone wants more great engineering to happen. You're not a snowflake in that regard.

You're complaining because you can imagine it happening faster than it is, which is unhelpful and unpleasant. Thus, downvotes.

Everyone wants more great engineering to happen.

No, they do not. Otherwise we'd have three dozen New Horizons-class spacecraft flying throughout the solar system and Kuiper Belt by now.

Right now, there's a sizable contingent of people who are looking at the Pluto imagery and muttering to themselves, "So what? How does this affect the Kardashians?" Some of those people -- not all of them, but enough of them -- vote. All of this self-congratulatory stroking on our part just empowers them.

I should have said "(nearly) everyone reading on Hacker News wants..."

He's complaining to the choir (of sorts) while disparaging the very real progress we are making because it isn't as good as it could have possibly been if reality were different.

Absolutely true. When a co-worker saw the picture I posted on hipchat of Charon, he said "so what, looks just like our moon."

Thankfully he was chewed out by another science fan in the channel, but a sad number of people care less about this achievement than about the latest sports team win.

The pictures can be boring even if the science is exciting. Maybe we could instead talk about what this means. What we have learned from this.

I find it neither unhelpful nor unpleasant. It could certainly be happening faster if we could persuade politicians to expend more money on space engineering or facilitate the raising of private capital. I find your argument strangely teleological.

That's a different than "this isn't very impressive because I think these achievements should be happening faster."

There's some real haters who are downvoting your realism. Sorry about that, I think you are simply being truthful.

This mission was launched 9 years ago. I'm surprised it even had 40GB of storage space.

Mars gets within 0.3 AU of the Earth when the orbits line up. Pluto is at best 29 AU away. That's almost 100x harder, and it's amazing it took only 40 years.

And all those other problems like getting people to Mars, or the moons of Jupiter, for example, will be easier?

All things with space are difficult, expensive, and possibly dangerous. Sure, getting to Pluto was difficult and cool, but that's the nature of space exploration.

Well it doesn't :) It has 8GB storage (and the backup has that much too).

Hm, maybe it was 40 gigabits = 5 gigabytes of data that it gathered from the flyby?

Folks, I appreciate that you don't like melling's opinion here, I have problems with it too. But can we not create an echo chamber by downvoting it into oblivion? That's not what voting is for. Let him have his say, if you disagree, then post a response. The way to win an argument is not to bludgeon the opponent into silence.

On HN, it's completely appropriate to use downvote for disagreement (this has came up over and over again, but I doubt it's gonna change). Generally, I tried not to downvote for just disagreement, but melling's comment is pretty much the text book sample of the middlebrow dismissal, or gratuitously negative that we try to avoid.

That's incorrect. Why don't you read this 10 times then reread what I said.

" We live in some exciting times. Every few months we have a new probe somewhere teaching us so much about our tiny corner of the universe."

It's simply not accurate.

I was not one of those who downvoted you. And on further reading of your comments, it looks like you are commenting on the political climate of our society (no one cares about space/ science etc.), rather than specific engineering ability of the probe/ the team involves.

It is a popular sentiment, and I can say that a lot of us would agree with it. But your original comment read very much like belittling the current Pluto mission, which is a different thing and very much not welcomed here. I mean, we even try not to complain too much for the 10000 JS frameworks being posted here, let alone another probe in space.

> very much not welcomed here

While I agree with your first paragraph, I have issues with sweeping statements as to which viewpoints are welcome here. While I, as stated, disagree with melling's opinion in this matter, he is more than welcome to have it and make it known. Just as those who don't agree, through downvote or response, are welcome to their view.

I felt like melling was pointing out something valuable---putting current achievements into perspective with a little history.

Middlebrow dismissal isn't even a real phrase.

It sure is. It even originated here on Hacker news.

http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissal...

Right, so its part of the circle jerk. Once again, not a real phrase.

> On HN, it's completely appropriate to use downvote for disagreement

No. It is not appropriate at all! You reply for disagreement. You do not downvote.

Downvotes are for useless messages, flamebait, off topic, things like that.

Downvote for disagreement leads to reddit and no one wants that.

The bigger issue is that people with negative reactions are more likely to downvote than those willing to upvote on touchy subjects. That creates an imbalance and everyone has to be careful not to upset the hypersensitive SJWs as a result. The same human tendency accounts for the imbalance in online reviews.

Out of curiosity, do you consider it acceptable to downvote a message for not contributing to the conversation, even if it is technically on topic? I try to follow official policies, but I confess that I often just think of voting as a general way to express my opinion of how a comment contributes to the quality of the discussion.

Check out what PG says about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

I don't agree with him there, because unpopular opinions should still be expressible. The downvote allows you to suppress opinions that you don't agree with which I don't think fits with the spirit of discourse that a good community should have. If someone says something inflammatory, suppress it. If someone says something you don't agree with, disagree with it.

I agree.

Is it time we move on and form our own opinion about the use of the downvote as a community instead of always deferring by quoting pg, whilst whose values and contributions are obvious, has only posted 1 comment[1] (and no submissions[2]) since his last active day 475 days ago?[3]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg

[2] I do not know however if he reads or still votes on HN.

It's not really interesting what he has to say there. He never returns to address any of the valid criticisms of his post.

That's one opinion and it's doesn't jibe with what the site creator has stated previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683

  "IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch.
   Downvotes have always been used to express disagreement. Or more
   precisely, a negative score has: users seem not to downvote
   something they disagree with if it already has a sufficiently
   negative score."

He did also say this in a discussion about problematic downvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057347

So his position did seem to be a bit more nuanced than "downvote what you like".

"I know it when I see it"

My personal rule is to not downvote grey comments unless it's offensive or extremely wrong. Sometime I even upvote a comment I don't like when it's too grey.

More troubling than downvoting Melling's first comment (which is gratuitously negative and poorly worded) is the pile-on down-voting (and lack of corrective upvoting) of their other comments to this thread, most of which are reasonable points nicely made.

I feel like I downvote more than other people (and I'm happy for mods to say where I rank in the downvote league) but I don't like the pile on that you sometimes see on HN.

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