
A dying teenager who wanted world peace (and love) - lermontov
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-52763560
======
dehrmann
> Jeff hoped not only that he would get that dream job with Nasa, but that the
> organisation would start to work with the USSR rather than competing with
> it.

> "Even when I was fairly young, I could see the potential for collaboration
> between the US and Soviet Union," he says. "It just never made sense to me
> that we were pointing nuclear weapons at each other, when we could be
> collaborating to do extraordinary things in space."

Oh, kids. Nasa's raison d'etre was to research how the US can watch the
soviets from space or shoot them from space. That's why its budget peaked in
'66\. Doing "extraordinary things in space" was just a means to that end. But
I do appreciate the sentiment.

~~~
rorykoehler
The world would be a much better place if curiosity was the main driver
instead of power.

~~~
jedmeyers
As long as you have limited resources to manage, your curiosity will go
nowhere without the power to obtain resources to satisfy that curiosity. I too
love to dream about how great life is going to be once we all have unlimited
resources.

~~~
rorykoehler
We have more than enough to go around and we have for a long time.

~~~
Judgmentality
Do we?

Fresh water isn't unlimited - in fact much farming today is done unsustainably
by pumping ground water faster than it can be replenished. Desalination plants
are expensive and not necessarily viable.

Oil is obviously limited, and while there are energy alternatives it's not
quite that simple. Not to mention the abundant use of petroleum in every day
items we take for granted such as plastic. Sure, we can imagine a world
without oil, but right now that world does not exist.

Land is limited. Minerals are limited. Medicine can be limited (I'm fairly
certainly whoever develops a vaccine will find it used nationally much more
densely than internationally until it is ubiquitous).

~~~
arcticbull
> Fresh water isn't unlimited...

Yep, but we have more than enough for the time being.

> ... in fact much farming today is done unsustainably by pumping ground water
> faster than it can be replenished.

Yes, however a lot of that is done to produce products that are unnecessary (a
single almond requires 1.1 gallons of water to produce), a political exercise
(40% of all US corn is grown for Ethanol, which produces more carbon emissions
than it saves), or otherwise in support of our largesse (49% of all US corn is
grown for animal feed).

> Oil is obviously limited, and while there are energy alternatives it's not
> quite that simple. Not to mention the abundant use of petroleum in every day
> items we take for granted such as plastic. Sure, we can imagine a world
> without oil, but right now that world does not exist.

Substantially less oil would be consumed for power, making it available for
plastics, etc, if we actually invested in nuclear, wind and solar. The amount
consumed for the manufacture of plastics is pretty limited and plant-based
alternatives are coming to the fore.

> Land is limited. Minerals are limited.

The density of the US is 94 people per square mile, with more than enough
minerals to go around. There's effectively no limit to how far _up_ you can
build in a metropolis if the city council chooses to permit it (see: San
Francisco vs. Miami, Houston).

> Medicine can be limited (I'm fairly certainly whoever develops a vaccine
> will find it used nationally much more densely than internationally until it
> is ubiquitous).

Medicine is always going to be limited, the question is how we choose to
ration it -- based on luck (aka free market capitalism, to whomever can afford
it) or based on need (via socialized scheme).

> Food...

Consider that America wastes 40% of all the food it produces -- 80 billion
pounds of food per year -- enough to feed the entire rest of the planet. [1]

There is enough to go around, we just choose not to let it.

[1] [https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-
america/](https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/)

~~~
Judgmentality
> with more than enough minerals to go around

I think we actually agree on most things except for this. China is hoarding
rare Earth minerals, mostly the kind you need to develop batteries to
transition away from our dependency on oil.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2019/07/10/china...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2019/07/10/china-
has-a-powerful-trade-weapon-rare-earths-used-in-green-energy-
products/#808b2034e4c1)

So no, we absolutely do not have enough minerals to go around, at least if you
want to transition to alternative energy resources.

~~~
arcticbull
"The major cities in which rare earths were mined are Shandong, Inner
Mongolia, Sichuan, Jiangxi, Guangdong, Fujian, Hunan, and Guangxi." [1]

Africa has relatively little in the way of discovered rare earth deposits.
There are 50X as many known rare earth deposits in China as in South Africa,
and that's the largest source in Africa. They are very much mining it at home.
If they're getting them from abroad they're not "hoarding" them, there's a
market, and other countries could just as easily buy.

Lots of articles can back me up here, it's blighted the land. [2, 3, 4]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_industry_in_China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_industry_in_China)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-
ra...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-
village-pollution)

[3] [https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-
toxic...](https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic-
aftermath-of-rare-earth-mining)

[4] [https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-
place-...](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-on-
earth)

~~~
Judgmentality
You seem to be right - I overestimated the mining efforts of China in Africa
and assumed it was related to specific Earth minerals incorrectly.

------
pwdisswordfish2
>Listen, we're not the US Postal Service

Just forward the letters, man! How hard can it be? I bet they’re looking into
every one of them anyway…

It’s kind of funny because in many languages the word for ambassador literally
derives from “messenger”. Unfortunately not in English, but the words do seem
related in Russian, from what I can gather.

Edit: Also, the school’s Russian teacher only translated the headline?! Come
on!

~~~
guerrilla
You got me curious:

From Middle English ambassadore, from Anglo-Norman ambassadeur. From Old
Italian ambassatore, ambassadore, from Old Occitan ambaisador (“ambassador”),
from Latin ambasiātor, from Latin ambasiātor. From Gothic 𐌰𐌽𐌳𐌱𐌰𐌷𐍄𐌹 From Proto-
Germanic _ambahtiją (“service”) Borrowed from Gaulish ambaxtos (“servant”)
From Proto-Celtic_ ambaxtos (“servant”) From _ambi- (“around”) +‎_ ageti (“to
drive”) +‎ *-os.

~~~
pwdisswordfish2
Yeah, that’s what I had looked up as well. Pretty interesting. I don’t think
I’ve come across an etymology that went from Gothic to Latin to English, but
I’m hardly an expert.

------
082349872349872
see also
[https://www.csmonitor.com/1986/0916/rpeace.html](https://www.csmonitor.com/1986/0916/rpeace.html)

Eternal September may have brought us many bad things, but a very good thing
is that it's now far, far easier to get an idea of how ordinary people live
elsewhere (or even elsewhen, for a small subset of previous decades). Breaking
a filter bubble is much easier than pre-VCR access to foreign or ephemeral
media ever was.

As someone who grew up knowing that ICBMs were only 30 minutes away, I've been
keeping an ever-growing informal list of things that were pop culture on both
sides of the Iron Curtain. One of my favourites is the Duck/Chicken Dance.

~~~
Baeocystin
I lived in Vientiane, Laos is a kid. Mail back home to the 'states was a
three-month round trip affair with only about an 80% success rate. Phone calls
to family were completely impossible unless we flew to Bangkok first.

Nowadays, I can click on any of a half-dozen free webcams that show the old
neighborhood, whenever I want. It still kind of blows my mind, the
improvements in the world's communication infrastructure when I think about
it.

------
gerdesj
What a lovely story.

The siege of Leningrad was a brutal affair and yet time, effort and materials
were found for a child (Nina) to receive three complex brain surgeries.

~~~
lightgreen
> time, effort and materials were found

There were hospitals in Leningrad, doctors and medical intruments were in it.

Doctor worked there, they were paid (with food stamps) to do the surgeries.

It would be strange to expect that they refuse a treatment to a woulded
patient.

