
Is America Facing Another Sputnik Moment? - anthotny
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/is-america-facing-another-sputnik-moment
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heroprotagonist
I'm pretty irritated at the title. It seems to pose a question of whether we
are having a watershed moment where an achievement by a competing nation will
spur us to greater activity.

But all the article does is rehash history. A more accurate title would be,
"It's the Sputnik anniversary, here are some thoughts".

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Nokinside
The message in the article is that NASA is getting into the 60 years old
Sputnik era mindset of national gestures and symbolism instead of doing space
science or helping actual space economy.

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chollida1
> Indeed, recently opened archives suggest that Eisenhower preferred to let
> the Soviets reach space first, so as to establish a precedent. The United
> States would then be free to launch reconnaissance satellites without
> incurring the wrath of its Cold War nemesis.

You hear things like this alot,

\- The US knew about Pearl Harbor attacks and let them happen

\- The US knew about 9/11 and let it happen.

\- The US knew about soviet misses moving to Cuba and let them get there
intentionally.

Most people dismiss this as tinfoil hat territory. I wonder how many of these
"conspiracies" have any truth to them?

As to the US facing a "Sputnik Moment" now, I don't think the article lays out
any valid reasons why now is their Sputnik moment. You could have written this
article any year from 1969 to now and it would be equally true.

~~~
iraklism
I catch myself internally debating this from time to time.

On the one hand, we are encouraged to make decisions based on
facts/data/evidence. Speculation is speculation. Anything goes.

On the other hand, if we only do this we are bound by the “reality” that has
been provided to us. No evolution/revolution can occur.

History is filled with documented cases of these “conspiracies”.

I’d be really interested in hearing other peoples’ views on this.

~~~
jerf
I think the error that a lot of conspiracy theorists make isn't so much the
idea that conspiracies exist, but that they have some sort of additional
metaphysical super-reality that makes them supremely powerful and omniscient.
I can process the possibility that 9/11 was at least permitted to happen by
somebody who happened to work for the government. But I bet it didn't go as
they expected (doubt anyone planned on one of the planes crashing before
arriving at the Pentagon), and I would also lay money down the after effects
were not precisely what they wanted or expected either. Just as it the effects
were not precisely what the terrorists themselves probably expected or
desired, either. (And in only the craziest levels of the conspiracy theory
would the motives of the actual people and the conspirators actually line up.)

A lot of conspiracies probably exist. Mostly they fight with each other
(knowingly or otherwise), work at cross purposes, and don't have exactly the
predicted effects any more than any of the rest of us can predict the future
precisely either. And people underestimate what people can do. At the risk of
being excessively topical, as an example, at the moment I see nothing in
particular about the Las Vegas shooting incident that requires a conspiracy to
have occurred. That doesn't prove there wasn't one, and I reserve the right to
change my mind as evidence comes in, but at the moment, I don't see anything
that requires that as an explanation. In a world of 7 billion people, a non-
trivial number of which are crazy, a non-trivial number of _those_ of which
recently went crazy due to environmental factors such as drugs (prescription
and otherwise) or brain tumors, I don't think the baseline of such incidents
will ever be zero.

(And I'm not necessarily all that hard pressed to more-or-less believe the
official account of 9-11 either, honestly.)

In summation, I think that certainly some conspiracies exist, but they are
less powerful and omniscient that people ascribe to them, that there are
things that "just happen" without a conspiracy, and that sometimes they do
succeed and remain secret.

I'd also observe that just like there's a rush every time a new product comes
out to be the first to denounce it and declare it's utter failure, there's a
rush to be the first person to declare that you can see the workings of a
conspiracy or how something is a false flag operation. In our social media
age, this is what I would call "the expected result", not some sort of
surprise or meaningful signal.

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roesel
A nice intro into Sputnik, but otherwise almost no substance.

How are crewed missions not in line with the Apollo missions praised earlier
in the article? I am a huge supporter of basic research but NASA had plenty of
success with research which was performed to support/enable a more applied
purpose.

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lr4444lr
I'm surprised that despite talking about the push for scientific education
that came out of the Sputnik event, the article doesn't quote the seminal
manifesto that really galvanized the conversation: _A Nation at Risk_ [0]

Is it as relevant today as it was back then? The rest of the BRIC nations
hadn't yet reached their ascendancy, and outsourcing was in its infancy. AI
automation was a fantasy.

[0]
[https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html](https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html)

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imglorp
Our systematic, aggressive cost accounting has forced reduction, offshoring,
or outsourcing of basic R&D and core competencies in a number of tech fields.
Shareholders hate investing beyond the next quarter. Where is the flow of
innovations that used to come from Bell labs, DEC SRC, or Xerox PARC? Who
among the Buffets and bankers will have the appetite to pay for it?

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horsecaptin
Is there a newspaper out there that doesn't use bait-filled titles and
articles filled with "analysis" and just reports the news?

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icc97
> It also elides the fact that, at a time of increasing automation here on
> Earth, the rush to send human colonists to space seems quaint, if not
> misguided.

Personally I find that with all the recent Space X announcements, space
exploration really feels like the future is arriving. It turns out we don't
need flying cars, but having space rockets that land themselves, having moon
bases and people on Mars genuinely is the future.

This kind of stuff excites me and makes me long for the future. Automation
doesn't.

Obligatory XKCD: [https://www.xkcd.com/1232/](https://www.xkcd.com/1232/)

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intrepidkarthi
Stupid title for a TRUMPish article.

