
You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook - rahimnathwani
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mars-colonies-counting-ads-edward-hsu
======
undefined3840
I’m surprised this article is so upvoted.

1\. The author took this nearly word for word from Thiel/Eric Weinstein, who
have both discussed this point extensively, most recently on Weinstein’s
podcast.

2\. The author is using this click bait headline to discuss his own
industry/company, and this looks like some content marketing piece.

~~~
ElFitz
Plus, the clickbait headline is merely a copycat of one Thiel's own words,
except it was with flying cars and Twitter

~~~
kobayashi
Please post the Thiel article

~~~
lioeters
"We wanted flying cars - instead we got 140 characters."

Quote is from the article, "What happened to the future?"

[https://foundersfund.com/the-future/](https://foundersfund.com/the-future/)

~~~
ElFitz
Thank you!

------
Barrin92
I think it's great that there's a renewed discussion about the nature of
productivity and growth and that people are starting to become aware that
economic profit or consumer demand are not the same as progress on long term
fundamental science and manufacturing. For way too long now we have all
operated on the mainstream economic view that productivity growth is somehow
like manna from the heavens and that we only need to let market forces play it
out.

I wholeheartedly recommend reading Dan Wang's piece on the issue:
[https://danwang.co/how-technology-grows/](https://danwang.co/how-technology-
grows/)

~~~
shkkmo
What we need is progressively stricter tariffs paired with looser immigration
laws. We need to force companies that want to efficiently compete for our
consumer demand to in-source process knowledge and manufacturing.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
Dunno if we is U.S. or someone else, but the U.S. could at least loosen up its
immigration policy a little bit. We're literally putting Mexicans in fucking
camps.

------
bitL
"You get what you measure" \- talk to VCs that could finance your idea and
then weep when you see what ideas do they actually select. Quick boring ROI +
veiled scams are the way to go these days if you want to get external funding.

~~~
buboard
I think the bigger lie is that you absolutely _need_ VCs to finance your idea.

~~~
OnlineGladiator
What do you think is a better way to fund a manned mission to Mars? It's hard
to argue with the progress that SpaceX has made - and that wouldn't exist
without VC funding. Meanwhile NASA continues to operate at the whims of
Congress. It's doing fine, but it's not looking for any moonshots like it was
50 years ago.

~~~
goatlover
The goal of NASA is scientific exploration, not human colonization. Robots and
satellites are much cheaper and safer than trying to make Mars a viable place
to live, and you can explore many more places.

~~~
OnlineGladiator
I agree, but the title of the article we are commenting on is "You Promised Me
Mars Colonies but I got Facebook"

I didn't mean to say NASA is failing (although they are a political entity and
have a lot of ups and downs as a result), but literally to say "how else could
you possibly fund this if NASA isn't going to do it?"

If NASA is meant for exploration and we don't need VC funding (the point of
the original comment I responded to), what do you consider the best way to
fund a Mars colony?

------
philipkglass
This raises some interesting questions about why the-future-seen-from-1970
included so many developments that failed to materialize. Unfortunately, I
think it provides mostly wrong or irrelevant answers.

One thing that made the 20th century so amazing was the discovery of
scientific phenomena that were easily translated to _industrially and
commercially relevant_ technologies. We're still mining the rich vein of
technological possibilities opened up by quantum mechanics. The major features
of the field were well established before World War II. There has been nothing
so technologically fruitful discovered since. It's possible that amazing
_scientific_ breakthroughs in cosmology or particle physics will be made this
century, yet fail to have anything like the _technological_ impact of quantum
effect devices, if the time/length/mass/energy scales are not amenable to
building products and factories usable on Earth.

The other big headwind since 1970 has been the price of fuels. In every year
of the 21st century, inflation adjusted global crude oil prices have remained
above where they were in 1970. The one modern bright spot [1], the shale
revolution, has spectacularly failed to make its investors prosper [2]. Nor is
its continuance assured enough for airlines and aircraft manufacturers to
decide that the time has come again for faster rather than thriftier passenger
service. Airframes last a long time. Want faster-than-Concorde passenger air
service for the 21st century? You need new vehicles _and_ a stable, low priced
[3] energy source for them to consume.

[1] For oil and gas prices. Not for the climate.

[2] [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/shale-pioneer-fracking-
unmiti...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/shale-pioneer-fracking-unmitigated-
disaster-230000670.html)

[3] Including climate externalities. I wouldn't bet on those remaining
unpriced over the airframe's life either.

~~~
petre
The future acording to Ford Perfect: just the same old stuff in faster cars
and smellier air. Douglas Adams was a visionary, as many writers before him.
That's why we need literature and human sciences - because we lose focus
otherwise.

~~~
adwn
Almost all "visionaries" are wrong, and it's impossible to tell in advance
which ones aren't.

> _That 's why we need literature and human sciences - because we lose focus
> otherwise._

Non sequitur: neither part of that sentence follows from the rest of your
post.

------
trixie_
NASA hasn’t been actively trying to drive down the cost of space. If the had
it would of unlocked space for all of us decades ago.

It took SpaceX investing their own profits into building a reusable booster.
And now they’re doing the same for the entire vehicle with Starship. NASA does
pay SpaceX for flights to the IIS, but most of that money goes into building
Dragons and the rockets to support them.

What if NASA actually invested in truly low maintenance fully reusable
vehicles decades ago? You might actually have Mars colonies today. But what do
we have? Continued investment in SLS when the writing has been on the wall for
years now.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
Well then there would be less money for things like PACE, ICE-SAT, ICE Bridge.
They've been building earth satellites to improve fisheries management and
inform earth conservation efforts. PACE will be particularly helpful for me as
an oceanographer because of they've got those neato optical plankton sensors
onboard.

Also, NASA allocates funding based on decadal surveys of the scientific
community, so they have really considered doing as you propose.

~~~
DennisP
Or, there would be less money for SLS. NASA has been spending $2 billion
annually for SLS development for a while now, and all they'll get is a
disposable rocket the size of Starship that costs at least a billion dollars
per launch, or $10,000/kg payload.

Meanwhile SpaceX is spending less than one billion dollars total for
Starship/Super Heavy, and at scale it'll launch payload for $20/kg. How much
more money would NASA have for observation satellites with $20/kg launch?

Probably even more than you'd think because when launch is cheap, you can also
afford to make your satellite cheaper. If it fails, it's not so expensive to
launch another one.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
That's strange. Why is NASA doing sls instead of just contracting SpaceX? From
your comment it sounds like SpaceX is much more efficient at launching things
into space than NASA, and I'd like to know how that came to be the case.

~~~
DennisP
Various reasons:

Good: NASA started SLS years ago, and had no idea that SpaceX would be so
successful. They also didn't know SLS would take as much time and money as it
has.

Bad: NASA is at the mercy of Congress and SLS has a lot of political support.
It spreads jobs over a lot of districts and pays big money to major defense
contractors. At this point it's a huge sunk cost and embarrassing to cancel.

Ugly: Those contractors work on cost-plus contracts so they have little
incentive to make a cheap launcher. To illustrate, the SLS uses Space Shuttle
main engines, which cost several times as much per unit thrust as the Saturn
V's engines. That was worthwhile for the Shuttle since it reused them.
Naturally, NASA's contractors thought they were perfect engines to throw away
on every flight.

------
tozeur
The author works for a HPC company and is probably using this article for
recruiting. I would’ve preferred the article to have more than a couple measly
paragraphs on that subject, rather than he pander to the ‘futurists’

------
skybrian
Seems like we don't get Mars colonies and supersonic jets for good economic
reasons? These are luxuries at best. It's a nostalgic idea of progress only
tenuously related to actual progress.

More relevant questions might be why the cost of housing hasn't improved and
why we haven't cured cancer yet.

~~~
pfdietz
Cancer's a really tough problem, and we're only now getting the mass of
detailed information about its biology (in all its forms) that allows targeted
therapies.

------
Razengan
> _“Why We Can’t Solve Big Problems”_

I think it may partly be because most of human civilization is still basically
slave labor.

You indenture some people and you tell them what to build.

People don't care about problems they're not supposed to take care of. It's a
detriment to them if they do.

This kind of makes it tricky to take on tasks like say, space elevators or
arcologies or extraterrestrial colonies. You need expertise and constant
collaboration from so many different domains it's hard for a single
organization to have enough musclepower and brainpower for, even with
contractors.

Then there's the tribalism. Governments may have the resources to take on
global/space-scale projects but they generally try to hinder other
governments, even within the same nation.

~~~
balaam
I agree with this. A basic income program could have an unexpected dividend of
a new innovation boom.

------
samfisher83
I think the article points out the main reason. It is more profitable to build
Facebook than put a man on mars.

~~~
Irene
Connectivity-driven innovation is cheaper. Science is becoming harder and is
getting less bang for its buck. We saw great progress in AI over the past few
years but even this has taken far more effort and money than building social
networks. Perhaps connectivity-driven innovation could help to speed up
applied science innovation if power of the crowd is more efficiently utilized?

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
I don't agree that connectivity and applied science are two separate things.
We don't get to netflix without applied sciences: encryption, compression,
networking, neural networks. I don't know why the author said that. He has a
degree in computer science

------
sabujp
Forget mars colonies, i just want robots that can do household chores that
don't cost more than a vacuum cleaner (and i think roombas are overpriced),
where's Rosie?! That's hard, let's build the 10000th chat app instead, e.g.
why did this cost $120 million [https://qz.com/1194939/the-us-government-just-
gave-someone-a...](https://qz.com/1194939/the-us-government-just-gave-
someone-a-120-million-robotic-arm-to-use-for-a-year/) ? Can't we do better now
with 3d printing? I dunno, i think we're getting there :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6xqTcLXXC8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6xqTcLXXC8)

~~~
randomsearch
Thought: is the migration of manufacturing away from western countries part of
the problem? Lots of innovation in software in the US or UK, but less in
manufacturing - perhaps because the skills aren’t there?

~~~
ben_w
Is there really a lack of innovation in manufacturing? 3D printers (hyped
though they are) are improving rapidly. Nanoscale stuff (not just graphene and
chips, but also those) are seeing a lot of progress.

I’m not in hardware though, so I can’t tell if that’s part of a trend or not.

~~~
randomsearch
Oh, sorry, I mean - as in innovation in hardware products rather than the
manufacturing process itself.

------
taway16
I have talked to VCs who told they love to fund "deep tech", but when they
realize that basic research is binary result, they get surprised, and say it's
too risky. And sometimes the VCs who evaluate this are people who are young
enough to never lived on their own during a recession.

------
scythe
Why is it always space? Space technology requires lots of energy and our
society is currently in the middle of realizing that our current way of
getting energy is going to kill us. Of course we're not making large-scale
investments in energy-intensive exploration.

I wish EDS maglev, fusion power or quantum computing generated so much
excitement, to say nothing of grid batteries, magnetocaloric heat pumps, or
electric impedance tomography. I guess QC has done well lately.

~~~
Animats
_Why is it always space?_

Good question. The best off-earth real estate in this solar system is worse
than the worst on-earth real estate. It's easier to build colonies in
Antarctica or underwater on the continental shelf than on Mars. Mars is small,
cold, and nearly airless.

We're not short of low-value real estate, after all.

~~~
nootropicat
"Hell is other people". It's not possible to escape the state on Earth
anymore. It's a pure question of travel time. Underwater continental shelf or
Antarctica, it's all trivially accessible and indefensible. It's not possible
to start a new way of living somewhere, like the Amish or Mormons did. What's
needed is at least the equivalent of travel time and cost between Europe and
Americas before steam ships.

Space is not that hard assuming some basic human upgrades. Nothing scifi
needed (like mind uploading), just an engineering problem - things that today
take a factory but would have to fit into a human sized body.

~~~
205guy
This is so much hyperbole, typical of manifest destiny escapists.

You start with a pop-interpretation of an edgy existential statement. The
point of Sartre's "No Exit" was not to glibly quote the punch-line, it's to
think about the logical implications. Probably something about learning to
live together despite our flaws/sins.

About escaping the state, the Book of Genesis figured it out long ago: humans
behave badly (aka sin) and were thus cast out of the only place they could
live in peace--in other words, some people ruined it for all the others. And
because of bad behavior, humans need to follow laws; and who makes the laws is
what has created (and continues to create) history. So it was never possible
to escape the laws/state ever.

To dream of running far enough away to a mythical place where you alone get to
make the laws is just futile escapism. The Amish and the Mormons just moved
with their laws to a new place, and if you didn't agree with their laws, you
still got kicked out.

Now for the hyperbole: the "underwater continental shelf" and Antarctica are
not "trivially accessible", they are some of the most unexplored and hostile
environments on Earth. You'd have lots of trouble establishing a livable base
there.

Why does it have to be defensible? Is this some sort of Fort Laramie you have
to steal from someone else? Leave society, live off only what you can make or
grow, have no contact with the outside world. Find a lake in some remote
mountains or an island in some remote sea, sneak out there and never come
back! What? You still want the amenities, energetic resources, trade, and
communication with the rest of the world? Then you're going to have to deal
with other people and THEIR laws.

"basic human upgrades" "just an engineering problem" fit a factory in a human-
sized body??? Why that should be as easy as a CRUD app on a virtual server
with some rented storage.

Face it: for all intents and purposes, the world is full, nobody is escaping
anywhere, and we all have to learn to live together.

~~~
nootropicat
>To dream of running far enough away to a mythical place where you alone get
to make the laws is just futile escapism. The Amish and the Mormons just moved
with their laws to a new place, and if you didn't agree with their laws, you
still got kicked out.

Strawman. I literally wrote "like the Amish or Mormons did" yet you describe
living alone in a hidden hut somewhere, Theodore Kaczynski style.

>Why does it have to be defensible?

Even in the XIX century, Mormons were eventually subjugated by force. They
only managed to last several decades under their own laws. Today under the
"Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act" it's a federal crime to operate a
submersible vessel without nationality in international waters. The claimed
jurisdiction is global. So no, it's not possible to move away anywhere on
Earth anymore. The moment anything substantial would be created, some state
would claim it as their own.

>Why that should be as easy as a CRUD app on a virtual server with some rented
storage.

What's the point of this hyperbole? The difference between an engineering
problem and scifi is that the former can already be done, but is expensive or
otherwise impractical, while scifi problem like mind uploading can't be done
for any money today. Engineering problems, like making rockets cheaper, are
solvable by throwing money at the problem as long as general physical laws
permit improvements.

>the world is full, nobody is escaping anywhere

Which is exactly why developing space travel technology is so important.

------
buboard
Another reason: no imminent threat from the rival superpower. Though , the
rise of china may change that

------
6gvONxR4sf7o
There's also a factor of iterativeness. I think everyone here will appreciate
the value of designing something you can do step by step, with value at each
step of the way. You don't have to go zero to 100 immediately. You can course
correct. You can revise. You learn from 0-50 to do 51-100 better.

Facebook can be built that way. Google too. SpaceX, maybe not so much. It's
simply a harder and more expensive and riskier investment to do something that
has so much startup cost before you start to get any value or pivotal
learnings back.

------
m0zg
In a way, FB is more useful than Mars colonies could ever hope to be. How the
hell do you even survive on a planet without a magnetic field to repel cosmic
radiation? A few kamikaze will go, but it's lunacy to expect some kind of
massive and growing settlement there. It'll likely be an extremely expensive
counterpart of the ISS or an arctic research station. You aren't ever going to
get it to more than a few hundred people. Inspiring? Hell yeah. But beyond
that also pointless.

------
kristopolous
I'm writing a book on future thought tentatively titled

The Soul of Tomorrow

A futurist's construction kit

A field manual for how to think about and create "future stuff", stepwise
advances for a continuous world.

I'm about 25,000 words in. It's currently being developed on github. If this
really interests anybody, I'd really love to talk to them about things.

The chapters are starting to come together, but honestly this is 15 years of
thinking and currently only 15 days of writing (November novel writing)

I intend to eventually get this to a publishable academic state with careful
citations. I've even taken a week off work to travel around to libraries and
do research for it.

I'm looking at how visions of possible futures operate, how they change, get
communicated, materialize, and often collapse.

I've developed a number of frameworks that I'm currently trying to validate
and falsify by looking at many classes of future from things like biblical
second coming theology to socialist theory to technological dreams to even
white nationalism. I'm trying to figure out how the dreams of a different
tomorrow operate at fundamental levels.

Please reach out and contact me if you want to talk about this. I'm really
passionate about this study.

My email address is in my bio. If you replace the domain of Yahoo with Gmail
I'll probably see it quicker.

~~~
mch82
Have you checked out Shell’s scenario writing? They used to publish some very
good how-to guides for futures research. I didn’t see as much how-to content
the last time I visited the website. [https://www.shell.com/energy-and-
innovation/the-energy-futur...](https://www.shell.com/energy-and-
innovation/the-energy-future/scenarios.html)

Syd Meade is also an interesting person to study for a book about envisioning
the future. He designed a number of cars and is famous for Blade Runner. I
talked with him & his key insight was that he always drew a car in a world. A
car needs a world (context) in order to make sense of its design.
[http://sydmead.com/](http://sydmead.com/)

------
DennisP
I'll just mention there are a bunch of privately-funded fusion reactor
projects, including TAE, General Fusion, Commonwealth, Tokamak Energy, LPP,
Helion (funded in part by YCombinator), and others.

There are also lots of companies working on molten salt reactors. In theory
that's easier than fusion, but governments are more prickly about letting you
work on fission.

~~~
pfdietz
TAE: it was explained to them 20 years ago why their idea didn't work, even
theoretically.

General Fusion: acoustic compression was shown to be unworkable, so they
pivoted to a slower scheme with a central conductor down the middle of the
chamber. Good luck getting that conductor to survive 100T magnetic fields and
orders of magnitude higher neutron loading than in conventional reactor
concepts.

Commonwealth and TE: overall volumetric power density of their concepts will
be very poor compared to fission reactors, even if every other problem is
avoided.

LPP: there is a serious disconnect between accomplishment and hype. Also,
pulsed approaches with very short bursts of fusion output make wall
engineering much harder, and it's already very hard in continuous fusion
reactor concepts.

The only one I cannot immediately dismiss is Helion, although that may be
because I know less about them. The goal of direct conversion is admirable if
they want to have a chance of being cheaper than fission, but the demands on
that seem formidable. The high current, high voltage, billion reps over the
lifetime of the reactor switching requirements seem extreme.

~~~
DennisP
I'm not trying to claim that these particular projects will succeed. I'm just
saying that some VCs are in fact funding the sort of high-risk breakthrough
physical technologies that the article claims are not being funded.

But a nitpick on LPP: wall engineering isn't really an issue for them since
they're attempting boron fusion. Like Helion they're also planning direct
conversion, since the output is a pulsed beam of charged particles. I once
asked Lerner why they don't start with D-T and he had an argument that their
concept actually works better with boron (don't remember why).

~~~
pfdietz
Of course wall engineering is going to be a problem with boron fusion. Any
very hot plasma will emit photons, and H-11B plasmas will emit them even more
than DT plasmas (because the rate of emission increases rapidly with the
charge of the nuclei). In fact, a H-11B plasma will normally emit photons
faster than it can reheat itself from fusion. LPP makes noise about making
tiny knots of plasma that are so dense and ultramagnetized that this doesn't
happen -- but as those knots expand, the supposed effects that suppress
radiation would die away, and out would pour the photons.

~~~
DennisP
The reactor would only be about 5MW, and the wall of the reactor core can be
however far away it needs to be to not get melted by x-rays. It's not like
it's surrounded by superconductors or breeding blanket, it's just vacuum
containment. Generally it's neutron radiation that's considered difficult to
deal with, and there'd be little of that.

And the reactor won't produce net power at all unless they're right that
bremsstrahlung will be suppressed long enough by the plasma's magnetic field.
If it is, then most of the energy will go into the alpha particle beam.

~~~
pfdietz
The reactor is described to be 5 MW average output. But if it's very bursty
the instantaneous power will be far higher. Damage to the wall will be
determined by heating of the surface by these flashes (and possibly mechanical
damage from shocks induced by vaporization in that surface layer). Keeping the
instantaneous power low enough to avoid damage could make the reactor
unacceptably large.

~~~
DennisP
So your criticism is that maybe, possibly, the reactor will be too big. I'll
take it.

~~~
pfdietz
That is a central problem with fusion: the volumetric power density of fusion
reactors sucks. It's not a trivial criticism, it's an economic showstopper.

LPP's concept has other problems, of course, like the aspirational physics of
those putative 1000 T plasma knots, and direct conversion by Handwave
Engineering.

------
lazylizard
I dunno why ppl keep saying all we got is facebook. We got vxlan, 100gbe,
SSDs,nvme SSDs,and soon non-volatile memory, GPUs, dpdk, segment routing,
containers, config management, nosql, json, bittorrent, blockchain, eliptical
curve crypto, totp, letsencrypt/acme, raft consensus..and more!

~~~
truncate
I somewhat agree. Facebook may not appeal much to people interested in let say
space exploration or self-driving cars, but amount of engineering lessons
learned by deploying a software at that scale is still invaluable. We are so
much better at distributed systems, machine learning than we were, and that
knowledge can be applied to other problems (and it is).

------
nscalf
What is tough about this problem is how hard it is to communicate. We all know
something is wrong, even if we don't really realize it. Like the article says,
we've been promised all of these incredible things by the advancements we've
seen, but we have gotten very few fundamental improvements. I live in the US,
so I'm going to speak from that point of view.

We work more than every, are poorer than any time in recent memory, have a
broken healthcare system, we're seeing decreases in life expectancy, epidemic
levels of suicide, etc. and all of this at a time when the market is at
ridiculous highs. There are very few people talking about this in highly
coherent ways, one is Eric Weinstein on his podcast The Portal, which focuses
on this. What we have seen in the past 50 years is that physics has hit a wall
in delivering meaningful real world improvements for people's lives, biology
has largely done the same, and chemistry pushes forward at a snails pace in
the form of pharmaceuticals. The saving grace that makes everyone feel as
though we're progressing is technology, which seems to have hit the same wall
in recent years since most of the easy problems to solve with computer science
have been solved.

In the soft sciences, economics has some deeply troubling problems down to the
fundamentals, our politics/government/public policy is damaged and decaying at
the root, academia has exploded in cost with little payoff for most, and has
entrenched itself as a inescapable shadow that looms over young people for the
rest of their life, all while cannibalizing those who speak out against it.

Many great advancements are threatening to become meaningful, but many more
have been doing that for decades. It really seems like we are running out of
easy problems to solve, and the systems that we have in place are remarkably
bad at solving hard problems, while being remarkably good at concentrating
wealth

I often think of the first few lines of a poem by Allen Ginsberg:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who
poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz..."

I'm seeing the best minds of my generation destroyed trying to sell ad space,
starved of connection, posting selfies looking for a hollow fix.

------
rileymat2
Am I the only one who feels weird reading this article on LinkedIn?

------
dade_
I watch what NTT Research is up to, and frankly, how many startups even know
anything about how to fabricate a superconductor, let alone have the
facilities to create them? They have the tools to make websites and little
computers with sensors made in Shenzhen, so that is what they make.

[https://www.ntt-
review.jp/archive/ntttechnical.php?contents=...](https://www.ntt-
review.jp/archive/ntttechnical.php?contents=ntr201910fa4.html)

------
brainfarts
Humans are notoriously terrible at predicting how technology with develop over
decades. It’s humorous to look at what people a hundred years ago thought
technology would be like.

[1][https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2014/05/victorian...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2014/05/victorian-
postcards-predict-future/amp)

------
jglathe
Well. Complexity kills. This is true on so many levels. Whatever was promised
by futurists or science, is most of the time a marketing blurb. But it almost
always adds complexity. Maybe it is a good idea to avoid easy gains. You get
born, you have to learn the ropes and use your skills. You always build on the
knowleadge of others. But you have to learn it first. That's something other
than reciting.

------
buboard
And he doesn't even touch on the inefficiency of public research spending
which has ballooned since 2000 with disappointing returns

------
rhizome
Mars colonies don't come from the private sector, Elon and Jeff
notwithstanding. The problem is that public science has been starved of
funding for decades through tax cuts.

If the author would take off his (it's always a he) blinkers of technocracy he
might see that profitability is not the only measure of "why." Some things are
not profitable, yet are still worth doing. Andrew Yang-lite doesn't account
for this at all (see "blinkers" above), which is pretty much par for the
course for the "Facebook is the be-all end-all" attitude.

To paraphrase JFK, we pay taxes for public benefit not because it is cheap,
but because it is expensive.

~~~
georgeburdell
>Mars colonies don't come from the private sector, Elon and Jeff
notwithstanding

Exploration has a long history of rich benefactors and private interests.
Monarchs, Dutch East India Corporation, etc., are closer to Musk and Bezos
than a modern democratic state

>The problem is that public science has been starved of funding for decades
through tax cuts.

This graph suggests otherwise? In current dollar terms, R&D spending is double
what it was in the 1970s.

[https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2019-06/DefNon.png](https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2019-06/DefNon.png)

~~~
rhizome
I am skeptical of the success rate of rich benefactors for a technology with
only a century of practice, vs. boats that have been used for thousands of
years.

> _In current dollar terms, R &D spending is double what it was in the 1970s._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NAS...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NASA-
Budget-Federal.svg)

And there are more budgets to be involved than just these two.

------
widowlark
There's a certain irony in Buzz Aldrin complaining that he didn't get Mars
Colonies and simultaneously hating on Elon Musk for not being the US
Government.

------
eanzenberg
It sounds like people are forgetting the world before Facebook. Isolated,
repressed locations, limited flow of information from tiny amounts of sources.
The Connected-Information Age seems to have brought on some great advances and
has been self-sustaining from a profitable perspective. Sure, the worlds'
governments could have spent billions / trillions building bases on Mars or
even terraforming it. But for what purpose? And for how much misery would
earth have to endure for all that effort?

~~~
aguyfromnb
> _It sounds like people are forgetting the world before Facebook. Isolated,
> repressed locations, limited flow of information from tiny amounts of
> sources._

Facebook is not the internet. This problem was solved long before 2005.

~~~
dehrmann
Depends where you live. [https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/facebook-is-the-
internet-f...](https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/facebook-is-the-internet-for-
many-people-in-south-east-asia-20180322-p4z5nu.html)

~~~
LunaSea
You can also argue that Facebook was the death of local communication and
socialisation and thus a step back for that goal.

------
breck
The problem is Intellectual Monopoly laws.

Imagine you have 8 billion processors but you only provide 8 million of them
with disk access.

Very few people have access to the information necessary to build innovative
products. Instead of waiting for BillG to solve the energy crisis and
healthcare delivery and new kinds of toilets for everybody, let's abolish
Intellectual Monopoly laws and unleash the power of all 8 billion processors
on solving these hard problems.

#intellectualfreedom #scihub

------
munherty
To provide an edgy answer, we live in a rather peaceful time...

We haven't had a good old fashioned War to accelerate our technological
advancements. As humans were rather adept at finding new and creative ways to
kill each other and then ultimately repurposing it for good later on...

------
tomaszs
I hope tech will be used to hack universe not people eventually

------
api
Facebook is addictive. There's nothing addictive on Mars. If we discover space
crack then we will have a real space program.

------
vkaku
Remember: Back to the Future?

------
numair
All of these articles and ways of thinking always miss the bigger, more
fundamental shift in human society — we now know there is literally no place
we can access in any meaningful amount of time where the “grass is greener”
than the places we’ve already been.

This is profound, semi-depressing, and enlightening at the same time. Rather
than seeking something new somewhere else, our new obsession is in improving
what we’ve got, where we are right now.

I know a lot of you are going to make hand-wavy claims about space mining and
things like that, but our population curve seems to indicate a very minimal
benefit to all of that. If anything, the fastest-growing environmental concern
seems to be space and sky pollution. Starry-eyed young engineers have been
sold on the idea of interstellar space travel, when the reality of the
commercial application of their work is that it’s more likely to lead to an
over-proliferation of satellites and help rich people get to places faster via
space plane.

The final argument someone’s inevitably going to make is, survival of the
race. Yeah, okay. You might want to self-reflect on our existence as deeply
terrestrial beings that are intrinsically connected to the Earth. Even if you
spend all of your day hidden in a bedroom, you can’t escape your bond with
this planet. Instead of trying to find a mistress in the form of another
moon/planet, we need to spend more time working on the marriage.

I think space technologies are fun, and that rich people obsessed with suicide
missions to other planets should be able to do what they want, but let’s not
kid ourselves on the moral superiority of these sorts of things. There is no
shame, and no inferiority, in working to optimize our Earth-bound existence.

~~~
guelo
I try to imagine humanity a thousand years from now, still bound to the same
increasingly inhospitable planet, paying for the sins of our generations but
nowhere to escape to. With probably an abandoned Mars or moon colony. Just
nothing to explore. Even the boundaries of natural science would be mostly
understood by that point. It would be so depressing. Our only salvation would
be if we still have enough resources remaining for computers to run virtual
worlds for us to explore. Basically video games, that's our best hope.

~~~
zanny
I don't think there is any chance we make it a thousand years without either
reaching technological singularity or destroying ourselves. In the 80 years of
transistor technology we went from string manipulation via pneumatic tubes to
real time ray tracing.

Though to be fair, both outcomes basically end biological human life - a
technological singularity obsoletes carbon based biology and any rational
successor species wouldn't keep living humans around when they can trivially
archive our genetic code and reproduce us at will if ever needed - which is
also then unlikely to happen. Its that or nuclear annihilation.

~~~
7thaccount
Paul Davies (head of SETI) has a fantastic book called "The Eerie Silence". It
was the first time in years that I had read a good science book written for
the layman that taught me not only a lot of new scientific ideas, history I
didn't know about, and made me think about humanity in a new light. I really
can't recommend it enough.

Ok, so he makes an argument that made me put down the book (ok 17 year old me)
and really ponder the statement. It was his belief that "all biological life
is transistory". Of course we have no other intelligent life outside of earth
to compare against, but it kind of makes sense in a completely unproven kind
of way. A species develops as biological and eventually transcends to machine.
At that point, you would be far more intelligent (maybe) and the only
requirement for society would be lots and lots of energy. You would
essentially be a mind floating around in infinite cyber space experiencing
everything there is to experience. You could travel to the stars if you would
like (no cryogenics or food necessary), but honestly...why would you want to?

The book mostly sticks to scientific fact and covers a lot of SETI history,
but there are many additional topics like this that are thought provoking.

Some of my friends were horrified by this (end of biological humanity assuming
it is ever possible), but to me...it is the most logical progression for
humanity to become more than what it currently is. These flesh bodies cause us
to die far too early and our brains can probably only be enhanced so much.

~~~
zanny
We are in effect the same tragedy that encompasses Octopoda. They are provably
relatively intelligent and emotive creatures but have extremely short
lifespans for their mental capacity and thus can never take real advantage of
their learning ability.

Humans are still that, just on an order of magnitude longer time scale. Its
still hugely limited when compared to orders of magnitude larger time scales
than that.

------
molteanu
I've told myself countless times lately, that it is simply not possible for
young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing, surfing fb and
youtube all day long and then go buy cars and going to Greece as their very
first vacation. Something, somewhere, just stinks badly.

I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10
years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always endless
meetings and poorly trained people that nevertheless earn well above the
median wage so the incentive to improve onself is almost zero and the attitude
is "we're better than the rest of humanity. We deserve all, the rest deserves
nothing."

I did an Electrical Engineering faculty. I know how hard it is to do math and
physics and all that. But since there's such an easy money to be made from
slinging yet another website or a stupid mobile app with these dumbed down
languages, the interest in the sciences and anything more complicated slowly
wanishes. We'll pay the price eventually. Maybe not now, maybe not in 10
years, but eventually. We're too comfortable.

"There existed no need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise
of the mind — we could see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid
was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life — we
went soft, we lost our edge." \- Dune

(I'm from Eastern Europe)

~~~
headmelted
“I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10
years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always endless
meetings and poorly trained people that nevertheless earn well above the
median wage so the incentive to improve onself is almost zero”

This was actually painful to read because of how much truth there is in it.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
I can say I worked on one.

But because it was well managed, small team, everyone listened to each other's
areas of respective expertise and authority, we wrapped it up in a year on a 6
digit budget.

Meanwhile, a previous project elsewhere i have experience with, had a team of
approx 30 cycle through, 10 to 20 external consultants (some flown in and put
up in hotels, but who had no actual experience in the things they were
consulting on) , had been running for several years, estimated 8 digit budget,
and by the time i left had been running for several years with no discernable
output compared to the status quo except reports and presentations taking
about how good things would be one day in the indeterminate future.

I'm convinced the later is the norm, and it's even harder to go back to once
you've worked on a project that 'just works', but I'm sure several people used
the later one to land themselves high paying jobs by putting it on their
resume using management speak to make it sound impressive, so I guess success
depends on whose point of view you're looking from...

~~~
ethbro
From my experience in consulting and internal, there are two major things you
can do.

1) Use objective KPIs + encourage a culture of admitting, taking
responsibility for, and being forgiven for failure

Failing to admit failure is incredibly toxic to ongoing corporate functioning,
and a culture that doesn't allow for it endlessly moves goalposts until there
is success (by some metric) without motion (by objective metrics).

2) Don't allow anyone to overscope sprints

If all the "team" can accomplish is a "Hello World" in the next week, then
that's the goal. Better to be honest than slide down the slippery slope of
lying to ourselves.

------
bpodgursky
A lot of really stupid shit is going to happen in 2020, but if Starship makes
it to orbit and Crew Dragon successfully launches astronauts, those are the
only events anyone will remember in 100 years.

(Come, on tell me with a straight face you remember anything else important
that happened in 1903)

~~~
option
Don’t want to sound as a fanboy, but IF (and this is a huge if) Elon succeeds
on his mission to make humanity a multi-planentary species, he’ll be
remembered as a greatest human who has ever lived for a very long time

~~~
Aloha
I'm no Elon fan, and it's a really really big _if_ , but - you're absolutely
correct about that if he succeeds completely he'll go down in the same
category as Edison or Napoleon.

~~~
learc83
Napoleon in most of the English speaking world is much more infamous/loathed
than admired.

~~~
option
yes, I’m Russian and, IMHO, napaleon isn’t that far from hitler. Both were
mass murderers who valued a lot of silly things above human life

------
helpPeople
Only 4 more years until Elon Musk puts a $30,000 Tesla on Mars where solar
power roofs cost the same as conventional.

I believed it until about 3 years ago, when I realized spaceX is Elon's
government subsidized advertisement for his other projects. Also the 30k car
is never coming. And the roof price is loaded with astricks to be 'correct".

We really need to wake up to the next gen marketing tactics.

~~~
smnrchrds
> the 30k car is never coming

 _Never_ is a strong word. We may not get 30k electric cars in 5 years, but we
will eventually. We may not get full autonomous vehicles in a decade, but we
will certainly have it before the turn of the century.

~~~
thatfrenchguy
You mean when global warming will make most of the US a nightmare ? Great.

