News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Notre Dame fire and the future of history. Parent comment

Re:The Notre Dame fire and the future of history by deathanatos on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @10:41AM (#19674009)
What about mega-scale engineering projects? E.g., a space craft to Alpha Centauri, to study another star close up? It's 4 years at the speed of light, and it'll likely take us much longer. Or what if the planet there orbiting Proxima Centauri b in the habitable zone is capable of sustaining life, and it could be our first stepping stone off of Earth?

For that matter, what if a megaproject is required for a space faring race, and democracy is the great filter?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Notre Dame fire and the future of history by mikeash on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @11:06AM (#19674267)
Let’s say we started a project to send a probe to Alpha Centauri. With the entire world dedicated to the task, the probe could probably be launched in a decade or two, and would reach its destination in maybe 30,000 years.

Or we could forget about the probe and focus on developing better propulsion technology. That would have immediate applications, but could also allow the probe to reach its destination orders of magnitude sooner.

I don’t see any reasonable motivation for generations-long megaprojects until technology has well and truly stagnated.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Notre Dame fire and the future of history by rayiner on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @10:58AM (#19674173)
We spent a trillion dollars sending a man to the moon. We can do megaprojects if the exigency exists. But the bar for exigency is much higher now and that's a good thing. Notre Dame, by contrast, never did a damn thing for the French peasants that were taxed to pay for it.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Notre Dame fire and the future of history by deathanatos on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @02:13PM (#19675913)
The type of megaprojects being discussed in this thread are those that span lifetimes. Getting a man to the moon — without dismissing its huge impact, it was definitely a great work of mankind — was still done within a single lifetime.

I posed Proxima Centauri simply b/c it wasn't religious, and perhaps palatable as something humanity should undertake, but not feasible within a lifetime, as a counter-example to show that not all lifetime-spanning projects are worthless.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Notre Dame fire and the future of history by moreira on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @10:51AM (#19674111)
Amusingly, I suppose that war, and the urge to beat the Soviet Union, is what even got people to the moon in the first place. Without it, I sincerely believe we still wouldn't have been there.

If the Cold War was still raging and Russia decided -today- to colonise Mars, it'd immediately go from a "someday/maybe" to "within the next 5-10 years".

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Notre Dame fire and the future of history by oblio on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @10:45AM (#19674040)
There's mega-scale engineering projects happening every day, all across the world. Just look around. Or on Youtube :)
[ Parent | on HN ]