It's time to come to terms with the fact that we're bad at doing hard things.

Did land person on moon. Do have world's biggest tech companies / Vertical landing rockets / AI leadership etc. Doesn't sound like we are bad at hard things although we do have our fair share of screw ups.

Landed on the moon, ok that one was hard. But let’s get realistic here. There are events like the Manhattan Project, the Operation Overlord/D-Day landings, the Apollo missions, and the Soviet response to Chernobyl... these are the things that required coordination and cooperation across tens to hundreds of thousands of humans, organised into hundreds of subgroups responsible for aspects of the overall outcome in complex interdependent ways... these are significant human achievements.

And then there’s things like Google, Amazon, SpaceX and Microsoft, these are for the most part companies driven by money. Either the accumulation of it for a secondary goal (SpaceX needs money to pay for a mars colony), or the accumulation of it as the primary goal (Microsoft has a quarterly earnings target to hit)

Comparing across these two categories feels horribly unfair to the people who aren’t in it for the money. The astronauts, the soldiers, the scientists and the liquidators (a term for the people involved in the Chernobyl cleanup)... this isn’t to say the achievements of today’s companies are nothing, just that these two categories are driven by two tremendously distinct drives and comparing the results directly as though 100% equivalent feels inappropriate.

Working on AI, search, IT security, etc. is currently lucrative, but a lot of people do it because they are interested in it.

That's pretty far from the heroics of going over or under an actively melting open reactor core, but also far from doing it for the money.