People say the same thing about moon technology, and forget about all the advances gained. https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/feature/Going_to...

There are 5 items on that list:

- Digital Flight Controls

- Food Safety

- Space Blankets

- Quake-Proofing

- Rechargeable Hearing Aids

This list does not impress me at all and I find it hard to believe we wouldn't have come up with those 5 items + a lot more without spending billions to go to the moon.

It's cool to go the moon but just like all things government is involved with, it could've been done a lot cheaper without involving bureaucrats.

The space race literally made the semiconductors that currently run the world useful and affordable. Without it we might be using tiny vacuum tubes to this day.

You forgot the /s.

On my second sentence maybe, but not the first.

I will just pick this one to set (some) record straight

> Rechargeable Hearing Aids

Apparently you don't have a family member that has hearing problems, making it difficult for them to have a 'normal life'. I have one. I remember buying a €4k (a few many years ago) pair of hearing aids and see the tears coming down when one was able to hear again.

I see this as a prosthetic leg. You lose a basic function, this technology helps go back to having a slightly better life. Some stats on the matter. DDG returned US statistics on the top results; I believe these can be proportional for all other countries.

https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/quick-statistics...

-About 28.8 million U.S. adults could benefit from using hearing aids. (HB Note: isn't that 9% of the population? - that's a big number - almost 29 million people??)

-Among adults aged 70 and older with hearing loss who could benefit from hearing aids, fewer than one in three (30 percent) has ever used them. Even fewer adults aged 20 to 69 (approximately 16 percent) who could benefit from wearing hearing aids have ever used them.

-As of December 2019, approximately 736,900 cochlear implants have been implanted worldwide. In the United States, roughly 118,100 devices have been implanted in adults and 65,000 in children.

You are correct that my family members do not need hearing aids. But I am also not saying hearing aids are useless. I am just saying it is not worth going to the moon for.

Since it would've been cheaper to not go to the moon and let a private company step in to provide the need there would have been more resources to spend on improving more lives than were improved now.

The research necessary to make a better hearing aid (improved batteries, noise cancelling circuitry, miniaturization of electronics, etc) cost billions. I imagine it was inevitable that the research would have happened eventually, but it would have taken longer and it would have been patented and expensive to license. It's very likely that the hearing aid industry wouldn't have had the resources to buy in the necessary tech to make a cost effective product until several decades later than it has. They might not even have done it by now if we hadn't reached the moon.

It's all speculation of course, but if you look at the rate of technological advancement pre-Moon landings compared to post-Moon landings, it does look a lot like the Apollo programme was an inflection point.

You are reversing it. We didn't go to the moon to create/improve hearing aids.

But it was an effort that cost X amount of dollars, and since then it has helped 20-50-100 (?) million people globally to have a better life, go shopping, talk with friends and loved ones, listen to music, etc.

Not everything is about being profitable on day1. But if we do put a price tag to everything.. think of the jobs/profits/dividends/taxes created by the "hearing aids" industries. We now have 20-50-100 (?) million people that are 'more' integrated to society. That generates money to recover the 'losses' of the moon efforts.

https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/industry-reports/hea...

-The global hearing aids market size was $6.47bn in 2020.

If you run this number for the past 30-40-50 years, it adds up. And now add the $bn that the (hearing aids) users contribute to the global economy by integrating more/better to society.

I see this as a win-win. We explored the moon. We improved people's lives here on earth.

It is easy to look back in time and say what could have been done better, practically easy when you're not involved in process at all, what so ever.

It is actually very easy to predict these things, if the people in charge are not the ones paying the bills it's not going to be worth the money.

Prove me wrong make a predication now here, nostradamus.

I guess it is easy to make trivial predictions about the near future ... something like "computers will get faster", "batteries will become energy denser".

Something like "food will become safer" is trivial only in the most generic sense. It's entirely possible that something that we eat today will be found carcinogenic tomorrow and people will still take ages to accept and act on that new knowledge.

At least in my part of the ivory tower I see a strong shift away from meat, even my and my SOs parents (in their 60-70s) have (on their own behalf) cut out most of their meat consumption.

So if I had to make a Nostradamus prediction, I would bet on real meat becoming a pure luxurious item, something that only gets brought on the table for special occasions, over the next ... 50 years.

It also inspired many engineers and software developers to become what they are, develop new methods etc.

Not really since r&d don't provide quarterly returns for years sometimes decades. Government funding science is a good thing and obviously there is some waste but the net positive is far greater. Capitalism is good, but so is working together as a society (aka government) to develop new tech is also good. It's not a zero sum game despite what libertarians would have us all think.

Despite what you think about what Libertarians think, the term that is relevant here is opportunity cost. Not zero sum games.

Shhh, don't mention the PTFEs

>It's cool to go the moon but just like all things government is involved with, it could've been done a lot cheaper without involving bureaucrats.

This libertarian tilt is soo yesterday :)

Following the market and money signals alone leads to such amazing "innovations" as bitcoin and crypto -> people betting the next idiot will be left holding the bag and burning tons of energy and hardware while at it. Plus wasting a bunch of engineering hours on pointless endevours.

Or such amazing innovative endevours as Ad optimisation and network tracking.

Sorry but following money alone leads to some pretty pathological scenarios and results in a shitty society. I used to like libertarianism, the "don't touch me if I don't touch you" foundations and the logical framework is neat - but it just doesn't work out in reality - at least it doesn't lead to a world I'd like to live in.

The surge of Bitcoin is a reaction to the endless money printing of the federal banks that has been started well over 10 years ago. This has put the interest rates to 0 or even -0% all over the world causing people to pull out their savings and putting it in anything that has a chance of beating the inflation rates.

It is not libertarian economics but keynesian economics that drive people to bitcoin and other bubbles.

Libertarian economics is not "soo yesterday", accepting bad policies from bureaucrats is.

Ps. if ads are the worst thing in your life then your life must be pretty good. Maybe install an ad blocker.

Ads are not the problem - harvesting the most talented CS people to work on ads is - this is the kind of innovation your ideal system leads to. Personally I'd rather live in a society that values going to mars. Subjective I know, but I only have one life to live, I don't live in the general case :)

Bitcoin is an extreeme example of something that's built in to markets - you're trying to guess how much someone will be willing to pay for an asset and this leads to natural bubles - it stops being about determining the value of something and it starts being about playing the market. You can spin whatever rationalizations you want arround it - bitcoin is the most degenerate manifestation of this. If you find a market full of idiots willing to buy bullshit and pump it's valuation, if the idiocy is strong enough that it wont easily go away, you have a really good incentive to join in and prosthelytize to grow the bubble more, even if you don't beleive it - just the fact you beleive there will be more idiots buying in makes it rational for you to get in.

And if you skip out on trading on it you'll be punished with below avarage returns.

And your solution to "the problem" of other people freely choosing where and what to work on is what? You choose?

Let's agree to disagree on politics. Just let me know if you're ever about to be chosen as Supreme Chairman of the Party so I know what country to avoid.

It's better to realign the incentives to make sure you don't end up in pathological scenarios. The reason why tech companies find investing in this so lucrative is because these markets have so much winner-takes-all scenarios. You don't need to strawman it - governments are dealing with these kinds of secnarios, it's not ideal but better than doing nothing.

> I've never understood this assumption that focusing on one thing must necessarily always be to the detriment of another.

The Earth is a zero-sum game, possibly the most real example that exists. Every gallon of oil, every mineral that doesn't find its way back through recycling effectively disappears. Everybody reading this website has spent their life in an era of such excess, such profligacy, that this fact is easy to ignore: "we can just reallocate a little and do both!"

The trouble is we're moving towards the end of that era. We're moving onto oil fields with increasingly poor EROEI. Arable land is decreasing. We're going to have to make some choices very soon which will be to the detriment of something else.

As a species we have a high tolerance for wasteful nonsense—what is life without recreation and creativity after all? But it's perfectly reasonable to consider a very resource-intensive project like "life on mars" and decide that should be low on the priority list.

  "resource-intensive project like life on Mars"

I don't take perspective this seriously for four reasons:

- its pursuit will lead to unintended tech advances

- it's such a small expenditure relative to other wasteful crap we engage in.

- there is a valid argument for diversifying life, the next gigantic asteroid isn't following your timetable

- it's private money and isn't negatively impacting you and doesn't have its hand in your pocket, as long as externalities are being taxed you're not worse off

I see so much hand wringing about this but I'm sitting here wondering why we are wasting so much money on movies and video games instead of these aspirational projects.

"resource-intensive project like life on Mars"

"I don't take this perspective seriously"

Yeah. They say "resource-intensive" like we're not spending many MANY more resources on making big sticks to shake at each other.

And they say this as if the resources on this planet were a significant fraction of what's available in the solar system.

They say things like "earth is a zero sum game" as if sunlight didn't exist and materials we mine from the asteroid belt won't fall down a gravity well.

Or as if the resources required to put life on mars are a significant fraction of any meaningful measure.

It's almost like they think earth is big. ;)

Any possible Mars effort is dwarfed by the huge amount of bullshit we do otherwise. There are lots of very bright people working in the Finance industry. In another world they would be perfectly capable of doing physics, engineering etc. Even the people who are engineers right now mostly work on bullshit consumer crap. Don't get me started about ad tech. This list goes on and on. There's lots of people who would have been capable of a STEM jobs or even basic research, but landed in some other bullshit job for whatever reason. I refuse to believe that we are using our resources wisely. And about materials, there is no technical reason that one needs to replace a phone every two years. Unrepairable bluetooth headsets. IoT crap. Cars that let you browse twitter...

do not underestimate consumer crap. One of the reasons the Soviet Union went down was the inability to provide its citizens with consumer crap. It had LOTS of stem jobs by the way

Your comment reminded me of Soviet Union or Communist Romania. They thought the same way that brilliant people shouldn't focus on finance and that the state should produce things that are not "crap" in the view of some academic or party member. It failed badly, the only good thing that we inherited today is that we have many engineers in Eastern Europe and that's pretty much it.

> The Earth is a zero-sum game

No, it's not zero-sum. As you noted, "arable land decreasing" shows that. And similarly you can create arable land, you can enrich soil, use more drought tolerant crops, use tools and automation to harvest resources with less labor, at a lower cost. The allocation of resources is also not zero sum

Don't forget the stupendous amount of energy from that big ball of hydrogen that hits it every second.

Arable land is outdated thinking. Its time to go vertical farming.

>Every gallon of oil, every mineral that doesn't find its way back through recycling effectively disappears.

I realize this is a hell of a caveat, but if we ever get fusion running in a real way, our problems of resource scarcity are essentially solved. Like you said, the elements we have on Earth right now aren't actually consumed, they just get shuffled around. Make electricity cheap enough, and un-shuffling what is needed becomes economically viable in a way that energy-as-provided-by-oil could never achieve.

There is no reason to believe that fusion will be a particularly cheap source of power.

This is a so-called 'wicked' problem. Choosing to go to Mars is not as clear cut as it seems on the surface.

Calling the project 'resource intensive' is one thing, but pointing out exactly where it consumes an unreasonable amount of resources is a totally different ball game.

Context matters, and things can look very different depending on what you compare against each other. Arguably, the actual rocket, astronauts and supplies send to Mars only count for a negligble fraction of what's available on Earth. But things change when you take a step back: there are many layers to the story. You need infrastructure and people here on Earth to actually assemble the mission: specialists, technicians, management, buildings, factories, supply chains,... And if you zoom out even more, you see that you need sturdy civic infrastructure to support all that: education, roads & bridges, domestic and foreign policies, international trade deals, defense and so on. And all the people involved to support all that have to attain a living standard above the poverty line which allows them to focus on all that. So, now you're looking at essential economic sectors which need to support all of that.

Turns out that the 'resource intensiveness' isn't concentrated on a specific point. It's diluted, it's hard to track, and there's a fuzzy line with questions like 'is this resource clear cut spend on an, arguably, wasteful Mars mission or something else?'

> As a species we

I always get skeptical whenever 'we' is used in an argument. Especially in reference to humanity as a species. Humanity isn't a collective consciousness able to think with a single mind. It's billions of individuals that all act on their own accord and any collective behaviors that can be observed are emerging dynamics.

Sure, you could argue that sovereign nations consists of millions of individuals rallying together and aligning their behavior towards common goals. But those are always informed by a complex interplay of trade-offs, incentives, benefits, external conditions, and so on. In the grand scheme of history, even nations aren't forever: they come and they go over time.

The hard reality is that either going to Mars, or curbing climate change aren't self-fulfilling prophecies simply because several vocal groups want them to become reality. They only become reality through complex dynamics over which individuals have far less control then we might assume about ourselves.

> I've never understood this assumption that focusing on one thing must necessarily always be to the detriment of another.

Probably mostly because popular news / media has endeavoured to simplify things way beyond the point they should have been simplified -- nuance, rationality, critical thinking, are under-promoted.

https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

In that case it makes much more sense to build a space station somewhere in asteroids belt between Mars and Jupiter, there is carbon, metals and, what's very important, water, so it is possible to make station self-sustained and easily retrieve whatever is needed.

Although I am not sure if it will be practical to move iron from that place to the Earth, without some significant break through in space travel, probably not.

Mars is located conveniently between the Earth and the asteroid belt and people probably tolerate low gravity (0,3 G) better than zero gravity, at least for longer periods of time.

As a springboard towards the Outer Solar System, Mars makes a lot of sense. It is a lot more Earth-y than anything beyond, with the possible exception of Europa and Titan. So our contemporary technologies need less adjustment to work there.

I see Mars as our "first convenient UAT". If we can make this work (get people to create a settlement and live there for 1-2-5-10 years), then we can identify and study the requirements and impact, and probably repeat the process to the next planet further out.

First you get to feel comfortable with lifting 20kg before you move to 30kg, 50kg, etc. improve your wrist angles, how you spread your toes on the groun, etc. Mars is our 20kg. We take it for a spin, iron out the wrinkles, repeat it perfectly, then move to the next target.

Meanwhile we 'studied' Mars for 'so long' that we know there are very few things that can surprise/wipe the effort with e.g. a single volcanic erruption/earthquake/mega-storm.

> I've never understood this assumption that focusing on one thing must necessarily always be to the detriment of another.

I totally agree with you, having a bright, exciting vision of the future is a huge motivator and technological driver to help with our problems on earth.

This website really gave me a good laugh in a positive way. I would say, space exploration made it again possible to look at our homeworld in a more appreciating way!

> the drive to reach Mars has been producing technology that will help Earth. For example, advancements in renewables energy in the short term.

What are you referring to ?

Yes, any large effort will shed some crumbs of technology that can be reused elsewhere, but resources are finite. I would prefer that the drive to help Earth produces technology that will help Earth. That's a more focused, direct goal.

I'm indifferent about Mars but I kind of find this argument weird.

It assumes that these secondary advancements would not have been achieved if research into going to Mars was not done.

How about just doing research about renewable energy for earth instead of Mars? You could argue more could be achieved if this was done because we will not be distracted by Mars specific problems that won't apply to earth

Really, the production of technology that helps Earth has been the only benefit of our adventures in space since the 1960s. Nobody lives on the moon, and nobody will live on Mars either. But the exercise of getting there produced many benefits and advances in technology that are useful here on Earth.

Building habitats that do not rely on a biosphere is exactly what we need on earth and exactly what will be built for mars. Perhaps if we learn to live on Mars we can one day learn to live on earth.

Even a post-ww3 Earth is orders of magnitude more habitable than Mars. And simply, it’s just so far into the future that we should not yet be doing that.

"it’s just so far into the future that we should not yet be doing that"

You're probably right. And 640K aught to be enough for anybody, too ;)

It's a joke page, it's a way to get attention for environmental programs. Don't take it too literally.