[HN Gopher] Most Americans think NASA's $10B space telescope is ...
___________________________________________________________________
Most Americans think NASA's $10B space telescope is a good
investment
Author : hubraumhugo
Score : 277 points
Date : 2022-07-21 15:00 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| Pakdef wrote:
| Probably a better investment then the 8 trillions spent globally
| on the 20-year war on terror:
| https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar
| cptcobalt wrote:
| Probably? Categorically.
| dragosmocrii wrote:
| Now imagine a world where every taxpayer can vote where their
| money goes, and there are institutions making sure that this
| money is spent where it's meant for, like: education,
| healthcare, local infrastructure, research, military, military
| operations, etc I wonder if things would be different..
| Pakdef wrote:
| Something need to be done to give more power to the
| majority... But it isn't as simple as having a web app for
| having everyone vote on every topic even if you assume that
| the identity problem is solved.
| bckr wrote:
| No, not as simple. But goodness wouldn't that be at least
| _more interesting_ than what we have now?
| yakubin wrote:
| Almost no voter has the expertise to accurately allocate
| resources in a country. Why would a popular vote, where
| expertise means nothing, result in anything better than we
| already have? There are plenty of issues people don't even
| know exist, but are nonetheless essential. People also in
| general do not know how much is necessary to maintain
| infrastructure of a whole variety of things. I'd expect a
| catastrophe.
| MC68328 wrote:
| Yeah, it's not like wisdom of crowds or market efficiency
| are real phenomena.
|
| The non-experts elected by non-experts know better than the
| non-experts.
| theptip wrote:
| > Almost no voter has the expertise to accurately allocate
| resources in a country.
|
| That's true as far as it goes. However if we had the
| ability to individually vote on allocations, presumably
| most people would delegate the details to an expert of
| their choosing, while taking a stance on high-level classes
| of expenditures, for example "I will vote for the <insert
| expert> budget because it reduces military spending and
| increases healthcare spending", or whatever your policy
| preference is. Basically Liquid Democracy[1] of some sort
| (whether the partial delegation is built into the system or
| implemented outside the allocation voting system).
|
| I do agree with your general point that direct democracy
| can be problematic, particularly when a binary choice is
| presented rather than a continuum of options. E.g. see the
| CA ballot measure system which often results in "choose A&C
| or B&D"-type choices which exclude certain preferences from
| being expressed. I think a more granular direct democracy
| might enable better decision frameworks though,
| specifically by enabling more options for delegation.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
| elil17 wrote:
| Almost no politician has the expertise to accurately
| allocate resources in a country. Why would a legislature,
| where expertise means nothing, result in anything better
| than a popular vote? There are plenty of issues politicians
| don't even know exist, but are nonetheless essential.
| Politicians in general do not know how much is necessary to
| maintain infrastructure of a whole variety of things. I'd
| expect a catastrophe.
|
| More seriously, I don't think our current decision-makers
| are informed and the average person wouldn't be either. But
| I trust the average persons _values_ way more than I trust
| those of a politician. Maybe we still wouldn 't get enough
| funding for roads and bridges. We don't get that now. But
| perhaps the average person would put more money towards
| education and food and less towards war.
| carlmr wrote:
| Or the other parts of the war on X franchise.
| uhhhhuhyes wrote:
| Most Americans aren't net taxpayers.
| bckr wrote:
| Yeah, the govt is subsidizing their employment. The economy
| depends on the poor at least as much as the rich.
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| luigibosco wrote:
| They must have healthcare.
| gnicholas wrote:
| How will they feel when they find out that the telescope has
| already sustained "significant uncorrectable damage" from
| micrometeoroids? [1]
|
| Hopefully this was a rare event that happened to occur right
| after it was opened up. But there's a decent chance that this is
| will be a common occurrence that will happen again in the near
| future and continue to degrade the accuracy of the images.
|
| 1: https://news.sky.com/story/meteoroid-hit-has-caused-
| signific...
|
| EDIT: thanks for the links! This was shown to me on google news,
| and I clicked on the link for more headlines but none of them
| looked more authoritative (The Hill?). I sure wish they'd
| included the NASA link!
| AnonMO wrote:
| Its not rare per se NASA expects an impact about every month.
| this one was larger than their calculations, but that
| "significant uncorrectable damage" won't affect the pictures or
| the scientific work. also all damage to the telescope is
| uncorrectable due to the location of the telescope. If you read
| NASA report and not sky news which doesn't even link the report
| you would know.
|
| https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2207/2207.05632.pdf
| mturmon wrote:
| It's hard to see through the fog of breathless reporting in
| that link. Here's one closer to the source:
|
| https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/08/webb-engineered-to-en...
|
| It seems like they have 4 impacts that are consistent with
| expectations and one outside expectations. The first 4 can be
| be mostly corrected by fine-tuning the deformable optics.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| While the damage to the mirror segment itself can't be
| corrected, the effect on the JWST as a whole is negligible and
| it is still operating within performance limits. Just telling
| someone that it received "significant uncorrectable damage from
| micrometeoroids?" seems intentionally worded to incite a
| negative response directed towards NASA.
| lbriner wrote:
| A few comments saying it is cheaper than X which is much worse
| than a space telescope but to me, that is irrelevant. They are
| proposing to spend this in addition to all the other garbage they
| spend money on so the comparison is not logical.
|
| By the same logic, I can say that we shouldn't spend $10B on a
| telescope when we could invest it in one of many humanitarian
| exploits like micro-finance for developing countries, systems for
| clean water and sanitation etc.
|
| If the question was, "should we spend $10B of the military budget
| on this instead of tanks?", then fair enough.
| nextstep wrote:
| This is cheap compared to a lot of what the US government spends
| money on, and it won't kill anybody! So really quite a non-issue.
| prpl wrote:
| Now do SOFIA - the telescope most astronomers agree that, while
| unique, it is not a good investment and, by itself, contributes
| significantly to the carbon footprint of astronomy.
|
| Luckily it is almost at an end, finally, after years of trying to
| get it killed
| bowsamic wrote:
| It has actually become somewhat cultlike. I watched someone on
| twitter get completely torn apart for asking the very reasonable
| and scientific question: "What will we learn from this
| telescope?". They got absolutely demolished, people going through
| his tweets and personal details and making fun of him. I decided
| to ask a few of them what new stuff we expect to learn about the
| universe using this new telescope. Only one person managed to
| answer me, and they were not one of the people to mock the
| original guy.
|
| My impression is that people don't have a clue of why we want to
| do this, in fact, a lot of them explicitly seem to think that the
| high-res image in the press release was the main point. $10b
| projects don't get launched simply just for the reason "why
| not?", they have purpose and intention behind them. It is an
| interesting look into how the general public relate to science,
| compared to how scientists relate to it. For a scientist, "why
| are we doing this?" is one of the very first questions you would
| ask, not something to be mocked
|
| EDIT: I want to point out that I am a physicist and technically
| an astronomy (GW interferometry) myself, so I know that there are
| answers to these questions. I just think that it's interesting
| how not only do people not know the answers to them, but they
| think it is rude to ask. I can't reply to comments, as I'm rate
| limited.
| danjoredd wrote:
| Their first mistake was using Twitter. Twitter actively
| encourages people being toxic to each other since that is what
| gets the most likes. I remember back when I used it was during
| the Pewdiepie vs T-Series meme, and people kept calling me a
| fascist just because I watched his videos.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| I mean, it's Twitter. What else do you expect from an app with
| a significant user base of frankly frustrated people looking to
| pour out their lack of happiness with their lives on others?
| bowsamic wrote:
| This might be surprising, but a vast majority of casual
| science discussion among scientists from different research
| groups takes place on twitter
| dougmwne wrote:
| I had the absolute privilege to regularly attending lectures at
| the DC air and space museum. These were held partly as an
| educational tool for congressional staffers, to demonstrate the
| hard value of NASA science mission funding. They were deep yet
| accessible. We get so much out of our science funding!
|
| These missions do have primary science goals and in order to
| book time on the instruments, proposals are submitted and
| prioritized accordingly.
|
| The science being done is absolutely wild stuff, formation of
| new planets, stars, universe and everything. With a telescope
| like this you can watch the evolution of all matter in the
| universe, from near the beginning of time up to now in all its
| trillions of permutations. You get this amazing data on
| everything and can spend decades analyzing it for new insights
| and models.
|
| Twitter and the general population understands none of this,
| but NASA understands that a few pretty pictures will keep the
| funding flowing.
|
| But what thing could we learn that will really wow folks?
| Composition of exoplanet atmospheres, of course. Class M planet
| detected!
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Twitter is the ultimate out of context anger generation
| machine, so that's probably to be expected. It drives user
| engagement after all.
|
| There's a pretty good explanation in this documentary:
| https://www.pbs.org/video/ultimate-space-telescope-gunryt/
| chernevik wrote:
| "YouGov released an online poll" -- stopped reading right there
| [deleted]
| cbanek wrote:
| I think it's great how much that NASA advertised this telescope,
| and the name. They really piggy-backed off the love of Hubble, of
| astronomy picture of the day, etc.
|
| Don't get me wrong, it's great science, but great science doesn't
| always mean great PR. I feel like if you ask people about what
| NASA has done recently, they'll be like, I dunno. (last answer
| would have probably been the Shuttle, while ISS has some good
| coverage it doesn't seem as exciting to people). But they do
| likely know about Hubble and now Webb.
|
| Which is great, because the amount that the population thinks
| NASA gets in terms of tax payer dollars is grossly overimagined.
| It's less than 1%. But in the US you need great PR to get the
| funding for projects, not only to start, but also to not cancel
| them after a regime change.
| j0hnyl wrote:
| Why would anyone think it's not? $10B is pennies within the
| context of the US's frivolous spending.
| _greim_ wrote:
| > ...JWST's total costs account for 0.0095 percent of all US
| spending between 2003 and 2026.
|
| I think it was a good investment, but 10 billion is a lot of
| money in absolute terms and comparing it to "all US spending
| between 2003 and 2026" just to make it seem small is
| disingenuous.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| It's not to make it seem small - the point is that the first
| contract was awarded in 2003 and the project is funded through
| to 2026.
| bradlys wrote:
| Considering it's a 20+ year project in the making and has an
| expected operation of 5-20 years... I don't think it's entirely
| ridiculous to look at it this way.
| outworlder wrote:
| Can't even buy a third of twitter with that amount.
| kosyblysk666 wrote:
| [deleted]
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| So how about the overlap between this, and the people who think
| the U.S is heading for a civil war?
| fullshark wrote:
| Looks like the poll doesn't tell them how much it cost in the
| question.
| ryaan_anthony wrote:
| now do a poll: would you rather spend 10B on a telescope or X?
| TedShiller wrote:
| If you think it's a good investment then I have something to sell
| you
| dmd wrote:
| I did a poll of ~200 (University of Pennsylvania) undergraduates
| about 15 years ago, asking them (among many other questions) what
| percent of the federal budget NASA gets. The median answer was
| 15%, which is 30x more than the correct answer of one half of one
| percent.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| That's quite ridiculous an answer to be honest, but is a good
| example of how terrible people are at understanding federal
| funding, and unfortunately undergraduates are no exception.
|
| How much did they estimate the defense budget at, 150%?
| dmd wrote:
| Median was 40%.
| Yajirobe wrote:
| Also, for comparison, the US military budget in 2021 was
| $700-800 billion.
| noidiocyallowed wrote:
| This article gives zero information. It gives noise.
|
| There are only a handful of people amongst those 340 million who
| can judge whether it was a good investment or not. Why ask the
| general populace who only see the nice pictures, but they mostly
| don't know anything at all about this topic. Ask researchers,
| physicists whether it was money burned or money well spent.
| paulmd wrote:
| It is - and that's $10b upfront cost for an asset that will
| operate for a decade. $1b a year is a steal for that compared to
| the other shit the US wastes federal money on.
|
| I'd personally vote to 10x or 100x our hard-science funding in
| general, we spend an absolute pittance compared to military
| funding or corn subsidies or whatever other bullshit.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > I'd personally vote to 10x or 100x our hard-science funding
| in general
|
| You dropped the ball on the SSC.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| How many factory or construction jobs does "hard-science"
| funding create? I love science but defense invests in the
| entire "stack". It creates factory jobs but it also creates
| jobs for basically every STEM field.
|
| From a practicality standpoint- military spending is difficult
| to beat. Improves defense, improves the defense of allies,
| creates factory jobs, creates science and engineering jobs. It
| has everything.
|
| The only thing that comes close is if there were some green
| arms race where we are funding and building wind, solar,
| nuclear, fusion, etc.
| danny_codes wrote:
| Eh, everything except useful output. Sure, a by-product of
| military research could be something useful, but that money
| would go a lot further if we just went for the useful thing
| immediately. The F35 is a good example. Whatever technology
| gains came out of that project are likely useful in general,
| but presumably it'd have been several orders of magnitude
| cheaper to just directly invest in that tech instead of
| building a weapon.
| nickff wrote:
| How useful is the JWST's output? Is it any more useful than
| tanks that sit outside rusting?
|
| I'm an amateur astronomer, and even I doubt that these
| telescopes will provide any output that will be of use to
| humans in the next hundred or thousand years.
| r3012 wrote:
| I suppose one can argue about the output but there have
| already been spin-offs from the JWST inventions that do
| have practical applications.
|
| https://webb.nasa.gov/resources/JWST_spinoffs_v122011.pdf
| jandrese wrote:
| > How useful is the JWST's output? Is it any more useful
| than tanks that sit outside rusting?
|
| What an odd question. Almost anything is more useful and
| unused military equipment. At the very least the JWST is
| going to allow many astronomers to publish papers. It may
| even detect markers of life on other worlds. And there is
| nothing else that gives us a view into the early universe
| like the James Webb.
| gizajob wrote:
| You seem a little negative towards astronomy for an
| amateur astronomer. Knowing that Pluto is there, or other
| galaxies exist has little use in terms of utility, but we
| still want to know. The images and data output by the
| JWST might be of little use to scientists in 100 or 1000
| years, but that data will still spark the next round of
| research that will put them in the more advanced position
| they find themselves in.
| nickff wrote:
| I love knowing this stuff, and getting to see the faint
| light that comes to us from so far away, and so long ago.
| I still think it's almost totally useless.
| gizajob wrote:
| I was trying to highlight the difference between being
| useful and being valuable. Your stargazing might not be
| particularly useful but it's very valuable, because you
| enjoy it and because you're awed by what you see. Trying
| to find it useful or useless doesn't need to come in to
| it.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Was landing on the moon "useful"?
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| All that matters is we did it before the USSR.
| dmix wrote:
| Then why did they do it 6 times?
| wizofaus wrote:
| Surely the one thing that would have made the moon
| landing better is if it had been a truly cooperative
| international effort.
| nickff wrote:
| It would have taken much longer to come about, if it had
| happened at all. International efforts are like cartels
| which agree that they'll share any innovations, thus
| stunting progress (by removing the incentive to improve).
| wizofaus wrote:
| Undoubtedly. But I'm glad my own country got to at least
| play a small part, which of course we had to make a movie
| about (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dish).
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Indeed. Some people defend war spending by saying that it
| leads to, say, medial advances. Seems to me that you can
| fund medical research without spending a trillion dollars
| sending humans around the planet, causing another trillion
| in infrastructure damage, air-conditioning tents in a
| desert, blowing limbs off the aforementioned humans, flying
| them home and then _still_ spending the money on the
| research to fix them (and in the US especially, then also
| denying these hard-won fruits of this whole taxpayer-funded
| endeavour to the taxpayers).
| ghiculescu wrote:
| The point of military spending is to prevent war by
| creating a strong deterrent that encourages diplomacy.
| It's not to start wars, that's why it's called defense
| spending. (I'm not arguing the US always does this
| right.)
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| That doesn't work when you have a belligerent who needs
| to get itself into conflicts every 15 years to keep its
| experience levels up and foment conflict abroad in the
| "off season" to support its MIC.
| hanselot wrote:
| anthonypasq wrote:
| this is a tad naive to say the least
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| The continental united states is surrounded by two
| friendly neighbors that are not a threat to us. We are
| separated from our nearest peer adversaries by thousands
| of miles of ocean, and their _entire_ military doctrine
| revolves around defending themselves from _us_.
|
| We could get by with a tiny fraction of our 700B+ / yr
| defense budget. One wonders how much better a society we
| would be if we spent that on things that would _actually
| benefit_ the average citizen, or did something
| unthinkable like actually paying down debt.
| sharkweek wrote:
| If that happened, we'd invade ourselves to prevent such a
| country from developing.
| ckw wrote:
| trashtester wrote:
| > Some people defend war spending
|
| I prefer to think of military spending during peacetime
| as "peace spending" not "war spending".
|
| Spending on actual wars, once they start, is another
| matter. Some wars are just (like the support of Ukraine,
| at present, I would say, or the liberation of Kuwait),
| some are unjust, many are some shade of gray.
|
| But generally, it is preferable when democratic countries
| have enough military might during peacetime to make
| would-be conquerors put aside their dreams of being the
| new Peter the Great, Saladin or Qin Shi Huang.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2022/07/20/czech-
| r...
|
| Looks like useful output to me.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Maybe I'm wrong but I thought the whole point of the F-35
| was to keep the engineering firms sort of perpetually in a
| war-ready state and keep the engineer pipeline going
| strong.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| But we also got the most advanced strike fighter in the
| world out of it.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The internet being a byproduct of defense spending means
| that the ROI of defense spending is probably many years
| ahead considering where it put the U.S. from a global
| software dominance standpoint.
| MR4D wrote:
| That the Internet exists directly refutes what looks like
| common reasoning. It never would have happened without
| DARPA (because telecoms never would have let it happen).
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| You act like the basic research that darpa funded could
| not have been otherwise funded by a nation that didn't
| spend a large chunk of its budget on military spending.
| MR4D wrote:
| Why else would you design & fund a computer network to
| survive nuclear war?
| margalabargala wrote:
| That's a fair point; there's something to be said for
| novel technology being developed by
| industries/organizations adjacent to but not directly
| involved in the industry of that technology. This seems
| to tend to yield better results than funding the industry
| directly.
|
| My guess at why, would be that occupants of the industry
| have an interest in maintaining the status quo, while
| players adjacent to the industry have an interest in
| novel, disruptive technologies in adjacent industries.
|
| For example, over a decade ago, the US paid hundreds of
| billions directly to telcos to fund the buildout of a
| nationwide fiber network.
|
| Perhaps if that money had gone to a different group, then
| a nationwide fiber network would exist.
| MR4D wrote:
| You make a great point about "adjacent" players. However,
| in the case of the military, it's even moreso. . .
|
| Most companies (regardless of industry) seek _profit_.
| Whether that 's Microsoft or AT&T, or anyone else, they
| seek profit, and will do just about anything to get it.
|
| The military, however, is not at all motivated by profit,
| but rather by winning wars. That has a very different
| profile than "profit", and being an existential sort of
| issue, prompts some very different outcomes.
|
| The internet is one outcome, as I mentioned before, but
| also things like depleted uranium, which are a byproduct
| of enriching uranium.[0] Interestingly, there doesn't
| seem to be much of a civilian use for the material, but
| there sure is for war!
|
| Anytime you can get different motivations, you get a more
| diverse set of outcomes. Teflon and Tang are probably the
| best known ones from NASA efforts. NASA is of course
| interested in rockets and scientific research, which have
| some overlap with commercial and some overlap with the
| military.
|
| [0] - https://www.iaea.org/topics/spent-fuel-
| management/depleted-u...
| r3012 wrote:
| If only the world was so simple. I think the connection is
| more direct than you might suspect.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/magazine/neil-degrasse-
| ty...
|
| And
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44157732-accessory-to-
| wa...
|
| Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between
| Astrophysics and the Military Neil deGrasse Tyson, Avis
| Lang
| felipemnoa wrote:
| >>but presumably it'd have been several orders of magnitude
| cheaper to just directly invest in that tech instead of
| building a weapon.
|
| True, but virtually nobody would be motivated by just
| directly investing on the tech instead of an exciting
| fighter jet.
| ISL wrote:
| I don't know if you've ever met any ... aircraft
| metallurgists, for example, but holy poops are they
| motivated by doing anything awesome with advanced alloys.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm an engineer, and I'm motivated by the end product,
| not the just inventing a machine.
| felipemnoa wrote:
| Yeah, but you need to motivate the people that will be
| footing the bill and also the ones that approve the
| budget. The tax payers, the legislators...
|
| The regular person will not care about technical stuff
| like that, but they will care about a shiny new fighting
| yet.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Major science projects have extremely similar economic impact
| to military spending for the simple reason that they are
| extremely similar. The dominant companies involved in high-
| end scientific projects, especially in aerospace, are the
| exact same companies that receive the most military spending.
| Essentially every major defense contractor is involved in
| JWST, and the prime contractor is a defense company (Northrup
| Grumman). The only parties with significant involvement that
| are not directly the military-industrial complex are
| university coalitions, which operate similarly to the
| university coalitions that defense R&D programs heavily rely
| on.
|
| NASA is essentially part of the broader US defense
| organization and operates in extremely close collaboration
| with defense agencies using largely the same methods,
| contractors, and funding. Major NASA projects are largely
| indistinguishable from major weapons projects, and most of
| the time the two are closely interrelated in that both use
| technology developed by the other. Sometimes this is more
| informal (since the same contractors perform both) but
| sometimes it is quite formal, e.g. multiple defense satellite
| systems have been developed in parallel with scientific
| systems so that the design effort can be shared.
| SEJeff wrote:
| A lot of military research is done IN CONCERT with NASA, you
| know that, right?
|
| The DoD and NASA work together so much on missiles and
| avionics it isn't funny.
|
| https://www.nrel.gov/workingwithus/defense-partnerships.html
|
| https://www.defense.gov/News/News-
| Stories/Article/Article/23...
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-us-space-force-
| estab...
|
| etc, etc, etc. NASA's wind tunnel was used to help design DoD
| missiles. The two have always worked hand in hand.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Why can't we fix and improve infrastructure... and spend less
| bullshit like the F35 program? I believe research,
| development, and program maintenance costs are expected to
| exceed $1.7 trillion dollars.
|
| With $1.7 trillion dollars you could, for example, give every
| household in the country a small rooftop solar array (@
| ~$10k/ea).
| criddell wrote:
| If you try to buy that many solar panels, you're going to
| move the market a lot. Would the price go up or down?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| oh of course, very likely! but it's an interesting
| illustration of the massive budget these defense projects
| get -- and this is just one project!
| KerrAvon wrote:
| "Improves defense" is such a canard. The US outspends every
| other military power on earth by a zillion to 1. And most of
| it is unaudited and except for the rare whisteblowing, we
| don't really know how much is a total waste. We can
| absolutely afford to shift a few billion to hard science.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| The problem is, you are using an unlike comparison.
|
| We as Americans pay based on US salaries, US cost of
| living, etc.
|
| This is why many choose to use Military Purchasing Power
| Parity (MPPP) [1] instead.
|
| MPPP can explain why the USSR had at one point a truly
| gigantic force regardless of the spend.
|
| This explains part of the story around how huge China's
| military force is becoming [2]
|
| Another element to consider is how much of the entire US
| government (federal, state, local, and tribal) and US
| industry could be operationally controlled by the US
| Commander-in-Chief during wartime. China for example could
| be expected to have unity of command across the board. We
| wouldn't, despite things like the Defense production Act
| [3]
|
| Yet one other factor is the amount of unidentified military
| units, such as China's Fishing Fleet [4] (Chinese Maritime
| Militia) that serve as a somewhat disguised extension to
| their Navy. For force parity comparisons, you'd have to
| total up their Navy, their coast guard, and their CMM
| fleet.
|
| [1] https://voxeu.org/article/why-military-purchasing-
| power-pari...
|
| [2] https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/the-colossal-
| scale-of-...
|
| [3] https://www.fema.gov/disaster/defense-production-act
|
| [4] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-has-covert-naval-
| fleet...
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| I will point out that the military spending that people
| complained about provided my brother a good job at a factory
| making a decent wage while he was figuring out his life and
| college. In addition grew up to a major AFB, which was one of
| the biggest employers in the region, and these were good jobs
| too that paid well.
|
| Like all this money the government spends on military isn't
| just suddenly vanishing into thin air a lot of it gets put
| back into creating jobs, and the communities. Now there may
| be a lot more that gets diverted through seventeen layers of
| subcontractors, and more useless bureaucracy than you can
| shake a stick at but it isn't just being used for a useless
| purpose.
| worker_person wrote:
| The ideal military size is such that we are strong enough
| that no one is willing to start WW3. The smaller the budget
| that achieves this the better. Too small and wars become more
| common.
|
| WW1 we went home, and 20 years later things heated up. WW2 we
| stayed and it's been fairly peaceful since.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Don't kid yourself. It's been peaceful in spite of us
| injecting ourselves into matters that are none of our
| concern. We could have achieved the same thing with a few
| dozen nukes. You don't see anyone lining up to invade North
| Korea any time soon.
| xg15 wrote:
| If job creation is the only factor, why not invest the 10B
| into digging holes and filling them up again?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Where do I say that it's the only factor?
| vanattab wrote:
| > From a practicality standpoint- military spending is
| difficult to beat. Improves defense, improves the defense
| of allies, creates factory jobs, creates science and
| engineering jobs. It has everything.
|
| I mean he explicitly said it was not the only factor...
| DaveExeter wrote:
| Congratulations! You have discovered the broken-window
| fallacy! [1]
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
| hervature wrote:
| "The belief that destruction is good for the economy"
|
| That's not at all what GP is saying. Government investment
| into industries have different return on investment. This
| is why governments heavily invest into healthcare. But, if
| we're talking investing in a military vs. university
| researchers, I think you have to be fairly elitist to say
| that adding 100,000 academics is better for society than
| providing a good life for 1M soldiers. At its core,
| military spending is the greatest experiment of UBI ever
| done. Now, downvotes from the left and right.
| DaveExeter wrote:
| I don't believe in downvotes, so I upvoted you instead.
| :-)
|
| I agree with what you see. You see 1M soldiers
| (freeloaders?) and their salaries, housing, and
| healthcare provided 'free' by taxpayers.
|
| The problem is what you don't see, or as they say in
| French, ce qu'on ne voit pas!
| hervature wrote:
| Why thank you. I know that many believe that militaries
| can only be used for destruction. Of course, we've had 70
| years of peace (for the most part) that was really only
| possible with the largest military movement (10% of the
| US) to counteract a true force of destruction. I'm the
| first one to ream on the US's use of drone strikes and
| getting involved in the Middle East in the first place,
| but the GPS system and the US Navy probably contribute
| $1T each to the functioning of the global economy per
| year. If that takes a large amount of soldiers to be
| combat ready (definitely not freeloading) then I'm
| personally fine with that.
| kidme5 wrote:
| To "counteract a true force of destruction"
|
| You mean the other group of freeloaders on some other
| part of the marble flying through the black night?
| greedo wrote:
| I'm pretty pro-military, but "70 years of peace" is
| ridiculously inaccurate. We had the Korean War running
| until 1953 (which involved the following: USA, USSA, PRC,
| AU, Canada, the list goes on).
|
| Shortly after, the US begins covert assistance and
| operations in Vietnam (which ended up involving the USA,
| USSR, PRC etc etc.)This continued until 1975.
|
| The US had a brief break from overt warfare until Grenada
| in the 80s, followed quickly by Desert Shield/Desert
| Storm. Since then it's been pretty much continuous
| warfare by US troops to this day.
|
| Just because we don't see it on the news every night, US
| servicemen are fighting in Africa, in the Middle East,
| and obviously the Navy is present in almost all the
| oceans in significant levels.
|
| Sure the USN enables free trade. And I have no issue with
| a well-funded navy, with clear goals and objectives. But
| the rest of the military is bloated beyond reasonable
| belief, committed to tasks that are undemocratic, and as
| others have pointed out, when you have a large, expensive
| military, the temptation to use it irresponsibly is high.
| hervature wrote:
| That's my laziness of not couching all my statements with
| more nuance. There is the famous stat of the US having a
| pretty small number of years of peace since inception.
| The "70 years of peace" was meant to be the perception
| bit you talk about but also more "peace at home". In all
| the conflicts you mention, the US was doing something it
| didn't need to do in order to defend itself. People
| were/are course afraid of nukes, but I think that's a
| very different sentiment.
|
| If my comments are coming across as endorsing the
| entirety of the US military and that it is infallible,
| that was not the intent. I mostly just called people
| elitist for claiming that academic pursuits are more
| worthy of funding than the equivalent defense expenditure
| on the sole basis of academic=good and soldier=bad. Based
| on my other comments, you can see that I even believe
| that the technological progress spurred by defense needs
| is greater than throwing the same amount of money at
| research.
| tchalla wrote:
| Ha, benevolent US defending itself!
|
| Exhibit A - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan
| _coup_d%27%C3%A...
| forgetfulness wrote:
| They're freeloading in the sense that they're paid to not
| meaningfully produce anything, cleaning guns, loading and
| unloading crates, doing calisthenics and polishing up
| boots are some fairly unproductive uses of able bodied
| people, not to speak of the pencilpushers setting up the
| logistics for this.
|
| Paying people to churn butter by hand non stop would
| probably be more of a contribution, or doing actual UBI.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| You have a cynical view. I have a humanitarian service
| medal from rendering assistance to Indonesia after their
| earthquake in 2009. While I was deployed my friends got
| theirs helping Japan after their devastating tsunami.
|
| What about police and firefighters? They don't "produce"
| anything but you need them.
| okasaki wrote:
| I disagree, and you have a very poor understanding of
| academic pay if you think 100K academics costs the same
| as 1M soldiers.
| hervature wrote:
| Nope, don't believe that the pay is the same. Just the
| contribution to society is lower. Even 1M academics for
| 1M soldiers.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Defense spending tends to create its own demand though via
| "adventurism" in foreign countries, which has a fairly
| enormous collateral costs.
| kristjansson wrote:
| > How many factory or construction jobs does "hard-science"
| funding create?
|
| Lots? JWST is a schoolbus-sized pile of high-precision high-
| tech parts, never mind the construction of new facilities to
| test, transport it. LIGO and friends require substantial
| construction, colliders are huge construction projects before
| they're scientific instruments, ...
|
| If there's a productive project that costs billions, it's
| going to employ a lot of people.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| Nasa is defense funding.
|
| >wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.green arms race where we
| are funding and building wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.
|
| We have over the last 10 years. Now we need a grid scale
| battery race as we are realizing that all the green energy in
| the world is useless if we can't store it.
| greedo wrote:
| NASA is not defense funding. It might benefit from some
| military technologies, but its funding is not under the
| DoD.
| M3L0NM4N wrote:
| I wish more people realized you don't need necessarily
| batteries to store energy. There are mechanical ways to
| store large amounts of energy, like pumped-storage
| hydroelectricity.
| carlmr wrote:
| >we are realizing that all the green energy in the world is
| useless if we can't store it.
|
| Most of us realized this 20-30 years ago.
| _greim_ wrote:
| > How many factory or construction jobs does "hard-science"
| funding create?
|
| An infinite amount, in the long run.
| hajdjvkrj wrote:
| aren't NASA telescopes and technology garbage compared to the
| stuff NRO has?
| m463 wrote:
| Don't they point in different directions? :)
| jrussino wrote:
| A _lot_ of NASA 's stuff also points this way:
| https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/estd-missions/satellite/
| m463 wrote:
| > I'd personally vote to 10x or 100x our hard-science funding
|
| It's a slippery slope though. sometimes governments pick
| winners on non-scientific grounds.
|
| I wonder if maybe tax breaks might be a better way of funding,
| because folks who have ownership could be better.
| M3L0NM4N wrote:
| Full agree. I'd have been okay if this telescope cost us $50bn
| ratsmack wrote:
| >... compared to the other shit the US wastes federal money on.
|
| You mean like roads, bridges, and other infrastructure?
|
| I like to view nice pictures of space as well as anyone else,
| but I can't agree that it is money well spent. If it was
| entirely privately funded it wouldn't be a problem, but money
| from taxes should go for the things that benefit society the
| most.
| Maursault wrote:
| JWST cost each American $3/yr for it's mission life. They just
| would have wasted it on gum or an energy drink.
| imperio59 wrote:
| * at least a decade, right? Or are the batteries going to run
| out at some point?
| danny_codes wrote:
| The supply of coolant is finite. At the time of mission
| planning there was no spaceship capable of resupplying at the
| Lagrange point. As I understand it the coolant onbaord is
| good for 10 years.
|
| However, if starship is successful that situation will change
| and resupply becomes possible. So I suppose we'll see.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| NASA is already doing resupply missions to easily-
| accessible orbits [1] and they have previous spin-offs less
| customized to repair/replace but capable nonetheless e.g.
| X-37/X-40
|
| It is fully within the realm of possibility that a future
| OSAM mission will be capable of hitting far more distant
| points, since the Lunar stuff is just starting to heat up.
|
| [1] https://nexis.gsfc.nasa.gov/osam-1.html
| outworlder wrote:
| JWST is limited by fuel, not by the cryocooler. Helium is
| not a consumable, although some level of leakage may occur.
| But only one of its instruments requires it.
| dmix wrote:
| I'm guessing they didn't make it refuelable by
| automation, so it requires a human or custom robotics to
| refuel?
| l33tman wrote:
| Current estimate is 2 decades (original worst case was 10
| years depending on the accuracy of the launch, which turned
| out to be best case accurate!)
| thekiptxt wrote:
| Current estimate is closer to 20 years until fuel to keep it
| in the Lagrange point is exhausted. Originally planned for
| 10, but the deployment was precise enough to leave enough
| fuel for many more years :)
| paulmd wrote:
| I thought some of the instruments would run out of helium
| after a decade. Other instruments may be able to run longer
| of course. Even better.
| spfzero wrote:
| Military spending on advanced spy telescopes like Keyhole lead
| to Hubble.
| quest88 wrote:
| Why is it an investment though? What's the expected return? How
| does that compare to other options?
| laxd wrote:
| It's hard to predict the consequenses of fundamental
| sciences. Nevertheless, it's the ground where applied
| sciences and engineering grow.
| paulmd wrote:
| Who said "investment"? That's not a phrase that anyone here
| used prior to you bringing it up.
|
| Blue-sky science/hard science is not a financial instrument
| that you can reasonably expect to generate a 10x ROI on a
| predictable timeline, that's why it's blue-sky research, but
| it's nonetheless extremely important.
|
| Due to the lack of an immediately apparent profit incentive,
| it's one of those things that more or less has to be
| socialized or it doesn't happen. If there was an expectation
| of this leading to a better kleenex within 5 years then for-
| profit enterprises would already be doing it. But there
| isn't, yet there are still scientifically important questions
| to be answered by performing the research.
| quest88 wrote:
| Lol what. It's the title of the article. OP said "It is",
| referring to the title, that it is a good investment.
|
| "Most Americans think NASA's $10 billion space telescope is
| a good investment" in case you missed it.
| paulmd wrote:
| That doesn't seem to carry the implication of an expected
| return-on-investment in a financial sense. Something can
| be a good investment and nonetheless operate at a loss.
|
| So to answer your question: the expected return is
| fundamental/hard science being performed that will lead
| to potential (but unknown) improvements to our
| understanding of astronomy, physics, and generally
| speaking our understanding of the fundamental fabric of
| our universe.
|
| It's also unclear why you replied to me if your comment
| was directed at the title of the article and not to
| anything I said in particular.
|
| Sheesh, typical Hacker News, like you really really
| needed someone to personally explain the concept of blue-
| sky/hard-science? Good afternoon to you too, mister
| roboto.
| quest88 wrote:
| You said "It is". I was replying to you because you said
| it was a good investment, and I was questioning you why -
| to justify your opinion.
|
| The point is that I disagree that it is a good
| investment. The investment is gambling with unfavorable
| odds - we're hoping we get something out of it. Even if
| we learn something new from astronomy..so what? There are
| many problems on earth that could use $10B or more of
| NASAs space budget that have direct impact on lives.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > What's the expected return?
|
| Knowledge?
|
| How would you value the early experiments that eventually led
| to, say, germ theory on a monetary basis?
| quest88 wrote:
| Knowledge for what? What do we want to know? Is it for the
| sake of putting in a text book or showing neat pictures in
| a museum that people will forget about by the next exhibit?
|
| What did spending billions getting to the moon get us,
| bragging rights? What tangible benefit have we gotten from
| the space station and other space missions?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| An enormous amount of human achievement comes from basic
| research that didn't have an immediate obvious use case.
|
| Relativity gives us GPS, for example.
| leothecool wrote:
| "What is the use of a newborn child?" - Ben Franklin
| [deleted]
| snarfy wrote:
| And we barely get anything for our military spending except fat
| defense contractors.
| mmmpop wrote:
| Like, actually bloated.
|
| Once when I lived in Denver, I was commuting into downtown
| when a string of big fat jerks with HOMELAND SECURITY on
| their vests just walk in the middle of 15th and forcing
| traffic to just stop because they needed another snack. Not
| like "big guys" but just fat, rude, Larry the Cable Guy
| looking assholes with big guns slung around their shoulders.
|
| This is coming from a pro-cop, pro-gun kinda guy... fuck this
| breed of people entirely and their way of life.
|
| </rant>
| dmix wrote:
| They were stopping traffic because they were walking down a
| street to buy food?
| mmmpop wrote:
| They're fat piggies with big mean guns and given where it
| happened, I guess they could be going to a movie or
| something IDK
| loudmax wrote:
| I believe we get a lot out of living in a world where
| dictators aren't able to invade their neighbors.
| pengaru wrote:
| > I believe we get a lot out of living in a world where
| dictators aren't able to invade their neighbors.
|
| If only that were true...
| vanattab wrote:
| I mean I consider not being ruled by Nazis or Communists as
| at least somewhat valuable.
| mmmpop wrote:
| Ironically, isn't that just MAGA vs Antifa? Nationalists vs
| commies, they both suck tremendously.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Nationalism isn't the same as Nazism.
| RajT88 wrote:
| And Socialism is not Communism.
| mmmpop wrote:
| > And Socialism is not Communism.
|
| A lot of that crew would call themselves Marxists, no
| doubt. Maybe not "commies" if you mean they're not
| shipping people off to gulags, ok.
|
| > Nationalism isn't the same as Nazism.
|
| I agree, but I think you could ask you average college
| Democrat and they'd equate the two.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Shipping people off to the gulags is not a feature of
| Marxism. My point here is that these terms get attached
| to political movements and then people mistake how the
| _movement_ is practiced with the _original thing_.
|
| Lenin was influenced by Marx. He considered himself a
| Marxist for certain. What he practiced was
| Totalitarianism.
|
| The Nazi party's formal name was the "National Socialist
| German Worker's Party". You could argue they were
| influenced by Socialism, but you are being disingenuous
| if you make the leap to Socialism means exterminating the
| Jews.
|
| Now, there are people that say that! They are wingnuts.
|
| > I agree, but I think you could ask you average college
| Democrat and they'd equate the two.
|
| I doubt that very much.
| pydry wrote:
| You didnt need much military spending for that. Being the
| world's preeminent neoliberal empire, on the other hand....
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| You know we didn't really want to enter into WWII until the
| Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor? and there wasn't huge
| support for it, either. Until we went to war with Japan,
| the Nazi's hadn't actually declared war on the U.S. We had
| stayed isolationists post WWI and decided to let Europe and
| Asia "just kind of deal with it, themselves".
|
| We weren't the world's police pre-1941 and had to be pulled
| into WWII kicking and screaming, not by some moral
| obligation.
|
| https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-
| holocaust/us....
| snarfy wrote:
| I'm not saying we shouldn't have military spending, but we
| don't get much for what we pay for, similar to healthcare.
| zamalek wrote:
| A single Javelin missile costs $170M. It's impossible to
| disagree with you.
|
| However, given that Russia is using chips from laundry
| machines and microwaves (the type of information that
| makes me seriously question their hypermissile claims), I
| do think that we are getting great results if you ignore
| bang for buck.
| kristjansson wrote:
| You're actually bang-on, if you intended 'M' to denote
| thousands[0]. Otherwise the Peacekeeper[1] is the closest
| I could find to a per-unit cost of $170mm, and that
| offers ... quite a bit more bang.
|
| [0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/29/how-this-us-
| made-176000-anti...
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-118_Peacekeeper
| zamalek wrote:
| I did intend a 'K', thanks for the correction :)
| crispyambulance wrote:
| I think you're getting it mixed up with something else.
| The javelin is a shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon.
| According to wikipedia it has a unit cost >$200K (just
| for the missile). Not sure sure what the launcher pricing
| is, nor the amortized development cost. Yes, it's still
| high, but it is enough to shift balance of power in
| Ukraine (for example).
| danny_codes wrote:
| What's wild about cooperation on the scale of the US is that
| this project is almost free for the individual. 1billion is
| just $3 per American per year. So for a "subscription" cost of
| just 25C/ a month, we all get James Webb telescope.
| pirate787 wrote:
| There are 144 million actual taxpayers so the cost is more
| like $70 per taxpayer. Worthwhile but definitely not free or
| low cost. Another way to look at it is the average taxpayer
| paid $10,649 in 2019, so Webb required the entire year of
| taxable effort from 939,055 average taxpayers.
| [deleted]
| weaksauce wrote:
| Another way to look at it without making it look bigger
| than it is by omitting zeros from 144 million and including
| the zeros from the much smaller number:
|
| Assuming your average of 10,649 is correct, it's the entire
| taxable output for a year from 0.652% of the average tax of
| the tax paying population.
|
| 939,055/144,000,000 = 0.00652122
| amriksohata wrote:
| Investment? If we are looking for ROI an understanding of the
| universe with images will never return us anything even if it
| increases our understanding there is no tangible ROI. Yes it
| gives us knowledge but is it usable to help us in anyway that
| would have been useful to Neanderthals millennia ago?
| causi wrote:
| _Most Americans think NASA's $10B space telescope is a good
| investment_
|
| My god The Verge has an atrocious standard of reporting. The
| headline is clearly written to communicate that most Americans
| believe the JWST was worth its 2,000% budget overrun. That was
| not the survey question at all. The survey question was "How good
| an investment do you think the James Webb Space Telescope has
| been?"
| agloeregrets wrote:
| Is that actually materially different? Foundationally, if it
| was supposed to cost $10B and it was worth it and if it ended
| up costing 10B when it wasn't supposed to and was worth it, is
| that actually different? It's still a $10B project. Yes it
| overran it but, worth it.
| causi wrote:
| The survey participants were not informed of the cost at all.
| The JWST is absolutely worth ten billion dollars, but I'm not
| naive enough to think most Americans would agree with me, and
| I think that NASA contractors extracting twenty times their
| original grant from the taxpayers with no consequences is a
| major problem.
| daveslash wrote:
| Agreed. I think a better headline would be _" Most
| Americans still think Space is Cool as Fuck, still embody
| some childlike wonder about the universe, and are excited
| about JWST_"
|
| But I bet that if you asked Americans " _Was the $10bn cost
| of JWST worth it?_ " and then asked them to describe what
| the " _it_ " was and re-iterated the first question after
| they qualified the it.... I doubt you'd get a "yes" twice
| in a row.
| throwaway64643 wrote:
| People forget things fast. JWST as a telescope is great, but as a
| project, is catastrophic. Massive budget overrun, delay after
| delay. It's certainly the sign/result of project mismanagement.
| Unless they figured out what's wrong on this run, there won't be
| the next 'JWST', like ever.
| greedo wrote:
| I think you might be underestimating the complexity of the
| JWST. A publicly funded project of this complexity will almost
| always have budget overruns and delays.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| So much of the complexity and cost overrun of the Webb was
| because we lacked a heavy rocket with a large payload
| fairing. The need to fold the telescope so delicately and
| intricately was the biggest challenge. Hopefully the larger
| rockets in development mean that future telescopes will not
| suffer from such constraints.
| greedo wrote:
| Exactly. Having a sclerotic space launch industry has
| really hampered NASA in many ways. I have hopes that
| Starship will be able to change this.
| patrickthebold wrote:
| I'm going to go a little rant just from the headline:
|
| Think about all of humankind -- our ancestors in the past, us in
| the present, and our descendants in the future. Think about how
| much value we have inherited from our ancestors: Fire, wheel,
| GPS, electricity, farming, materials like steel, the list really
| goes on and on.
|
| Now, of course, there's no rule that says we _have_ to give to
| our descendants anything at all, or anything comparable to what
| we have received from our ancestors, _but_ maybe we should think
| a bit selflessly when deciding to invest in science.
| adventured wrote:
| > maybe we should think a bit selflessly when deciding to
| invest in science
|
| It's not selfless. Most people have children and or
| grandchildren. It's extraordinarily selfish to want to see such
| personal, long-term investments flourish; investing into the
| macro future well-being is a great way to see to that. Cultures
| obviously don't always act rationally toward the distant
| future, some do though and we know from history (eg Norway's
| sovereign fund, to name one prominent recent example) that it
| can pay off spectacularly.
| conductr wrote:
| I like this way of thinking but just to be devil's advocate, we
| also constantly lose knowledge on a longer (but rather small)
| time scale. I think our high tech present, is at a bigger risk
| of losing >90% of what we've learned in the past few years.
| It's like the global supply chain is great while it lasts. What
| happens to human knowledge if/when electricity is unavailable,
| hard drives are unavailable, etc. Some mad max or other post
| apocalypse situation is probably in the cards at some point,
| how do we keep the knowledge alive?
| pavlov wrote:
| Anything we can realistically give them by investing in science
| will be dwarfed by the toxic legacy of climate change.
|
| It's like your dad leaving you a really nice suit and one
| billion in debt in your name with no option for bankruptcy.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| The best choice would have been to curb climate change,
| yes...but we are materially beyond the point of no return
| now. We could maybe give one more generation a better life
| with cuts, but putting a team together to find answers to big
| questions is much much easier than to make billions of people
| change their actions. It is far more efficient.
| klodolph wrote:
| That's an age-old question. "Should we solve other problems
| besides what we think are the most important problems?"
|
| One problem with answering this question is that we _don 't
| know_ what avenues of research will produce important
| outcomes. Historically, we have been very bad at it. The
| mathematicians working on group theory in the late 19th
| century had no idea how important it would be to 20th-century
| scientists and engineers.
|
| Spaceflight, in particular, is an important part of the
| specific problem of solving climate change. Imagine trying to
| understand climate change without the use of satellites!
| agloeregrets wrote:
| Bingo. Also I would note that it is incredibly not a zero-
| sum game. A person could dedicate their life to playing
| Video games, zex, drugs, charity, religion, science, the
| environment, etc. Spending time and money on science does
| not remove time and work from climate, in fact it may
| increase the amount by adding public interest.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| We'll leave them with a whole array of low and no carbon
| energy sources, and the seeds for technology to draw down
| carbon. At some level our decedents will be born into a
| different world where people have adapted, they won't know
| anything else, but they'll have the tools to make the world
| they want. The future is full of possibility if we only look
| up a bit and try to imagine something better.
| marssaxman wrote:
| You are right, of course, and I know the kids will be all
| right, but - I have a hard time taking any reassurance from
| this. Civilization will probably not collapse, but all wild
| places everywhere will be destroyed; there is no stopping
| it anymore. A world completely dominated by humans sounds
| like a miserable, ugly, suffocating kind of place, and I'm
| glad I won't have to live in it.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > but all wild places everywhere will be destroyed
|
| I don't know about that. Forests are coming back in
| Europe and North America. As people get richer, they
| value those things more. Population will peak by the end
| of the century and decline for a while after that. At
| that point people and animals will have a lot more
| breathing room.
|
| We can put a price on nature now and start paying for
| conservation. Places like Costa Rica also offer really
| useful paths forward. A lot is possible if people who
| care don't give in to despair.
| marssaxman wrote:
| I am sure there will continue to be many parks and groves
| and "natural" areas, carefully managed by humans, in
| order to meet various human needs, and many people will
| enjoy the time they spend working on them or visiting
| them. But that's not the wildness I wish we could have
| left alone - untouched, busy with its own devices, for
| its own sake.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| There probably hasn't been much "untouched" (by humans)
| wilderness anywhere since the Pleistocene. Basically all
| of North America was managed by fire and shaped into
| effectively a giant game park by indigenous peoples as
| the glaciers retreated. The Amazon basin was similarly
| intensively managed with burning, flood controls, and
| mound building. You'll find similar interventions in the
| land across the old world as well.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Yes, it has certainly been disappointing to learn, over
| the years, just how little there is left we could even
| attempt to preserve. Of course none of it matters anymore
| as it will all be damaged by climate change.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I think knowing that people have been actively managing
| whole landscapes and ecosystems for as long as people
| have existed should inspire hope. Climate Change isn't
| insurmountable and a lot of damage can be repaired. If we
| want more vibrant and ecologically diverse landscapes in
| the future, we have the ability to make that happen.
|
| Even without a well coordinated global effort emissions
| growth is slowing, and declining in many places. In the
| US emissions have been declining for 15 years, and that's
| almost entirely driven by market forces and technology.
| Even a modest coordinated effort will make a huge
| difference over the coming decades.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I think you put too much faith in the collective "we".
| Right now the charity/investments of billionaires is
| funding most of the climate action from what I can tell.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Energy markets are shifting away from coal and wind is
| becoming dirt cheap. Decarbonizing energy is probably the
| biggest near term win we could aim for.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Extinct species won't be back though.
| soraki_soladead wrote:
| True but new species will emerge. There have be numerous
| mass extinction events on Earth.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Some won't but there's no reason to believe we won't be
| able to revive some species. It's unfortunate, but some
| loss is unavoidable. All we can do is prioritize, protect
| what we can, and move forward.
| bckr wrote:
| There's this idea that we should be sad about this. I
| say, if you're sad about it, I understand. I feel a
| little sad, too.
|
| But I'm also curious about what comes next. What will
| only get a chance to live thanks to the things that have
| died? What will humans be able to do in the aftermath? It
| sounds morbid, but if you just let yourself play with
| these thoughts they can lead somewhere different and
| interesting.
|
| The future is not full of only despair[] .
|
| [] https://youtu.be/LxgMdjyw8uw
| snikeris wrote:
| Ultimately all species will perish due to the heat death
| of the sun unless we take them with us off this planet.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| There is a lot of side effect when needing to push tech limits so
| hard to achieve this. The tech that was invented likely will be
| used. And to lead the world is also a big statement to the world
| that USA is where cutting edge things is still happening
| baltimore wrote:
| Hot take / prove me wrong: Space telescopes, astrophysics, and
| other "big" science have not yielded and are not likely to yield
| NEARLY as much practical benefit for mankind as biology,
| medicine, nuclear physics, and other "small" science.
| bowsamic wrote:
| We don't do science for the secondary technology benefits, we
| do it because in our society we believe that the goal of
| learning about the universe is justified inherently
| BudaDude wrote:
| Agreed. OP is looking at the capitalist value instead of the
| value to humanity.
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| Who is this 'we' ?
|
| First we consume stuff, then after we have grown so tired of
| stuff that we can't even fanthom acquiring more stuff we can
| have a discourse about philosophy.
|
| Learning about the Universe really is philosophy after all.
|
| The only philosophers of that kind that produced an
| advancement in terms of stuff being consumed are the ones who
| did it all inside their heads and the only expense they
| needed was paper and pen (Einstein, Feynman, Bohn, Maxwell..)
|
| They are showing the way by minimizing costs and delivering
| huge practical benefits.
| gnulinux wrote:
| > The only philosophers of that kind that produced an
| advancement in terms of stuff being consumed are the ones
| who did it all inside their heads and the only expense they
| needed was paper and pen (Einstein, Feynman, Bohn,
| Maxwell..)
|
| This argument -- which is brought up in every sophomoric
| conversation about the nature of science -- is extremely
| poor and unjustified. Of course Einstein, Feynman, Bohn and
| Maxwell relied on observations. Their theories fit the data
| that was collected before them. If you ever want to give
| the next Einstein a chance to build an even more useful
| theory, you need to observe more data. Period. This is how
| science works, you observe the world, you build a model
| that predicts it, rinse and repeat. There is no such thing
| as "purely pen and paper" in science and it categorically
| can never be. The idea that Einstein came to relativity
| through pure reasoning is silly, his theory was formed to
| explain observations that cannot be predicted by other
| models. Of course it involved tons of pure reasoning and
| mathematics, but the basis was only empirical observations.
| bowsamic wrote:
| > The only philosophers of that kind that produced an
| advancement in terms of stuff being consumed are the ones
| who did it all inside their heads and the only expense they
| needed was paper and pen (Einstein, Feynman, Bohn[sic],
| Maxwell..)
|
| That is factually wrong upon a basic research. All their
| work was based on experiment
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| Extremely cheap experiments.
|
| How much did LIGO cost? Was it worth it in order to
| remove the 0.00001% chance that Einstein was wrong?
| mturmon wrote:
| I guess you could go through recent Nobel prizes (in physics)
| and see how many came from astrophysics/astronomy vs. Earth-
| bound physics? One recent astrophysics Nobel off the top of my
| head is the discovery of dark energy (whatever it may be) due
| to supernovae occurrences.
| scrumbledober wrote:
| dark energy doesn't seem to have much practical use yet
| Balgair wrote:
| I have a feeling that this may be one of the
| understatements of the millennium.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum... Space telescopes are one of those projects that have a
| very low probability of an extremely high benefit.
|
| It will acquire data pertinent to most of the open problems of
| physics.
| MAGZine wrote:
| There's not a lot of practical benefit to looking at the stars
| beyond trying to understand the universe we live in.
|
| However, many _many_ technologies have come out of the space
| race and other space related endeavors--you might be surprised.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
|
| And these are just concrete technologies. A lot of research
| done to reach the endpoint was, of course, used in many other
| areas of research. Even just manufacturing breakthroughs--
| taking something possible "in theory," and actually producing
| an instrument to do the thing involves a lot of research that
| bears fruit for basically anyone paying attention.
| outworlder wrote:
| > There's not a lot of practical benefit to looking at the
| stars beyond trying to understand the universe we live in.
|
| Of course there is! We are not just looking at pretty
| pictures. We are also refining our understanding of physics.
|
| Dark matter alone is a glaring indicator that we don't
| understand what's going on nearly as much as we should.
| Without any telescopes we wouldn't even know that our
| theories had a problem.
|
| Improved physics understanding has always led to
| technological leaps. Be it electromagnetism, photonics, or
| even just relativistic effects. And now, quantum computers.
| [deleted]
| bckr wrote:
| Big science inspires wonder and curiosity, which causes
| children and young adults to pursue STEM, which leads to more
| biologists, medical researchers, and nuclear physicists.
| justin66 wrote:
| > Space telescopes, astrophysics, and other "big" science have
| not yielded and are not likely to yield NEARLY as much
| practical benefit for mankind as biology, medicine, nuclear
| physics, and other "small" science.
|
| You're drawing a line between astrophysics and nuclear physics?
| elihu wrote:
| NIH does get a lot more funding than NASA, they just don't tend
| to be in the news as much. 41.6 billion vs 22.6 billion in
| 2020. (I'm actually surprised the difference isn't larger.)
|
| I do agree that the stuff that's immediately practical should
| be a priority. I'd be in favor of substantially expanding
| research to solve immediate problems facing humanity (e.g.
| cancer, climate change, pandemics, energy and food shortages)
| but I have no objection to our current funding of space
| exploration.
| theptip wrote:
| The ROI of NASA is extremely high:
|
| > For every dollar invested by the government the American
| economy and other countries economies have seen $7 to $14 in
| new revenue, all from spinoffs and licensing arrangements.
|
| https://www.21stcentech.com/money-spent-nasa-not-waste/ (more
| reading: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/hq/library/find/bibliogra
| phies/...)
|
| This suggests that we're under-investing in NASA, since the ROI
| of the marginal government dollar is surely nowhere near that
| high. Basically to first approximation, we should start at the
| bottom of "ROI per marginal dollar" in the federal budget and
| reallocate those dollars into NASA and other basic research. I
| suspect agricultural subsidies and military spending are two
| places where you will find extremely low ROI at the margins.
|
| (In other words I don't think we should be trading off between
| "big" vs. "small" science.)
| Imnimo wrote:
| This is a weird question, because they don't tell the
| participants how much it cost, and I imagine most people who
| don't actively follow space science news wouldn't know off the
| top of their head. It's like simultaneously asking people to
| estimate how much a space telescope might have cost, and then
| also whether they think that estimate would have been a good
| investment.
| aaa_aaa wrote:
| As long as not funded by voluntary donations, such an extremely
| over budget investment is waste with little to no actual gain for
| humanity.
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