Hacker News Reader

Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

The problem with dates like that is they are pure best wishes. They might have funding for a demo in 2024 – although it isn't even clear they've got that yet, it sounds like they may just have funding to develop their proposal further. Even assuming the tech demo is successful, it sounds like they don't even yet have a detailed costed proposal for a 2034 launch, and no idea how likely that it will actually get funded.

Politicians and bureaucrats want immediate results, so a "launch now and see results in 30 years" mission – by which time many of the senior decision-makers will likely be dead – is going to be less attractive than competing missions offering results much sooner.

If you go back through the history of space exploration, it is full of proposals that "by year X we will be doing Y!" which never came to pass, because the money never turned up.

View on HN

> Politicians and bureaucrats want immediate results

This makes me sad. The entire point of Government is to be an enterprise spanning multiple generations.

The downside of electoral democracy, is if you are only going to be be in power for 5-10 years max, why care about the state of the country in 30 years time, except out of the goodness of your heart? And electoral politics often does a rather poor job of selecting leaders with goodness in their hearts.

Of course, non-democratic systems have their own, equally serious downsides. Consider China: a system which is arguably much better at making long-term investments in public infrastructure than most democratic countries are (witness China's high-speed rail system), but also a system which ruthlessly suppresses dissent and locks up over a million of its citizens in "re-education camps"

Even without politicians, the effective limit to most enormous projects is a human life span. Even if you look at projects that spanned 100-200 years like some cathedrals, they tended to be built in chunks: the main hall might be the first and largest, but things like trancepts, side chapels etc. would come later

In a hereditary absolute monarchy, the son (or more rarely daughter) may feel motivated to continue to the projects of his father (or more rarely mother), out of a sense of filial duty. In principle, it seems like hereditary absolute monarchy may avoid the problem you describe.

In practice, hereditary absolute monarchy suffers from the problem of the dud heir: Marcus Aurelius is remembered as one of the greatest Roman Emperors, his son and successor Commodus is remembered as one of the worst.

>This makes me sad. The entire point of Government is to be an enterprise spanning multiple generations.

Not in a democracy. The point of a government in a democracy is to serve the current will of the people. The government itself might last many generations, but its goals and motivations change with every election cycle.

The point of democracy is to create AI powered propaganda to tell the people how to vote and make the rich even richer?

rich people are not a problem; if anything, they are more likely to finance this kind of project

The esoteric among them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com