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Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

> A human being landing on Mars would probably be the single most watched event in human history.

I'm actually skeptical about that. It certainly would be the "single most watched event in human history" among geeks interested in space, and probably among geeks in general and nationalists of the country that did the landing, but I suspect it's a biased projection to extend that attitude to all of humanity. Objectively, it's likely that stuff like the opening days of some war or the 9/11 attacks would be more watched than a Mars landing.

Apropos: Gil Scott-Heron - Whitey On the Moon (Official Audio): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4

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The first human moon landing is among the top 5 most watched television events, topped mostly by sports events (and possibly the rescue of the rescue of Chilean miners).

Of course "most watched event" is more complicated, but I'd still bet on the moon landing, soccer and the Olympic opening ceremonies making up the top, rather than war or terror attacks.

> Of course "most watched event" is more complicated, but I'd still bet on the moon landing, soccer and the Olympic opening ceremonies making up the top, rather than war or terror attacks.

IMHO, that makes my point much stronger. If sports got higher ratings than the Moon landing, it's a clear indication we're in a bubble that inflates the importance of and interest in space exploration.

Might be making a mistake there, it sounds like you are dismissing sports as unimportant, instead it might be impressive that something so abstract and distant was able to rival something so elemental and popular.

> Might be making a mistake there, it sounds like you are dismissing sports as unimportant, instead it might be impressive that something so abstract and distant was able to rival something so elemental and popular.

My only point is I think geeks over-estimate the popularity of space exploration, incorrectly generalizing "it excites me/my type" to "it excites everyone/humanity." If regularly-held sporting events eclipse singular events in space exploration, it deflates high-flying rhetoric that expects the latter to be "the single most watched event in human history."

I make no comment on the importance of sports. But I'd argue that professional sports are probably more abstract (ultimately counting according to some arbitrary rules) and (practically, in a human sense) about as distant as space exploration.

The global population in 1969 was about 3.5 billion people, and I imagine global TV adoption was much lower at the time as well. Even if 60% of people alive at the time watched the moon landing, a sports event today would only need to be watched by ~30% of the global population to eclipse it.

I agree that a televised Mars landing would be the most watched televised event in history.

Or maybe it has gotten easier to watch things than it was in 1969?

So you get incredible Nielsen ratings for an hour or two, then what?

And if the Apollo “success” is any guide, it actually hampers further progress because the milestone was overhyped with no sustainable plan.

I think it would be comparable to the first moon landing. Even if it wasn’t as big, the population and access to video has drastically increased. It doesn’t seem crazy to me that a few billion people would watch it live/within 24 hours.

> I think it would be comparable to the first moon landing. Even if it wasn’t as big, the population and access to video has drastically increased.

Though that introduces the problem that you're not really measuring what you're talking about, sort of like how lists of the "highest-grossing films of all time," are mostly about inflation and not popularity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films:

> As the motion picture industry is highly oriented towards marketing currently released films, unadjusted figures are always used in marketing campaigns so that new blockbuster films can much more easily achieve a high sales ranking, and thus be promoted as a "top film of all time",[24][31] so there is little incentive to switch to a more robust analysis from a marketing or even newsworthy point of view.[30]

The first landing would be the most watched event.

The sixth landing wouldn't pull anyone away from this week's Monday-Night-Handegg game. The sixtieth would be fighting for ratings with Charlie's Angels.

I’d question even the interest among geeks. Recall the observation that the rationalist or new-atheist community of the early millennium declined just as social-justice rhetoric rose: people were shifting their interest en masse from one thing to another. I think geeky Westerners are so focused right now on social and political battle within Earth society that space exploration would draw no more than a "that’s neat" response before the discussion in their bubbles went right back to the usual.

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