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Comment by NKosmatos | Hacker News Reader

We, as a species, need the Deep Space Network(DSN) in order to keep communicating with everything man made that’s out there exploring our neighborhood.

This should be a global effort and I’ve read many articles about the lack of funding for the DSN. It’s getting more and more difficult to “juggle” and do proper time sharing in order to keep communicating with all the existing (and coming) spacecraft.

More resources and funding should be put together, by all space agencies (NASA, ESA, JAXA, ISRO…) so as to continue having means of communicating with all these space probes.

https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

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If the global free market doesn't want to spend capital in space stuff, then space is probably not worth it. Capitalism is an effective filter for economics and resource allocation. Soviet Union styled failed management occurs otherwise.

>Capitalism is an effective filter for economics and resource allocation

It really isn't a good filter for anything except "makes money quickly". Plenty of science returns zero economic benefits for years, even decades, but that doesn't mean it's useless.

> It really isn't a good filter for anything except "makes money quickly".

How do you figure? We stand in a nation built on giant economic long shots and in the only one that managed to put humans on the moon in a joint government commercial venture.

I'm using an open source product to write this to you. Running on an open source operating system. Also on an open source hardware device. Where's the "quick money" in any of this?

> but that doesn't mean it's useless.

It doesn't mean it's useful either. You can't use a simple "expectation factor" divorced from all other reality to decide how to spend tax money.

Our motivation for putting humans on the moon was an international dick-measuring contest. While the space race certainly created jobs and advanced science and technology, none of that was the primary reason we went up there.

>Where's the "quick money" in any of this?

Where's the capitalism in open source? Yes, yes, Red Hat, Microsoft etc all have their hands in it, but the very idea is anticapitalist.

>You can't use a simple "expectation factor" divorced from all other reality to decide how to spend tax money.

It's a bit more complicated than that, but plenty of countries outside the US spend money on things without tangible economic benefit.

The maximization of American dollars in a bank is a polite, democratic proxy for the violence of neo-colonialism. So any good investment scheme should ignore common metrics of science potential, as a lot of evidence is required to measure and determine what is a good science program to embark on. In contrast to analytical models and proposed theories that are more rational than they are empirical; rationalism is a sneaky way for neo-Marxism to taint the natural administration of science, technology, and capital. Hard evidence and reproducible centuries-long experiments are protective guardians of sensible science.

America wins for a reason in geopolitical history and it's because it has a secret military on top of its apparent military. Air forces and scientists are just fungible tokens for a surreptitious right wing shadow government that competes with ankle biting bugs like neo-Marxists. But it can all be reduced to undignified gang banging like Crips and Bloods, because space colonization isn't as noble as the romantic fictions have showed it to be. Maybe the correct inference from knowledge of history is that humanity isn't the end goal to chase after?

Money has to come somewhere. Hence market is a way. Competition is also needed so you produce better and better.

There is no capitalism as such it is a communism or. We have mix system always. War, love, gov, politics, … even old communist found relative autonomy and over determination (and once on that no point to say ultimate we believe communism or capitalism will determine as things keep on going, end never comes).

Btw totalitarianism is the worry. Once you are in especially media (india starting china and Russia telling) good luck. That is the worry. Not politics, market, war, … alone.

Multi dimensional life and sometimes believe me one guy can do a lot. Rip, steve.

I love how it's automatically "the Soviet Union" any time someone suggests that we might go against what the free market wants.

As an aside, the "free market" doesn't actually exist, something people with even a basic financial and civics education should trivially realize.

I hope you realize that this is essentially an argument for anarchy, as you may substitute for "space stuff" any of the many worthwhile things that free markets don't adequately incentivize, which is to say everything a government does. So-called "free markets" are not even self-hosting, as without the quite substantial socialist investment that a government represents, the entire system would rapidly collapse into warlord feudalism.

As long as the chaos of anarchy is instrumental in culling unfit individuals, ideas, and regimes, a man can reasonably sponsor the logical conclusion of free market capitalism. Maximum efficiency is the goal. Test-driven development is a better evaluator for what values a high time preference society should have. Economics proxies is the future of warfare and violence, as America loses its neo-colonial foothold in the Middle East named Israel and admirably demonstrates how not to dominate the world. Playing a form of high level chess requires patience and a divergence from mainstream education.

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