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Comment by dquail | Hacker News Reader

Under that definition ... there's hardly anyone working on "real" problems. Even Nasa.

Let's take education and NASA: It's fairly obvious that bad education, on a mass scale, eventually, causes death and/or disability on a mass scale. It just takes time.

It takes more time for an existential crisis to emerge because we paid no attention to getting off this rock. But it will surely come.

NASA Earth-observing satellites address a range of very "real" problems affecting people's lives: hurricanes, severe weather, fire, earthquakes. In the longer term, climate change and the many variables that affect it.

Space travel can be viewed as a very abstract indirect approach to "real" problems, for a variety of reasons, depending on your views of NASA's role in technological advance and the future of our planet.

Just to be a devils advocate, perhaps it is important to let NASA know that you will be 5 minutes late for a meeting. No, the single instance may not present a life or death situation, but maybe at some point the cumulative effect of solving these first world type problems can have a trickle down effect on making the world a better place for everyone.

I saw this as someone that doesn't use uber, twitter, twist or any of the other referenced products.

Exactly. It's something to think about when looking at the world that is and the world that might be.

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