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Comment by throwaway999666 | Hacker News Reader

> Anyway: USA! USA! (I kid!) Go humanity!

Well it was a grand old dick-waving contest in the 60s. Why not now as well.

But think of how it drove progress!

Seriously, would we have expended even a tenth of as much energy into building the rocket technology to go to space, without the nationalistic prestige race in the 60s? Or the idea that we could use them to lob nuclear holocaust at each other if shit hit the fan?

I'll take Nationalism + Badass space exploration over Kim Kardashian + Autotune any day of the millennium.

I just wish we'd have dropped a US flag onto Pluto. Nothing like envy to make someone else achieve something great!

> I'll take Nationalism + Badass space exploration over Kim Kardashian + Autotune any day

Kim doesn't have a long track record of leading to war and genocide. Nor do autotune and badass space exploration (yet).

Maybe humanity needs to live under a threat of annihilation in order to get its collective shit together? It's a thought that comes to my mind every time I open a news site.

Not visiting websites that you don't like has the effect of making you less cynical IME.

Dropping a US flag onto Pluto, at 14 Km/s, would have had the effect of a small nuke. :)

What about, dropping Christopher Walken onto Pluto?

it wasn't the dick waving bits that drove progress. it actually postponed it in many areas... that apollo program was damned expensive relative to the technology that came out of it. a gigantic vanity project.

that whole man on the moon business is really quite dumb (although impressive) compared to the robotic probes we use today, which are what the soviet union was pioneering at the time... all that dick waving stopped them from doing it sooner.

Probes are good for exploration, but colonies are useful too, and it's a shame that we stopped putting in nearly any effort along those lines.

but the problem was that we reversed the order. We should have gone to moon in the late 80s rather than build the shuttle, after having built a ton robotic probes and having much better automation. Imagine where we would be if we'd had a sustained 10-50 Billion /year increase in AI and robotics over the past 50 years. But because we pushed manned systems first, we both became disillusioned at the cost/benefit ratio and made that ratio worse by becoming very concerned about human life risk. And thus we lost momentum - budgetary, career-wise in engineering, public sentiment, political support ... On the other hand - I am a big supporter of the Goldin era "Faster, Better, Cheaper" approach. We got more done even with a 50% failure rate, and at half the cost - just by flat out doing more.

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