> Given that, why do I still think that the flood of money being thrown at this tech is dumb, and that most of it will be lost? Partly just because of that flood. When financial decision makers throw loads of money at things they don’t understand, lots of it is always lost.
This is a common take, it feels like a not-cynical-actually-smart counter to the hype train.
I think that take is missing something -- that this is how capitalism pays for fast learning.
You have a space entirely unexploited, you give million pioneering fortune seekers shovels and ignite exploration across the whole unexplored surface area. Most will quickly discover they're unsuited to exploring, or picking at dirt with there's nothing to find here, some will find fools gold and labor over it until they realize it won't buy land, and a couple will strike oil instead of gold and build an entirely new economy generating unfathomable wealth.
On the whole, no money was "lost", even without mentioning overcoming costs of delay since this got the exploration done the fastest.
I'm not saying this is more efficient than centrally planned 5 year programs (though in practice it probably is), but it does seem more effective at learning a new thing fast ...
... and getting from “exploration to exploitation” the fastest.
> Since then, no progress on this front. Not even a repeat. This is not an accelerating rate.
Well, one could argue that since then a significant bunch of our top talents have been allocated to generating financial innovations like motgage backed securities and figuring our how to get more people clicking on ads. So if this talent was reallocated to space exploration (which again someone might argue that can't be less stupid way to allocate these resources than click industry) the speed of technological progtess might change dramatically.
Just makes one wonder if there is something fishy how the free market supposedly is the most efficient allocator of resources...
>That's like going back to the 17th century and decrying the exploration of the New World because you're not certain just how much gold there may be and you can't predict what the New World economy might look like.
No it isn't. Exploration of the new world offered obvious substantive benefits - the trees alone were priceless to a countries that had to manage forests very carefully, not to mention new and useful crops coupled with an abundance of land. In short, it was a no-brainer.
And it was extremely cheap compared to building space infrastructure, since food could be grown or purchased from the natives, there was air, sunburn was the only radiation problem.
In space we'll have none of that. There are unsettled regions on earth far more hospitable to human life than anything we'll find outside our gravity well. The idea we ought to sink trillions of dollars into and infrastructure to produce things that are already good enough is hard to justify.
> How long didn’t it take for ML to actually create meaningful results?
Very little time.
ML has been creating meaningful results since the 1960s.
> Just because a space is riddled with 80% grifters
It is a strong indication that nothing useful will come out from the remaining 20%, which is probably wishful thinkers.
But then again, hope is not proof, lines of code is not a product, hours spent tinkering is not quality, big ideas is not real world impact.
Right now, and for the past 10 years, this space has been a lot less useful than what came out from imagining FTL travel or colonizing Mars.
But costed nearly as much (actually, more: going to Mars costs around ~2.7 billions, while This year, more than $3.8B has been poured into startups in the Web3 space)
If I believed in conspiracies I would say that the criminal cartels of the World have found the perfect tool to wash their dirty money. It works much better than pumping art.
>Folks who suggest dealing with poverty before launching machines to space: the economy doesn't work like that, FYI. If a country acquires deep technical know-how on engineering, it means the country can use it to spin out new industries and export that utility. That is how a country makes money.
Technology doesn't work like that, either. A country can "acquire deep technical know-how on engineering" by doing earth-bound R&D and working on its infrastructure problems...
Not to mention that they're not learning much new -- they just repeat what other countries have done since decades, most of which their engineers already know (they already send satellites and make military rockets and such).
Let's not pretend space vs local infrastructure is not an opportunity cost.
> It’s blindingly obvious that spaceflight makes sense to invest in. The issue is that the level of investment is large and the time horizon before a return is long. Sometimes government takes that role.
Are you invested in spaceflight then? I don't see it being very obvious at all. Yes, some precious metals can be recovered in large quantities but they aren't intrinsically valuable. These materials are used in things like catalysts, batteries and chemical processes where we could also invest to remove the dependence on them.
> are these space programs really profitable for the billionaires in question?
They aren't. We have currently two billionaire hobby space programs. One is a pure hobby and doesn't do actual space yet (suborbital hops != orbit). The other one exists solely to open Mars for regular access and eventual colonization, in the process also opening up near-Earth space for general exploration and exploitation. If it succeeds, it'll create an unprecedented amount of lasting value for humanity in general.
Really, complaining about billionaire space is one of the dumbest part of the current zeitgeist.
> If we contemplate such an array around the Moon or on Mars, or in a world with in-space resource extraction and manufacturing, the economics shift.
The economics of anything on Mars or the Moon amounts to 'try to convince a government to throw tons of money at you.' A technology which only makes sense in that economic context is very limited.
> The amount of material resources in space are breathtaking. Asteroid mining has the potential of delivering multiples of the amount of elements we've mined for our entire history in single asteroids. That alone could sustain a space economy.
At immense, non-economical cost. This idea is great in sci fi but we have nothing close to the technology to pull it of cheaper than mining things on earth
>There also isn't our massive gravity well. If you have materials (see point 1) it is easier to build large installations.
Point 1 is still sci fi
> We should be able to build GIGANTIC underground habitats in the moon.
Immense cost for no benefit
> There was also the powers-of-ten energy use as we climb Kardashev levels. That only happens with space settlement.
... and significant advancements in energy generation / capture
> Space will come more easily with cybernetics.
More sci fi non existing tech
> In a hundred years humans may be very very very different.
Sci fi
> But ultimately your comment harkens to the lack of vision of humanity, mostly I view it as a sign of increased control by the leisure elite over the world. They control the money and politics, and all they want are status and enjoyment, and the rest of the world to support them.
Ok and your vision of what we need to be doing now seems to consist of liking science fiction and ignoring realistic constraints.
> The same thing that led people to spend months in sailing ships traveling around the world a few centuries ago
The only real equivalent I can think of was the Arctic/Antarctic exploration. However that was massively cheaper and the environment was much more hospitable and not particularly profitable (and they couldn't send drones etc.). Most prior ventures had very practical goals and motivations and were mostly seeking a direct profit even if it didn't always work out.
> have a reasonable expectation of profit
Mainly through government funding though. The only directly profit generating activity that exists is launching satellites which on itself wouldn't really justify all the investment.
> Overall, it seems to me that just assuring that we have resources for hundreds of thousands of years is a bit misleading or at least undisclosed strong optimism.
there's also apparently asteroid uranium resources, and with SpaceX making it progressively possible to have payload delivered with economies of scale such industry may start in space once it makes economic sense.
> We found ourselves on an over-capacity lifeboat but with an immense supplies cache. We've mistaken that supplies cache with the capacity to sustain ourselves indefinitely, a story which I suspect will end poorly.
Well put. This is why I get excited about SpaceX news. It, and other commercial space ventures, seem like the very beginnings of a formation of a plan to shuttle people to the other lifeboats we see around us. It doesn't actually solve the problem, but often it's easier to make better decisions the second time around...
> I'm quite aware that this is not orthodox economic thinking.
I wouldn't say it's entirely unorthodox economic thinking, just unorthodox practice. I would hazard most economists understand this, and likely agree to a greater or lesser degree, but sit somewhere around "believe it will self correct", "don't know how to change it" and "don't think it's a problem" on what to do about it depending on ideology.
> When a person says that we should be sending humans into space, they are implicitly claiming to know the ROI
When a person says we shouldn't send people to space, is that also an implicit claim they know the ROI to be insufficient? And insufficient against what measure?
> exploration with machines strictly dominates exploration
Postulation, iteration and testing, re-iteration, re-testing. These are principals of both the scientific method and sound engineering design. I do not disagree significant progress can be made by exploration with mechanical devices, or organic test-beds, but grandly architectured schemes tend to fail over a costly amount of both time and financial impact, critical failure, than multiple iterated and tested solutions.
> Okay, so Apple and Microsoft and Google probably could bankroll a modern Apollo program.
You're assuming the entire cost needs to be bankrolled by a single entity or company. No such assumption needs to be made.
> There is no such monetization story for the moon.
North America was less interesting to European monarchies of the 16th and 17th centuries than South America, because they didn't think they'd find any gold there. Never mind the millions of acres of fertile land, or the opportunity to build a platform that would allow millions of people to create new wealth with the right incentives. Confusing the concepts of wealth and money, they turned down the opportunity of acquiring wealth because it didn't look like money. I think you are making a similar mistake. It's not a personal criticism per se: just like it would have been perfectly normal to assume kings and queens were right not to be interested in North America at the time, it's perfectly normal to assume big corporations would be right not to be interested in the moon today.
>I appreciate the tech very much, but the visions of "Millions of people working in space"? I have no desire to be a part of that but I do wonder what they'll be working on?
Infrastructure, warehouses, and a rescue network mostly likely. Getting fuel reserves and supplies into particular places, making ranger stations, and maintaining all of that.
It's also not impossible that some mega rich people decide to fund private projects that only have a slim chance of making a profit. Most of them will fail, but they'll still need workers while it's ongoing, and that still means you're giving knowledge to humanity when those workers figure stuff out and train others.
>And "Living on Mars". No thanks, I'll pass on that too.
That's fine. It seems rough because it is (understatement of the year). But there's always going to be a subset of the population who just want to get out and explore and colonize. The risk is not for everyone, because yes, sometimes you go exploring and die for a stupid reason completely out of your control.
Besides, we really don't have any full-time Martian marketing agencies to influence everyone's perceptions of life on mars. So of course it seems terrible. :)
> All I see is something they said would cost $500m and due to government involvement it is now unbelievably expensive.
Again with the ignorance: I just showed that it's not the government involvement that drove cost. It was because it turned out to be much harder than anticipated.
> Maybe there is more to it than it just being hard.
In this particular case, no there really isn't as annoying as that might be to the anarcho-capitalist/neo-liberal anti-government crowd.
The thing about NASA is that they're open and that includes their successes and failures alike. Delays are commonplace in private industry as well, but failure in particular more often than not results in bankruptcy and thus you never hear about it.
Just ask a venture capitalist how many high-risk tech investments actually turned a profit and within the anticipated timeframe. You only hear about the unicorns that made it or the ones that crashed and burned so brightly it could be seen from orbit. The majority dies like a drowning child - quietly and unnoticed.
>Bill Gates did something very similar, and we were similarly skeptical then. I like to think that once you're the world's richest man, your priorities might shift in a way that's difficult to imagine from the midst of the rat race.
Indeed.
If I was independently wealthy and only had 1 million extra, I can immediately think of a ton of stuff I'd start doing with it that would not directly benefit me. If I had tens of billions that I did not need to survive I would absolutely do something like develop my own rocket. I wouldn't stop there either.
Mars 2020 has a 2.5 billion dollar price tag, if I had Bezos-money I would absolutely try and send a lander/rover pair to both Mars and the Moon except I wouldn't have a bunch of science equipment on it, I'd purely be going to record the best VIDEO and photos that I could on both purely to get people interested.
Even if I couldn't get a government to let me do a lander, simply sending orbiters that could capture 1080p video of the approach and several times around Mars and the Moon, and then taking days, weeks, months to transmit it all back, just throwing that up on YouTube would be worth the spend to me just to see it, and the amount of people that would likely inspire to be interested in things bigger than just them, bigger than politics of this or that country, bigger than Earth could be truly profound.
I'd open source the designs of the equipment too and creative commons the video for general use and allow entities to obtain commercial use on a sliding scale depending on their intended use. If a student wants it for something, give me 10$ and a producer credit, if some big studio wants it, still be very fair but obviously charge more.
> ...second habitable home for humanity [...] or exploration for its own sake. None of these are particularly compelling given the economics behind them.
So this is what economics has done to "going boldly"? No wonder it's called dismal science ;-)
But seriously, diversification of our real estate beyond a single small planet seems like a necessity given the scale of the potential losses in case (X) happens.
Exploration for its own sake seems like a perfectly valid reason too whether done for touristic or scientific purposes.
As for ROI on space exploration, I wouldn't say it's terrible. It's just that we're short lived creatures and we like our returns fast. Space exploration is a very long term investment with potentially huge returns in far future.
>>If we can get to the point where we have the technology to colonize Mars, which will hopefully happen this century, then I would imagine it probably won't be long after that until we manage to have permanent space habitats that harvest materials from asteroids.
We are already capable of that now. The issues are politics and economics and not science/engineering.
If I'm not wrong the USA spent like $1T on building a fighter plane, and something like double digits trillion dollars and ongoing on wars since the past 20 years alone.
You can mine asteroids for a part of that kind of budget already.
Going down gravity wells of planets makes no sense, space colonies are the way forward, and there is no shortage of resources in space for that.
> Could we get the same kinds of spin-off technologies if we reallocated NASA's budget to prioritize technology development over, say, planetary exploration?
Not really. The private sector is really good at technology development, i.e. take an idea and figure out how to mass produce it at low cost.
What you want government funding for is fundamental research. Which space is good at because of the constraints.
Normally if you can't fit your payload on the truck, you send a second truck. That costs another $100, so it's not worth it to you to spend ten million dollars to figure out how to make it work with one truck, even if you figuring out will save a hundred million other people a hundred dollars each.
With space, you can't just send another ten billion dollar rocket, so you do the ten million in research and actually solve the problem, and we get the piece of new technology that everybody can also use for other things.
"Necessity is the mother of invention." It's hot, it's cold, it's far away, adding a kilo costs nine kilos of rocket fuel, oxygen is scarce, gravity is different, etc. You need the constraints to force an invention instead of just suffering the status quo and covering for the inefficiency with brute force.
This is a common take, it feels like a not-cynical-actually-smart counter to the hype train.
I think that take is missing something -- that this is how capitalism pays for fast learning.
You have a space entirely unexploited, you give million pioneering fortune seekers shovels and ignite exploration across the whole unexplored surface area. Most will quickly discover they're unsuited to exploring, or picking at dirt with there's nothing to find here, some will find fools gold and labor over it until they realize it won't buy land, and a couple will strike oil instead of gold and build an entirely new economy generating unfathomable wealth.
On the whole, no money was "lost", even without mentioning overcoming costs of delay since this got the exploration done the fastest.
I'm not saying this is more efficient than centrally planned 5 year programs (though in practice it probably is), but it does seem more effective at learning a new thing fast ...
... and getting from “exploration to exploitation” the fastest.
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