3 ms·

We've already had that experiment - it was called "the 60s" - obscene amounts of money (basically a blank check) was given scientist to reach the sky and we wen

by seer 10y ago

We've already had that experiment - it was called "the 60s" - obscene amounts of money (basically a blank check) was given scientist to reach the sky and we went from barely touching the atmosphere to sending humans to the moon, sending robots everywhere else, inventing robots for that matter. And from the investments from that era came the american semiconductor breackthroughs aka - Silicon Valley. So yeah we've seen it happen, it's amazing and I hope I could witness such a magical period in my lifetime. Sigh...

bluGill 10y ago
I have seen people argue that we wasted a lot of money on the space effort, and if we had not allocated so many resources there we could have had smart phones 10 years sooner. Of course you can never know, but it is something to consider. Those semiconductor breakthroughs probably would have happened sooner - the moon mission was happy with vacuum tubes on the ground and the transistors of the day: their big problems of engineering were not in the electronics area. Or to put it a different way, if we put similar effort into genetic engineering we could have fire breathing dragons instead. Nobody has been to the moon in my lifetime (and I'm getting old!), and I have no hope of going (though probably someone will go in the next 10 years it won't be me). At least the circus could show me a dragon.
- mahyarm 10y ago
  But without the space race, would those smartphones have GPS? Without GPS, how practical would self driving cars be? Would the lack of GPS push self driving cars out another decade?
  - dmix 10y ago
    In the hypothetical scenario where we didn't have a "space race" with Russia doesn't mean humans would not have figured out how to send a few satellites to space. Or learned how to triangulate signals to make GPS work. The OP said "lots of money was wasted". Sending rockets into space was very valuable. I don't think anyone questions that. But that was hardly the only part of the space race.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  "the moon mission was happy with vacuum tubes on the ground and the transistors of the day" That is not actually the case. The Apollo Guidance Computer was one of the first (possibly the first) computers to use integrated circuits (RTL). One of my professors in undergrad worked on it. They built the whole thing out of NOR gates, figuring that it would be better to have one component and test the crap out of it than have several different components. It's possible to think up arguments either way, but in any case, it worked. :-) Of course, as long as you have either NAND or NOR (or either AND or OR and an inverter), it's possible to build any Boolean logic function.

by seer 10y ago

bluGill 10y ago

I have seen people argue that we wasted a lot of money on the space effort, and if we had not allocated so many resources there we could have had smart phones 10 years sooner. Of course you can never know, but it is something to consider. Those semiconductor breakthroughs probably would have happened sooner - the moon mission was happy with vacuum tubes on the ground and the transistors of the day: their big problems of engineering were not in the electronics area. Or to put it a different way, if we put similar effort into genetic engineering we could have fire breathing dragons instead. Nobody has been to the moon in my lifetime (and I'm getting old!), and I have no hope of going (though probably someone will go in the next 10 years it won't be me). At least the circus could show me a dragon.

mahyarm 10y ago
But without the space race, would those smartphones have GPS? Without GPS, how practical would self driving cars be? Would the lack of GPS push self driving cars out another decade?
- dmix 10y ago
  In the hypothetical scenario where we didn't have a "space race" with Russia doesn't mean humans would not have figured out how to send a few satellites to space. Or learned how to triangulate signals to make GPS work. The OP said "lots of money was wasted". Sending rockets into space was very valuable. I don't think anyone questions that. But that was hardly the only part of the space race.
Turing_Machine 10y ago
"the moon mission was happy with vacuum tubes on the ground and the transistors of the day" That is not actually the case. The Apollo Guidance Computer was one of the first (possibly the first) computers to use integrated circuits (RTL). One of my professors in undergrad worked on it. They built the whole thing out of NOR gates, figuring that it would be better to have one component and test the crap out of it than have several different components. It's possible to think up arguments either way, but in any case, it worked. :-) Of course, as long as you have either NAND or NOR (or either AND or OR and an inverter), it's possible to build any Boolean logic function.