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"yes we can!" built the atomic bomb.
by user731955373 10y ago
"yes we can!" built the atomic bomb.
- kendallpark 10y agoWhich is a remarkable scientific achievement, independent of its use.
- goatlover 10y agoRemarkable in the same way a future gray goo invention would be. And it was a military initiative, developed for military reasons.
- EGreg 10y agoSo was the internet. You never know if we will need that arsenal against asteroids.
- czep 10y agoAnd from whose rocket are you going to trust launching those nukes? I'm not interested in even being in the same Hemisphere as such a launch! And everyone knows lasers are the solution to errant asteroids. Perhaps attached to evil sharks :)
- nixos 10y agoWhich is _much_ (orders of magnitude) easier than curing Cancer
- iaw 10y agoArguable. We can only compare difficulty after the fact, if Einstein hadn't rolled along with relativity and 3 decade gap for research, the atomic bomb wouldn't have been possible. There may be a 'relativity' level discovery in biology/aging/cancer that will change the historic perspective. We can't know until after the fact.
- zbyte64 10y agoJust from a data volume perspective cancer and atomic bombs are magnitudes apart. Throw in the fact that cancer evolves and understanding those mutations requires unraveling millions of years of evolution and you've got a doozy.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- iaw 10y agoI strongly believe that our analytic capabilities (as a species) have grown by orders of magnitude since we built the bomb. My entire point was that the bomb wasn't a given in it's day (in spite of what the retrospective belief seems to be), just because something is out of our grasp now doesn't mean we won't reach it if we try.
- 1_2__3 10y agoReading your comments it really seems like smart and knowledgeable people are trying to make substantive arguments replies and you're answering with woo-woo. You should probably listen more. I've learned a lot from reading them.
- rayiner 10y agoThe difference between "yes we can!" re: the atomic bomb and Zuckerberg's post is that the former happened after the fundamental discoveries in physics that made the atomic bomb possible. By the time someone said "yes we can!" a theoretical analysis of how the bomb would work already existed. That fundamental advancement in biology hasn't happened yet. That's the difference between rational optimism and irrational and mindless optimism.
- iaw 10y agoRespectfully, I disagree. The fundamental discoveries necessary for the nuclear bomb weren't discover until after Leo Szilard [0] proposed the weapon. Given that none of us were alive between 1906 and 1945 it's hard to fully grasp how the scientific understanding evolved over those 39 years. Einstein's work paved the way for Leo Szilard's vision but that vision was in no way a given. If it weren't for WWII, and Einstein's support, Leo would not have been able to garner the $2 Billion (1940's money) in support that was necessary to build the bomb. Even then, there was a coin-toss level certainty that it would do anything. Similar to Einstein's work preceding the discovery of Fission and the Atomic bomb. We have a great deal of work in biology around aging, telomere's, transcription errors, and more that hasn't been leveraged by the medical industry for varying reasons. I'm not ready to be a naysayer on this topic, historically as a species we've had remarkable success in accomplishing things that were considered impossible before we did them. [0] http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Med/Discfiss.html http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Med/Discfiss.html
- johansch 10y agoMark ("and Priscilla") are pledging $3B. The Manhattan project cost was "about $26 billion in 2016 dollars" according to the Wikipedia article. They are short $23B.
- pmoriarty 10y ago"They are short $23B." That's where this part comes in: "The more people believe we can cure all disease in our children's lifetimes, the more likely the government is to invest in it"
- johansch 10y agoThey (Government-sponsored scientists) were already working on all of these things.
- agumonkey 10y agoThat a quarter bill.
- prewett 10y ago"Build an atomic bomb" is a lot more specific than "cure all diseases." In fact, "cure all diseases" is kind of the opposite of a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-based). Whereas, to goal to build a device capable of detonating via nuclear fission is pretty specific, particularly to a physicist. Also very measurable and highly time-based. Not even the Gates foundation is trying to cure all diseases, and Bill Gates is smart and gets stuff done. This sounds like feel-good charity to me, but we'll see what the results are in 100 years, I guess.
- scrollaway 10y agoI agree with you, but I'd like to point out that it's easy to say "x is very specific" if you know exactly what x is after-the-fact.
- prewett 10y agoTrue, and a good point to make. My understanding of the difficulty of the atomic bomb was that everyone knew what to do (smash enriched uranium together such that was more than a certain mass), but they had a lot of difficulty getting the spherical detonation right. So the problem wasn't unknown from the physics side, but was rather an engineering problem. Compare to "cure all diseases," which we don't even know how to do theoretically.
- johncolanduoni 10y agoHow did we miss this universal cure sitting right under our nose!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- cmdrfred 10y agoDo you have a E=MC2 sort of revelation in regards to cancer?
- bsder 10y agoOnly by turning almost 10% OF AN ENTIRE COUNTRY into doing nothing but producing an atomic bomb. That's not 2 billion dollars, that's 2 TRILLION dollars. So, basically, redirecting the US military budget. I approve.
- rory096 10y agoSource? Estimates I see for the Manhattan Project from a quick google range from .25% to .41% of GDP. [0] https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf [1] http://mitchellhowe.blogspot.com/2006/02/want-manhattan-project-take-number.html http://mitchellhowe.blogspot.com/2006/02/want-manhattan-proj... [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.09054.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.09054.pdf
- akiselev 10y agoHe's likely thinking of the urban myth that over 10% of the US's power generation was used for the Manhattan Project [1] and confusing it with the cost of the project, for which estimates vary but is around $2 billion total (1945 GDP was $2 trillion). [1] http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR11/Session/H13.4 http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR11/Session/H13.4
- bsder 10y agoI'm also referring to the fact that estimates put in that almost 1 in 11 people in the US were involved in some facet of atomic bomb development. The point being that atomic bomb development required a gigantic commitment.
- robotresearcher 10y ago> That's not 2 billion dollars The Manhattan project cost about $2B in 1940s money; equivalent to around $26B today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
- onion2k 10y ago"Yes we can!" built everything, whether it's good or bad, large or small.
- smsm42 10y agoBlowing stuff up is usually easier than fixing stuff. Do we have cold fusion yet (not Macromedia :)? Do we have fusion reactors yet? In fact, we seem to be slowly losing ability to have any use of nuclear energy except blowing stuff up - it's next to impossible to get a new nuclear plant built, and old ones are being closed down. By the same 2100 we may have the atomic bomb as the only way to use nuclear energy we have. And still no fusion.
- M_Grey 10y agoI think he might be an HN user... http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/manhattan_project.png http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/manhattan_project.png