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This won't be popular opinion, and this is coming from someone obsessed with science, and space. The billions being spent by Silicon Valley elites, should be fo

This won't be popular opinion, and this is coming from someone obsessed with science, and space. The billions being spent by Silicon Valley elites, should be focused on things like eradicating cancer, disease, and cleaning up our only home before dumping money into yet another rocket company.

ameister14 8y ago
Yeah, I don't agree with that - last year 165 billion dollars was spent on pharmaceutical development, and tens of billions on oncology research. There are tens of thousands of people working on this. Everyone can help clean the Earth and eradicate cancer and disease. That doesn't mean the world needs to stop all other activities.
JTbane 8y ago
Cancer research often gets the spotlight due to the emotional nature of death and disease, but that doesn't make space research less useful to humanity as a whole.
- overcast 8y ago
  I never said it was less useful, but we need to focus on protecting this planet first. There won't be one left by the time we even have the capacity to get to others.
  - jcadam 8y ago
    I'd like to think we've built a civilization that's able to pursue more than one goal at a time, but maybe I'm an optimist.
    - overcast 8y ago
      Clearly we can't handle it.
      - fapjacks 8y ago
        Life will go much smoother and make a lot more sense if you stop thinking of groups of people as individuals with individual memories, skillsets, capabilities, and experiences. "We" are capable of anything you've read about in the news or in a history book, from putting precision machines on other planets to unlocking our genome to changing the temperature of our planet to systematically eradicating entire ethnicities. Every individual is capable of handling those things, which means that so are "we".
jcadam 8y ago
I don't know why space exploration is such a target for comments like this, given the amount of money poured into vapid social media companies over the last decade or so.
- overcast 8y ago
  I agree most VC money has been misappropriated in the interest of purely making more money.
  - refurb 8y ago
    Huh? That's the purpose of venture capital...to make money. How is it "misappropriated"? I'd say it used exactly as intended.
    - dasil003 8y ago
      Perhaps a poor choice of words, but I think the GP means the super rich have a moral duty they are shirking. One of the arguments against progressive taxation is that government spending is ineffectual, but if the super rich don't take up philanthropic spending in a serious way then that argument is undermined.
      - ameister14 8y ago
        But since we have progressive taxation, does the moral duty still exist? Personally, I don't think it's just the super rich that have a moral imperative to give to philanthropic causes; it's everyone, though the amounts increase as your income does, much like progressive taxation.
        dasil003 8y ago
        It's a sliding scale. Certainly we have much less progressive taxation than we had through most of the 20th century. The difference seems to be in the industrial era we actually had political will to do something about it. Now, Republicans have mastered the sleight of hand to harness anti-intellectual sentiment to pit the bourgeoisie against "the common man" even though it's the 0.1% capitalists that're really running away with all the gains. This is not going to end well, and the super rich should be trying to get ahead of the problem before the pitchforks show up.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Oh cool, let have this discussion all over again! It's been, what, 24 hours?
dang 8y ago
Please keep generic flamebait well away from HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17625830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17625830 and marked it off-topic.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

ameister14 8y ago

Yeah, I don't agree with that - last year 165 billion dollars was spent on pharmaceutical development, and tens of billions on oncology research. There are tens of thousands of people working on this. Everyone can help clean the Earth and eradicate cancer and disease. That doesn't mean the world needs to stop all other activities.

JTbane 8y ago

Cancer research often gets the spotlight due to the emotional nature of death and disease, but that doesn't make space research less useful to humanity as a whole.

overcast 8y ago
I never said it was less useful, but we need to focus on protecting this planet first. There won't be one left by the time we even have the capacity to get to others.
- jcadam 8y ago
  I'd like to think we've built a civilization that's able to pursue more than one goal at a time, but maybe I'm an optimist.
  - overcast 8y ago
    Clearly we can't handle it.
    - fapjacks 8y ago
      Life will go much smoother and make a lot more sense if you stop thinking of groups of people as individuals with individual memories, skillsets, capabilities, and experiences. "We" are capable of anything you've read about in the news or in a history book, from putting precision machines on other planets to unlocking our genome to changing the temperature of our planet to systematically eradicating entire ethnicities. Every individual is capable of handling those things, which means that so are "we".

jcadam 8y ago

I don't know why space exploration is such a target for comments like this, given the amount of money poured into vapid social media companies over the last decade or so.

overcast 8y ago
I agree most VC money has been misappropriated in the interest of purely making more money.
- refurb 8y ago
  Huh? That's the purpose of venture capital...to make money. How is it "misappropriated"? I'd say it used exactly as intended.
  - dasil003 8y ago
    Perhaps a poor choice of words, but I think the GP means the super rich have a moral duty they are shirking. One of the arguments against progressive taxation is that government spending is ineffectual, but if the super rich don't take up philanthropic spending in a serious way then that argument is undermined.
    - ameister14 8y ago
      But since we have progressive taxation, does the moral duty still exist? Personally, I don't think it's just the super rich that have a moral imperative to give to philanthropic causes; it's everyone, though the amounts increase as your income does, much like progressive taxation.
      - dasil003 8y ago
        It's a sliding scale. Certainly we have much less progressive taxation than we had through most of the 20th century. The difference seems to be in the industrial era we actually had political will to do something about it. Now, Republicans have mastered the sleight of hand to harness anti-intellectual sentiment to pit the bourgeoisie against "the common man" even though it's the 0.1% capitalists that're really running away with all the gains. This is not going to end well, and the super rich should be trying to get ahead of the problem before the pitchforks show up.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago

Oh cool, let have this discussion all over again! It's been, what, 24 hours?

dang 8y ago

Please keep generic flamebait well away from HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17625830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17625830 and marked it off-topic.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]