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Mars colonies don't come from the private sector, Elon and Jeff notwithstanding. The problem is that public science has been starved of funding for decades thro
by rhizome 7y ago
Mars colonies don't come from the private sector, Elon and Jeff notwithstanding. The problem is that public science has been starved of funding for decades through tax cuts.
If the author would take off his (it's always a he) blinkers of technocracy he might see that profitability is not the only measure of "why." Some things are not profitable, yet are still worth doing. Andrew Yang-lite doesn't account for this at all (see "blinkers" above), which is pretty much par for the course for the "Facebook is the be-all end-all" attitude.
To paraphrase JFK, we pay taxes for public benefit not because it is cheap, but because it is expensive.
- georgeburdell 7y ago>Mars colonies don't come from the private sector, Elon and Jeff notwithstanding Exploration has a long history of rich benefactors and private interests. Monarchs, Dutch East India Corporation, etc., are closer to Musk and Bezos than a modern democratic state >The problem is that public science has been starved of funding for decades through tax cuts. This graph suggests otherwise? In current dollar terms, R&D spending is double what it was in the 1970s. https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2019-06/DefNon.png https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2019-06/DefNon.png
- rhizome 7y agoI am skeptical of the success rate of rich benefactors for a technology with only a century of practice, vs. boats that have been used for thousands of years. >In current dollar terms, R&D spending is double what it was in the 1970s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NASA-Budget-Federal.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NAS... And there are more budgets to be involved than just these two.