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Post author here. I realise I wasn't explicit about the metaphors I was trying to draw. Mars problems have grand scale but we can see them from the beginning.
by genmon 6y ago
Post author here. I realise I wasn't explicit about the metaphors I was trying to draw.
Mars problems have grand scale but we can see them from the beginning. Google building the original web search index was a Mars problem: massive (at the time) but tractable. Robot cars probably similar: it's an engineering and world mapping problem, and it's tough but we can get there.
Venus problems are knotty, hard to decompose, and characterised by discovering new problems as we go along. UBI is a Venus problem. Vaccines/CRISPR/biology are all Venus problems. Physics is a Venus problem -- notably at the time of the ultraviolet catastrophe which upended everything in the early 20C.
My take is that technology has mainly dealt with Mars problems till now, but now we're facing Venus problems.
- kavi87 6y agoI don't think we have dealt with Mars problems at all, the road is still very long for any manned mission and I'm pretty sure the Moon will get its own base long before we even consider the possibility to explore Mars with humans. The base on the Moon being by itself a problem that we have not dealt at all. I mean we started space exploration like yesterday and each new problem seems to go on a logarithmic scale, they are hundred of times harder each time.
- phillipcarter 6y agoNaturally, nearly all the comments here are about space exploration and not what this article was actually about. I liked the comparison.
- rishav_sharan 6y agoI don't follow. Venus is a tractable problem as well. All we need to do is drop a blimp obseravatory on Venus. Its probably even cheaper to do it for Venus than it is to do the same for Mars. The reason why Mars feels more like a "tractable" problem is simply that we have chased it for decades. Noone gave Venus the attention and funding it could have used to become a tractable problem.
- dredmorbius 6y agoIt's not quite "title fever", but the point was buried too far in the essay and obscured by the title. HN frequently fails to read, and clearly has here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20title%20fever&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Interesting point, worth developing, but a less distracting label and clearer framing, with multiple strongly contrasting examples from different domains might help.