3 ms·
You're joking, right? 2020 is a year where SpaceX flew humans to space for the first time ever on a commercial vehicle, we created and started to distribute a
by cal5k 6y ago
You're joking, right?
2020 is a year where SpaceX flew humans to space for the first time ever on a commercial vehicle, we created and started to distribute a vaccine for a never-before-seen virus in under a year, and we began to hook rural people who've never had access to high-quality internet up via a constellation of thousands of micro-satellites in LEO.
Sure, not everything is rosy, but we're still capable of some impressive feats of engineering.
Oh, and AlphaFold made an incredible leap in protein folding prediction. Like, a true "paradigm shift" in one of the most historically intractable problems in biology.
- zx14 6y agoIf you want to assign countries to companies or divisions of companies, I think Deepmimd is (still) more representative of British ingenuity.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago> I think Deepmimd is (still) more representative of British ingenuity. It’s kind of like the strategy in World War II: combine British ingenuity (DeepMind) with America. resources(Google).
- sho_hn 6y agoTechnology-wise, the vaccine you mean was developed in Germany by a German company. Pfizer is the manufacturing partner and did logistics for clinical trials (except in China, where Fosun licensed it). $445 million in funding came as a grant from the German government, the rest from licensors. The German government has split another ~300 million or so on two other companies also working on vaccines. The US government did not contribute any funding to Pfizer's license. I'd rather say it's a cool example of international collab and winning together than an American exceptionalism narrative ...