That phrasing wasn't meant to be taken literally. It's an American expression. "The best humanity has to offer" just means that people put in a good faith effo

That phrasing wasn't meant to be taken literally. It's an American expression. "The best humanity has to offer" just means that people put in a good faith effort to obtain the best that they were capable of obtaining given the resources they had. It's a fuzzy concept because there aren't necessarily objective measures of good, but I think we can agree that, for example, Boeing isn't creating the best products humanity has to offer at the moment, because they have a recent history of obvious problems being ignored. > How do you know the best is a very different thing from a "high risk" scenario? Going to space is inherently a high risk scenario. As for whether what you have is the best you can have: you hire subject experts and listen to them. In the case of Challenger, the subject experts said that the launch should be delayed for warmer temperatures--the best humanity had to offer in that case was delaying the launch for warmer temperatures.