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While I agree that "corporate America" is problematic, the lessons from Voyager are not really applicable. For starters, it was designed to take advantage of so
by II2II 2y ago
While I agree that "corporate America" is problematic, the lessons from Voyager are not really applicable. For starters, it was designed to take advantage of something that predictably happens every couple of hundred years. Very few corporations last that long. Then there is the element of predictability. The solar system pretty much works like clockwork. You can predict simple things, like the orbits of major bodies, centuries in advance with a great degree of accuracy.
Compare that to the tech industry. IBM itself can trace it's origins back to a data processing company about 140 years ago. They probably had the most natural evolution into a modern tech company because of those origins. Yet noone at the original mechanical tabulator company could have predicted what IBM would be producing 70 years later, nevermind a century later. Nintendo is roughly the same ago and is more-or-less doing the same sort of thing (gaming) but has gone from low-tech to high-tech so their path was not predictable. Yet those are abnormalities. Almost anything that old is an institution of some form (e.g. government or education). Perhaps the closest thing we had to predictable was Moore's Law, but that wasn't a pure law in the physics sense. It was reliable enough to build an industry upon for many decades, but it could have failed much earlier than it did due to hurdles in technological developments.
The other thing about Voyager is that its intrinsic value grew with time. While we could develop a mission that could go as far as it did faster, and have better instruments to conduct research, it would take decades to build the probe and get there. It also makes sense to support it to get what little data it can return to us because it would help us develop better missions when we do decide to go that route.
- goldfishgold 2y agoThere are plenty of 100 year old companies doing basically what they did 100 years ago (Exxon, Coke, Hershey, Wells Fargo, etc.). They’re just not tech companies.
- II2II 2y agoI was thinking about companies approaching 200 years old since I knew my point would be more difficult to make if I said 100 years (and because they had a launch window that comes up roughly once every 200 years, though I checked that out and it is 175 years). That said, you're right about my basically overlooking companies that weren't based in technology. Exxon is a cute example though. At one point, they owned Zilog.
- goldfishgold 2y agoFair enough. 100yr old companies are pretty easy to come up with, 200yr old companies are much harder.
- oniony 2y agoYou would pretty much have to turn to Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
- lgeorget 2y agoThe other day, I saw a sign on a building for a painting supply manufacturer "since 1748": https://www.tollens.com/la-marque/histoire https://www.tollens.com/la-marque/histoire. I found that quite amazing.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nine_k 2y agoI would say that IBM's business has changed less than Wells Fargo's. IBM still supplies number-crunching devices and services to large corporations and government agencies. The technicalities have changed, but the core business is the same. But running a bank under a gold standard is very different from running a bank under a fiat money and fractional reserve regime.
- Retric 2y agoWells Fargo is still doing financial services but banking has very different meaning today. Computer is no longer a job title after all. So sure those brands are 100 years old, but the underlying companies have been restructured several times with major mergers and spin-offs etc. ExxonMobil even did the baby bell thing of splitting off from a single entity only to merge again and again in the coming decades.
- throwaway2037 2y agoWow, your choices are interesting. * Exxon: Massive amounts of technology have been ingested by the oil majors in the last 50 years. It is basically a high tech business at this point. Also, if we only focus on the physical work, fracking didn't exist 50 years ago, and now it is a major part of the industry. Again: Huge changes. * Coke/Hershey: Think about how much automation exists in their manuf. Do any humans touch a "bottle" of Coca Cola before it is packaged? I doubt it in highly developed countries. * Wells Fargo: the same as Exxon. Commercial banking has a fraction the number of employees _in proportion to their assets under management (AUM)_ compared to 50 years ago. How/Why? Automation / computers!
- RandomThoughts3 2y agoTheir point wasn’t that innovation doesn’t exist. Obviously things change. Still, both Exonn, Coke and Wells Fargo are still fundamentally in the same business as they were before. That’s not the case of other companies. IBM became big selling punch-card tabulating system. Have you seen a punch card recently?
- gtech1 2y agoIbm was not in the punch card machine making business. It was in the data processing business, and still is.
- RandomThoughts3 2y ago> Ibm was not in the punch card machine making business. It was in the data processing business, and still is. IBM absolutely was in the punch card machine making business in that they were absolutely selling punch card machines and not data processing consulting. And no, they are not in the data processing business today. They are clearly a consulting company first with some software development bolted. They actually pivoted twice from a mostly hardware company to a mostly software one and once again to a mostly service based one.
- throwaway2037 2y ago> it was designed to take advantage of something that predictably happens every couple of hundred years. Can you explain this more? Does it mean something like a gravity assist based upon the location of planets when the launches were done?
- Vecr 2y agoYes, but the program was cut down some from the original design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program
- II2II 2y agoI was thinking about how we can predict the location of planets with a high degree of accuracy. They are pretty close to an ideal physical system and is governed by a single physical law. The dynamics are so well understood that we have been able to predict the existence of, and find, other planets based on small deviations. We have even been able to refine our understanding of the structure of planets, even of gravity itself, based upon small deviations. That said, it certainly includes our ability to use gravity assists when planning a mission.
- varjag 2y agoAlso numerous space probes did fail very early despite having design philosophy not very different from Voyagers.