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> Operating on solar energy alone, Rosetta was placed into a deep space slumber in June 2011 as it cruised out to a distance of nearly 800 million km from the w

• hartator 13y ago
  Or maybe it's just a big waste of talents and money and we don't see it yet. We can believe people like Elon Musk will be the ones guiding humanity towards space conquest, not state programs.
  • nitrogen 13y ago
    We can believe people like Elon Musk will be the ones guiding humanity towards space conquest, not state programs. We need both. The deep space research that's only possible with $1e9-$1e10 budgets has to precede scaling up and commercialization. Furthermore, there's little commercial incentive, even for people like Elon Musk, to invest in basic science research like Hubble, JWST, the LHC, etc.
  • mogrim 13y ago
    You can believe that if you like, but I'm sure he'd be the first to admit that his success is only possible thanks to the advances made in the Space Race, which was of course state funded.
    • icebraining 13y ago
      Playing Devil's advocate, the state just got there first; we can make suppositions, but it's now impossible to know if non-governmental entities could make such advances, since they're already made.
      • mogrim 13y ago
        Of course, although I find it hard to imagine a modern corporation funding something like the Apollo landings.
• 27182818284 13y ago
  >Make you wonder if our industry's mind share being wasted on web apps and consumer gadgets because of the profit There is an expression I've heard jokingly about that, something like, "The brightest minds of our generation are working on click-fraud prevention."
  • chaz 13y ago
    Attributed to early FB employee Jeff Hammerbacher: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b4225060960537.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...
    • grey-area 13y ago
      I believe he was paraphrasing Ginsburg, though businessweek may have mangled it somewhat, here's the original: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by adwords, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the back-linked sites at dawn looking for an angry fix, Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...
  • kaybe 13y ago
    And yet, a theory states that humans have evolved to this state of intelligence exactly due to this kind of social game, to deceive and to detect deception. Thus, Space travel might merely be a byproduct of click-fraud prevention.
    • quantumpotato_ 13y ago
      Expound? Are you saying human intelligence grew from our deception?
      • TeMPOraL 13y ago
        There are some ev-psych theories that our intelligence developed because back in ancestral times, in small groups, being good at internal politics meant better chance for reproduction and/or not dying too fast.
• Ixiaus 13y ago
  Saying that our industry's mind share is being wasted on web apps is myopic. That statement is ignoring the numerous and iterative improvements to society through products and systems created to solve business and personal and social problems or inefficiencies. Not to mention the legitimately innovative technology invented and brought to market every year. I survived through the Techstars Austin program and have been apart of the Austin startup scene for quite some time and what many of the entrepreneurs, whether small or big, are doing is much more important as whole than what your statement implies. You should see the list of companies selected for the 1776 Cup; some were "appy" (but solving REAL problems!), others were hard science (new form of carbon to make capacitors more efficient to replace batteries), and some were humane (cheap, portable, and easy to build housing for displaced people).
  • jjoonathan 13y ago
    No, I don't think that stepping back and saying "this allocation of resources stinks" is myopic. Not unless you have so much faith in our resource allocation system that you excuse it from the need to justify itself. In fact, I think it's myopic to assume that a business has justified its existence solely on the basis that it has experienced success on the market. A method to make a well-to-do individual or company even more well-to-do, despite a 2x or 10x cost to the competition or to society, is a winning business proposition. "Create the problem, sell the cure" is a valid business model. Feeding the poor is not. Like most of us here, I believe that in total the market is a force for good, but let's please not pretend that market forces are self-justifying or beyond reproach. In an adversarial system, the solution to one person's "real problem" can be a real monster to the rest of us. We have to make the good/evil call on our own. Most of us are familiar with the game-theoretic concept of Nash Equilibrium and how, with the right rules, you can drive a local optimization scheme* to a globally anti-optimal outcome (i.e. the prisoner's dilemma). Since our economy runs on a local optimization scheme, it's entirely reasonable to wonder if there are any market segments where the Nash Equilibrium is particularly objectionable. The marketing industry is a great example. I've heard it claimed that its purpose in society is to convey information to the consumer. But that's not how it makes money. It makes money by attracting customers, and indeed the ads that you and I see every day are so acutely tuned to this goal, to the near total exclusion of all others, that I doubt there are many of us who believe that watching ads helps the average person make better business decisions. "Captain Morgan has the best brand of rum!" and "Dawny makes the softest tissues" are not messages that are of any use to society. Just the opposite -- they're probably false or, at best, misleading. Both customers and manufacturers would benefit from cutting the advertisers out of the equation. But they can't, because that's not a Nash equilibrium, and so the arms race continues. It's not as expensive as the actual wars we are fighting, but it's not too far off either. Look, you're right that the whole "all industry does is churn out socially worthless CRUD apps" criticism is unfair. Industry has solved (and will solve) an enormous number of practical problems. But it's not myopic to notice when a business empire is built on a strategy of dubious social value or to notice when the market is systematically undervaluing some kind of human activity. Those things happen, and it's reasonable to complain when a petty/artificial "real problem" gets enshrined while the most glaring "real problems" get swept under the rug. The scientific and humane startups you mentioned sound like steps in the right direction. I just hope that they experience a nonzero success rate. Market forces have a long and ignominious history of serving those sectors poorly. I don't have any great answers (apart from the obvious "don't defund science or social nets"), but the only way we can hope to find better options is by identifying what's wasteful, calling it that, and trying to figure out new ways to address the problem. * While I sincerely apologize to any game theorists who object to my inaccurate terminology, I must point out that it was you guys who decided to call this kind of optimization "greedy."
• rhizome 13y ago
  "Well, the world needs ditch-diggers, too." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiRGRvE_Wqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiRGRvE_Wqg
• ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
  > Using these data, scientists will choose a landing site for the mission’s 100 kg Philae probe. The landing is currently scheduled for 11 November and will be the first time that a landing on a comet has ever been attempted. In fact, given the almost negligible gravity of the comet’s 4 km-wide nucleus, Philae will have to use ice screws and harpoons to stop it from rebounding back into space after touchdown.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• erikpukinskis 13y ago
  Edit: I can see this is getting downvoted. If you have time, I would really appreciate a response to go with the downvote. This is my heartfelt belief, and if I'm wrong I would really like to be able to learn something. > Make you wonder if our industry's mind share being wasted on web apps and consumer gadgets because of the profit incentive associated? I find this sentiment strange. To me, your kind of excitement, which seems to be pure joy over incredible engineering feats, seems nihilistic. There are serious terrestrial problems happening right now. Massive environmental destruction, humanitarian disasters. Even in relatively stable places like the Bay Area I know many people who are teetering on personal disaster. These are extremely complex problems and engineers have extraordinarily powerful skills to help solve them. I understand why people are captivated by things like comets and why they'd want to attempt these extraordinary feats. It's exciting and fun and there are few joys that can match doing something that's never been done before. For that reason I don't begrudge anyone who chooses that kind of work. Earth's crises are incredibly depressing and there's largely no glory in helping a few people stay out of homelessness, or helping a kid get through college. It's risky, demoralizing work. But I don't really understand why a mission like this would be considered a noble pursuit. Fun, sure. But not especially noble. Yes, basic space science has some value to society in the long term. But we have a MASSIVE backlog of basic science that is being unused. We have journals chock full of solutions to problems that are going unimplemented. Even something as simple as logistic regression, which has been around for 70 years, is vastly underused. People get excited about bayesian models and neural networks and all this great research, but there's still a massive backlog of problems that could be solved with a simple regression or an ANOVA. There are no basic questions to solve, just the work of obtaining and cleaning data, doing the analysis, and packaging it in a tool that people can actually use. You seem to wonder why more people don't take on extremely difficult challenges on the edge of possibility. But I wonder why more people don't use existing technical tools to solve the massive backlog of problems that are being ignored.
  • jmckib 13y ago
    In order for the human race to survive, we need a foothold in space. The Earth, or even our solar system, won't remain habitable forever.
• aortega 13y ago
  >Make you wonder if our industry's mind share being wasted on web apps and consumer gadgets because of the profit incentive associated? I Think you over-estimate the capability of "our industry". I don't want to pop your bubble but the people required to make those space machines are not you typical web 2.0 programmer. They are the best of the best and many have half a century of experience. Also they have way more budget. Space is hard.
  • mironathetin 13y ago
    >>I Think you over-estimate the capability of "our industry". I don't want to pop your bubble but the people required to make those space machines are not you typical web 2.0 programmer. They are the best of the best and many have half a century of experience. Also they have way more budget. Space is hard.<< I work for ESA space missions (not Rosetta). Although my colleagues are certainly well qualified, I am not sure if we are really the best of the best. (we are not the typical web 2.0 programmers though, this is certainly true :o). Usually, the software for space missions is written by electrical engineers or physicists/astronomers, who somehow specialized in software after their master or phd. Indeed, the style of that software is quite different from what is usually developed in business setups. No unnecessary complexity, just straight forward paths to the solution. We use more or less exclusively open source tools. No windows too. Works pretty well. Our results are also open source, btw. Just to answer some guys who believe, this is all military, secret and disclosed. But we also have to fight cowboy-coding and design-pattern-gurus. We usually don't have to fight software managers though. Everybody is so well qualified, that we use to discuss once a week what we do, where we want to go and then just do it. Worked very well, so far. My last mission was a huge success :o). The real innovation may indeed be done at universities and science institutes, not so much in startups and business. Which startup can afford to hire 200 scientists and invest a billion to do something new? I think there is indeed no competition on that level. But we also give a lot of tasks to industry (we have to, because of the public funding). In some cases, this caused trouble, because their main focus is to make profit and still be good enough to avoid problems. Also, they usually keep their methods secret for legal reasons. If something does not work in space, it can be hard to get the necessary information to fix the problems (while the time is ticking, because many missions have finite lifetimes). Our goal is usually 'as good as it gets, outstanding, if possible'. We can afford that and that is really cool. It doesn't work in a business setup, because it usually is expensive.
• mikeash 13y ago
  All I wonder is why most of these comments are taken up by boring and pointless political discussion voted to the top, and almost no technical discussion. Edit: and downvoted because I want Hacker News comments to be about hacking. Maybe it's time to change the name of the site to Rich People Angst and Bad Economics and Politics News.
• hipaulshi 13y ago
  The precision and reliability of embedded system those guys designed always amazes me
• epoxyhockey 13y ago
  Make you wonder if our industry's mind share being wasted on web apps and consumer gadgets because of the profit incentive associated? Engineers that work in defense/nasa/etc generally aren't on twitter, linkedin or facebook broadcasting, well, anything - you just don't hear about them unless you personally know some of these people. It's part of the job description to be private and avoid becoming a target of the media or a foreign nation. It also makes it difficult to stay in touch with colleagues when you're relegated to the rolodex-era of communication. Quite contrary to your statement, this world might be 1000 times better if the same engineers working on government programs were to work in the commercial sector, pushing the boundaries of tech that is accessible by everyday people.
  • Ma8ee 13y ago
    You mean government programs like NASA? Yeah, these people should definitely work on robot vacuums and yet another tablet.
    • epoxyhockey 13y ago
      I was mainly referring to DoD workers. NASA is a bit of an exception since many aspects of what they work on is public info. The point I was trying to make is that I imagine that these brilliant engineers wouldn't be focusing their efforts on iterative improvements to vacuums and tablets.
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      • Ma8ee 13y ago
        I do agree that it would be better if the DoD money was used for something more peaceful. On the other hand was the Manhattan project quite cool and DARPA-net turned out to become something quite useful. To be a bit more serious: I do consider the notion that private enterprises always are better to be stupid. For large projects the private bureaucracy are usually as big as the government ones. The private enterprises are with a few exceptions very shortsighted; that is why I joke about another tablet. Show me the company that put serious money into e.g. fusion.
• panacea 13y ago
  Newtonian physics must be really effective to apply to objects in space. Despite vast distances, the calculations must be (relatively speaking... ahem) easier to model than more complex systems like weather, or the brain.