4 ms·

I wonder why are you being downvoted. This is pretty interesting, and a great way to look at it.

by wosos 12y ago

eveningcoffee 12y ago
Apollo program did cost 110 billion when adjusted to the inflation. With this amount of money, and math above, you could feed every person on Earth about 3 and half years.
- sanoli 12y ago
  You know, I'm a big space exploration geek, but, over the years, I've come to see a lot of it as money not well spent. Again, I'm a space geek, amateur astronomer, follower of Nasa's and ESA's missions, but, in the end, some of the stuff will just cost too much for not much reward. Sometimes I'm still on the fence though.
  - qrendel 12y ago
    If you want some possibly-far-fetched but very high-ROI space investment strategies, have you seen the Phil Metzger et al proposal for rapid bootstrapping of space industry[1][2]? Even if off by orders of magnitude it would still dwarf the industrial output of the world within a few decades. [1] http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/affordable-rapid-bootstrapping-space-industry-solar-system-civilization/ http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/affordable-rapid-bootstrap... [2] http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Preprint_Affordable-bootstrapping-of-space-industry-and-solar-system-civilization.pdf http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09...
- ptaipale 12y ago
  Actually, people can't eat money. Money can buy things, but if you change the allocation of money, you change the price of things as well, so linear calculations like "with this amount of money, and math" do not necessarily work out very realistically. On the other hand, there is already much more than enough food in the world - at least so far, despite huge population growth - so the problem is not that the world would need more food; the problem is allocation and distribution of food. Shortly, lack of market access. And most big famines are not even about people not being able to afford food as such; they are political. From your example, Apollo, I'll jump to another example: the best-known modern famine in Ethiopia, 1983-1985. There was local drought in northern Ethiopia, but the government was actually exporting food. The government extracted food from producers so that they themselves had to buy their own food, and at the same time the same government restricted the movement of people. There was plenty of aid sent, but it was sent to the government that had partially caused the hunger in the first place. In 1985, Ethiopia had a population of 41 million. Now it has a population of 88 million. And they are not particularly hungry, and this does not even require a lot of money from the Apollo program. But it requires more stable political circumstances in Ethiopia (and things have looked somewhat better after the Soviet-backet government fell in 1991).
poikniok 12y ago
Because by his math a loaf of bread costs $0.06. Do you know where I can buy a loaf for that price?
- warkid 12y ago
  China?
  - Gurkenmaster 12y ago
    I think the majority of china's population eats rice which doesn't have to be processed as much as bread.
    - mapt 12y ago
      Paddy rice is a substantially higher labor crop than mechanization-friendly wheat production per calorie, and China eats about as much wheat as it does rice; It grows even more maize, but this is mostly as feed.

I wonder why are you being downvoted. This is pretty interesting, and a great way to look at it.

by wosos 12y ago

I wonder why are you being downvoted. This is pretty interesting, and a great way to look at it.

Apollo program did cost 110 billion when adjusted to the inflation. With this amount of money, and math above, you could feed every person on Earth about 3 and half years.

sanoli 12y ago
You know, I'm a big space exploration geek, but, over the years, I've come to see a lot of it as money not well spent. Again, I'm a space geek, amateur astronomer, follower of Nasa's and ESA's missions, but, in the end, some of the stuff will just cost too much for not much reward. Sometimes I'm still on the fence though.
- qrendel 12y ago
  If you want some possibly-far-fetched but very high-ROI space investment strategies, have you seen the Phil Metzger et al proposal for rapid bootstrapping of space industry[1][2]? Even if off by orders of magnitude it would still dwarf the industrial output of the world within a few decades. [1] http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/affordable-rapid-bootstrapping-space-industry-solar-system-civilization/ http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/affordable-rapid-bootstrap... [2] http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Preprint_Affordable-bootstrapping-of-space-industry-and-solar-system-civilization.pdf http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09...
ptaipale 12y ago
Actually, people can't eat money. Money can buy things, but if you change the allocation of money, you change the price of things as well, so linear calculations like "with this amount of money, and math" do not necessarily work out very realistically. On the other hand, there is already much more than enough food in the world - at least so far, despite huge population growth - so the problem is not that the world would need more food; the problem is allocation and distribution of food. Shortly, lack of market access. And most big famines are not even about people not being able to afford food as such; they are political. From your example, Apollo, I'll jump to another example: the best-known modern famine in Ethiopia, 1983-1985. There was local drought in northern Ethiopia, but the government was actually exporting food. The government extracted food from producers so that they themselves had to buy their own food, and at the same time the same government restricted the movement of people. There was plenty of aid sent, but it was sent to the government that had partially caused the hunger in the first place. In 1985, Ethiopia had a population of 41 million. Now it has a population of 88 million. And they are not particularly hungry, and this does not even require a lot of money from the Apollo program. But it requires more stable political circumstances in Ethiopia (and things have looked somewhat better after the Soviet-backet government fell in 1991).

poikniok 12y ago

Because by his math a loaf of bread costs $0.06. Do you know where I can buy a loaf for that price?

warkid 12y ago
China?
- Gurkenmaster 12y ago
  I think the majority of china's population eats rice which doesn't have to be processed as much as bread.
  - mapt 12y ago
    Paddy rice is a substantially higher labor crop than mechanization-friendly wheat production per calorie, and China eats about as much wheat as it does rice; It grows even more maize, but this is mostly as feed.