Watching this, I can only describe it as holy. An incredible reminder of what humanity can do, and the beauty of our curiosity and the universe around us. I grew up learning that my great uncle was in Mission Control for Apollo; missions like this are what inspired me to pursue engineering in the first place.
Yep, while we are measurably destroying the Earth's biodiversity orders of magnitudes faster than the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs. And this is without global warming, which is another great thing we are doing.
Arguably, the biggest thing humanity is doing is killing the Earth. Great that we have some comfort in doing fun things on the side.
My encouragement would be to take this and point to it to make those problems seem tractable, which they are with political will. “We went to the moon! Surely we can …”
I would like to see a system like New York's campaign finance vouchers, where individual citizens get to decide where the public funds are directed. That way you have to have an audience and you have to appeal to people's sense of what's truly valuable, rather than just trying to farm views.
I think social pressure is the best weapon we have against these. The people who use them want to seem cool, so make it seem like these are weird, dorky, and creepy and they won’t take off.
Which, importantly, drives more renewables and storage development because it makes the renewables fantastically profitable to run: near zero cost for you, but paid the price set by gas.
You're not sure if human to human interaction is intrinsically more valuable than a human talking to a facsimile? That feels like a very dangerous position to hold for one's ethical calculations and general sanity. I'm clinging tightly to the value of the bond with other people, even the passing connection, but certainly with my family members as this article is about.
i much prefer using the ATM, self-checkouts and an e-commerce website, over having to talk to somebody at a branch to get money, buy my groceries, or booking a holiday.
Human to human may be more valuable, but that may not have much to do with the truth in their statements. For example if your relatives are hooked up to a constant misinformation feed it gets to become problematic to communicate and deal with them.
"Is this a deepfake video call" is a major plot point in a pretty big movie currently in theaters, so I think this is getting into the broader zeitgeist.
I don’t have a source for this handy, but I believe that in terms of goods produced, manufacturing is actually still alive and well in the US. It’s just that this is done by a much smaller and more automated workforce.
This is not exactly true on the scale of these interventions. The state can't run out of money but it does run out of the time and talent of its people, the resources of its land, and the patience of its partners. State capacity is a real limit, and where we direct the money is a pretty strong proxy for where we spend these, the true resources of the state. We don't pay for bombs with dollars, we pay for them with schools, roads, and hospitals.
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