It's a correct characterization, so there's not much point to taking issue to it. It doesn't have to be at Apollo levels as a percentage of GDP in order to be spent well.

Heh, I think we can add your entire post to the "not strictly accurate" pile. The story which we're commenting on already shows your assertion false that plastics kill "everything in the area as animals try to turn it into food". Some animals are quite successful at turning plastics into food or into a surface for living on.

Congress has that power as well.

Not on my side. I though it was well accepted that 50 years was a long time especially when it comes to human technology development and industry.

OTOH, we went from putting something into orbit for the first time to putting men on the Moon in about twelve years. The world currently spends the entire budget of Apollo (excluding Skylab) on space activities every five years or so. NASA and the US Department of Defense alone might spend that much on space activities.

Nothing I have said, implies we should give up. Instead, my view is that our standards are way too long. We're complacent and willing to squander vast sums of money on negligible space activities which don't get us anywhere.

Consider this, until 1984, NASA had a monopoly on commercial space launch. That's twenty years of the fifty year period where no one outside of NASA could legally launch private payloads. They didn't actually help a business develop any significant launch infrastructure until they funded Pegasus launches in the early 90s, that's getting towards thirty years. And the real progress has been SpaceX which didn't start till about 11 years ago.

Suppose during the build up to Apollo, the US government had encouraged private orbital launch development. I think the same launch capability we have now, could have been in place in the mid-70s! There are technological advances that have helped SpaceX build a cheaper and more reliable rocket, but as most people have noted, the basic technology is fifty years old.

I don't really have any trouble imagining the supposedly unimaginable. From the rest of the world's point of view, it'll be a considerable disruption of global oil supply possibly with a bit of domino toppling of neighboring governments over subsequent years. In other words, the mid to late 70s revisited.

In other words, public does things which have no obvious benefits - economic or otherwise, near or far term. When scientists have to face limited resources, they pick and choose which research to do usually on the basis of what sort of results they expect to obtain. Why should governments do things differently than the scientists themselves?

I see no evidence of that. Military spending. which incidentally was much larger, might have had such an impact, but it is worth noting that even in the complete absence of support from the federal government, there would have been widespread and rapid development of transistors and integrated circuits.

I doubt it's even five years sooner. And due to governments' propensity to hire lots of people and have them do unproductive things, government might have obstructed such progress over the long term by hiring significant fraction of scientists and engineers who would otherwise have assisted in IC and computer development.

And what else? That's not much to show for half a century of activity.

They could have started in 1980.

A lifetime, let us note here, is a very long time for us.

A common misconception shared by a lot of Hindus in India. For example, there was a 1857 rebellion that started because Indian soldiers were required to bite the ends off of bullet cartridges (it was part of the loading process for rifles of the time) coated with animal fat (allegedly both beef and pig, which offends just about optimally).

Depends on the amount of energy you're talking about. Adding that much more energy (which is roughly 3600 times more than the Earth currently receives from the Sun) probably will be vaporizing crust (depending on how fast the heat dissipates to space).

So you're telling me that the infrastructure for intercepting and using as much energy as is present in the world's fossil fuel supply every minute (or rather every 5-10 minutes after efficiency losses, I suppose) is going to be difficult? Who knew?

That depends. But there's no reason to expect space relative activities to remain expensive. For example, if you can get a self replicating factory onto the surface of the Moon, then the cost is the R&D, launch, and the cost of supervising the resulting infrastructure which is built (which might just be monitored by a few people on Earth remotely). Materials and land are free for the taking - while on Earth, they form a firm floor for how cheap you can get solar power. It might be a high price tag to get it started, but you can end up with infrastructure capable of covering the entire Moon with solar cells (though perhaps over a considerable period of time, like many human lifetimes) for far less than the equivalent infrastructure would be on Earth (assuming it were even allowed to that extent).

Science uses aren't magically better than party balloon uses. I don't see ITER, for example, being a better use of helium than character balloons at Tokyo Disney.

Part of the point of having a functioning market with relatively competent buyers and sellers is to decide who gets scarce resources without having to make dubious and subjective moral judgments. As the price goes up, the more spurious demands will drop out. Tokyo Disney finds some other way to entertain its guests while ITER gets the helium it wants.

It hasn't yet and they've been doing this for more than half a century.

There are two things to note here. First, you clearly don't any experience with commercial R&D. It can be more farsighted and considerably more effective than the publicly funded equivalent (in large part because they have a goal other than burning a certain amount of public funding).

Second, commercial R&D is not the only sort of privately funded R&D. The Keck Telescopes in Hawaii, for example, are privately funded, but they aren't for profit.

Maybe you ought to research NASA's "spinoffs" some time and see how much work is actually done by the private side.

There's no requirement for this R&D to be more useless, it just is.

Nope. I don't trust business. It's just an observation that they do R&D better than government does. And there's a simple model of self-interest that explains why that happens.

Yes and no. If the business has huge income now and in the future from a treatment for a serious ailment, they won't be so interested in killing that golden goose for a cure. But if they don't and they can take out a competitor's cash cow, then sure, they would. Not every drug company has such indefinite treatments for every disease. Small businesses in particular don't have this problem.

So perhaps you ought to look at what obstacles there are to small businesses developing cures. First and foremost is a complex regulatory process that can cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per eventual successful drug to navigate. That's not imposed by corporations but by various developed world governments.

I merely note that this is routinely observed phenomena.

I have no dealings with EA, but their customers continue to buy EA's products. If you buy crap, you get crap.

Except the obvious - don't buy their stuff. All this crap doesn't matter to the people who don't own their stuff.

Sure it is. But if their job is "learning", then they have a long way to go. I recommend starting with some lessons on economics.

I don't trust you to buy an Apple product much less recommend anything for NASA, but that's not my problem. When NASA or other government agencies squander my money, then it becomes my problem.

You have a name? Most of the people who think that about me have the balls to post under a name.

Perhaps you ought to look at the other eye-rolling in this thread. This is the sort of thing that gets collected every time it gets brought up.

This is Quantum Apostrophe, right? Why can't you use your arguments that make sense (particularly, the economic infeasibility arguments) rather than resorting to the one that is particularly idiotic.