So…I’m just curious because I’m a noob about this stuff. What was the net benefit of going to the moon?
The pictures and rocks, plus improvements in semiconductor/computer technology and rocketry.
http://news.cnet.com/How-NASA-helped-invent-Silicon-Valley/2009-11397_3-6211034.html
Whenever you attempt a task which stretches the boundaries of current scientific understanding and application, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll discover something. Much of basic research is motivated by what’s going to be discovered along the way rather than the destination itself.
More technical blahblahblah, if you’re interested.
The purpose of going to the Moon:
Well those do seem like nice things I must say.
What was the price tag for all that?
About $200 billion in 2010 dollars.
Dr Stadler, paging Dr. Stadler…
For virtually creating the international semicondcutor industry, that’s a pretty good investment.
Yeah I’m sold, seems like a bad fight to pick.
And that’s why Newt Gingrich is a bad politician.
Did his mom name him after an amphibian on purpose?
In any case, he’ll have to wait until 2016 or 2020- if he’s still around by then- if he wants to be president. That and not take any more cards out of Clinton or Herman Cain’s book.
What a crock of steaming bullshit. I am an engineer for one of the largest tech companies in the semiconductor industry. Government did not bequeath us with semiconductor technology, not through Bell Labs, not through NASA. No one foresaw how important semiconductors would become. They weren’t trying to miniaturize the vacuum tube, they were trying to make it solid-state. For a very long time after they were invented, transistors were the red-headed stepchild. Real electronics used vacuum tubes. The turning point was the advent of semiconductor-based memories which began to achieve very high densities at low cost.
Later on, interest turned to the CPU but it was the Personal Computer that really put it all together. At the time, the government systems (and university systems and corporate systems) were all mainframe-based. They did not anticipate the demand for compute power in the home. When ARPANet was invented, it was just a giant inter-mainframe wide-area-network. Again, they failed to anticipate (everyone did) the demand for point-to-point communication between personal computing devices. Dial-up bulletin board services sprang up across the country. There were entirely point-to-point networking systems that had nothing to do with “the” ARPANet. Only as people began using DNS-based, dial-up ISPs to access “the Web” did “the Internet” emerge. Yet again, they failed to anticipate the demand for mobile phone devices and mobile compute devices.
Look at the FBI’s laughable “takedown notices” on “seized” DNS’s. You can just type in the IP or use OpenDNS to access the website. Derp. These are the people that invented the transistor and the Internet? Give me a break.
It is difficult to explain to a non-specialist how ridiculously absurd it is to claim that any one entity - let alone the government - is responsible for transistors, semiconductors, computers or the Internet. I will give just one example to illustrate the point that a lot of what makes modern compute technology possible has to do with the solution of very non-fundamental technical problems.
There are two basic types of transistor logic - NMOS and PMOS (N-type or P-type Metal-Oxide Semiconductor). In the early days, you couldn’t “dope” both types of transistors on the same silicon die (the tiny piece of silicon that contains your CPU), so you had to choose which type of logic you wanted. NMOS was slightly faster than PMOS, so most logic during the TTL (transistor-transistor-logic) era was NMOS. But both NMOS and PMOS have a problem… they are fast to transition their logic level in one direction but slow to transition in the other direction. Fortunately, the faster transition directions are complementary (NMOS transitions from high-to-low voltage quickly and PMOS transitions from low-to-high quickly). Once semiconductor fabrication technologies were developed that enabled doping of both N-type and P-type transistors on the same die, circuits could be constructed that took advantage of the relative strengths of each transitor type, giving us CMOS logic which is faster than either PMOS or NMOS and is the only logic type in use nowadays.
This development had a dramatic impact on computer performance. If we were still using the old logic, your iPhone would die after an hour and would have significantly less compute performance. Yet there was no hero who made the breakthrough, there was no single organization that brought the “the vision” to fruition. There were just a lot of people buying and selling and developing and researching and along the way the problems got knocked down one-by-one. This process continues today.
Clayton -
I wasn’t saying that if it wasn’t for Apollo, consumer electronics or something else would never have taken up the slack eventually and we’d all still be in the stone age. I’m just noting that the manned space program starting in 1959 was important to why the semiconductor industry developed at the time that it did. When you consider that the computer industry has been doubling about once every five years since then, with all its accompanying importance to science and the rest of the economy, even speeding things up by a few years makes quite a difference.
Well that is indeed quite interesting Clayton, but we’re essentially arguing over what amounts to a drop in the bucket in today’s dollars relative to the overall debt of the US government.
The real culprits are the safety net programs and the military expenditures overseas particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Republicans can’t trash talk a war we started and we can’t go after social security and medicare because they’re sacred cows so instead we’ve got Newt Gingrich talking about NASA.
The amount of time and energy that it would take me or any other unitiated noob to research NASA’s history and various exploits would be significant and I probably wouldn’t understand much of it anyways as I’m not exactly tech savvy.
So instead of talking about the real problems, we’ve got our politicians harping on programs that are publicly popular and ultimately irrelevant.
Makes me a sad panda.
This kind of sweeping claim simply cannot be proven or disproven. How much did it speed things up? How much sooner did the space program make the development of the personal computer? What specific foresight did the gubbermint have that others missed? Is it simply that the public sector is filled with optimistic dreamers who see possibilities where the private sector is filled with apathetic, unimaginative Luddites? Please give us some kind of cause-and-effect reasoning to help us follow how A led to B?
Clayton -
Well, anything’s certainly possible, and maybe, just maybe, the semiconductor industry was totally unaffected by NASA. But if you want some more information on just how much of a role government funding played in starting it up, I can talk about that instead.
Sorry if that’s all tl;dr or irrelevant to your point, but I’d like to see some evidence that private firms were just waiting to jump on semiconductor tech if it wasn’t for government computer projects taking up a fraction of a percent of GDP.
I don’t give a crap about what an Establishment blowhard like Gingrich talks about. My posts are in response to these nebulous claims “but for the government, we wouldn’t have ________” being floated by mustang. The government does do some things that need to be done. So what? I’m supposed to be filled with joy and thankfulness because the government doesn’t just collect all our tax money into a big pile and burn it? Which, by the way, I would actually prefer as a matter of policy to what they actually do. What they actually do with the money - start wars and subsidize childbirth among the poor and bad financial decision-making by businesses and those saving for retirement… - is much worse.
Clayton -
The US is one of the hardest countries in the civilized world to get an abortion in. On top of everything else the Republicans do, you aren’t even guaranteed a free abortion. Putting funds into Medicaid abortion and contraceptive coverage would do a lot to address this.
But whatever, major tangent/derail.
Boy, we’re just going in circles - the government does do some things that need to be done. It even pays people to discover and invent new things, particularly things that it intends to use for war or increased domestic regimentation. Why did the government invest in silicon valley at that time? Who was the visionary in the government that had the insight that this was “the next big thing” and that money needed to be poured into it?
It is true that the government poured lots of money into Silicon Valley. Turns out that they didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts. Steve Blank explains the secret history of Silicon Valley in this eye-opening talk:
In this lecture, he basically all but comes out and says that he knows that Google has intelligence-agency connections.
Clayton -
What I’m saying is that some fights are worth skipping. We’re arguing over peanuts. And for what?
You and I both know your libertarian paradise is unlikely to spring up tomorrow and if it does it probably won’t be because people are just sick and tired of NASA.
OH, how absolutely terrible. (had to snip an f-word there)
To think that you should pay for the medical intervention you require… I hear in some non-european countries you’re not even guaranteed free shoes and food. You actually have to pay for stuff, rather than just bringing a bag into a store and grabbing what you want.
If it wasn’t for republicans, abortions and apples and all manner of goods would simply appear as if by magic, completely free of charge.
Funding =/= results. He gave the example of the Wright brothers spending $1,000 compared to $67,000 for the state funded airplane (which never succeeded). Gubmint in general pays far more than the private sector for the same things. He says earlier that the OECD studies find a correlation only between private research and economic “growth”. Neo-classical types love statistics.
Politicians like to look “progressive” and “cutting edge” by throwing money at anything with the “science” in the name.
Speaking of the Wright Bros., he told the story of how the U.S. had no air force until 1917, when they passed a special act allowing free use of airplane patents, because the Wright Bros became full time patent trolls. lmao