[powerhour]

Since creating rockets capable of reaching the moon we've sent rovers to Mars and launched space telescopes capable of analyzing other galaxies billions of LY away. How can you claim with a straight face that the latter is a smaller advancement than the former?

[tsimionescu]

Landing on Mars is fundamentally similar to landing on the Moon - slightly easier in some ways (no humans, some atmosphere), slightly harder in others (much farther away, so need more energy; much slower comms, so impossible to manually correct anything). Launching a space telescope is easier than either, as you don't have to land.

The robotics wasn't there to create the rover, so the mission wouldn't have made sense, but the technology that allowed NASA to land on the moon wpuld have allowed them to land something on Mars as well.

Honestly, a better counter would have been the gravitational wave detector, the kind of precision we have achieved in measurement is awe-inspiring. On the other hand, the Michelson-Morley experiment was also quite impressive for its time, though a good few orders of magnitude less precise.

[powerhour]

You hand-waved away the advancements in robotics like it was nothing. You ignored the significant technological advancements behind the space telescopes, focusing instead on the relatively mundane transportation method. What's up with that?

[tsimionescu]

I was comparing apples to apples - spaceflight to spaceflight, like the GP did (first rocket VS reusable rocket boosters).

For the space telescope, the first ones became operational in 1962, and the fundamental principles are the same. The advancements are wonderful, but they are iteration, not some paradigm shift.

Robotics is probably the most impressive of the three, though again, some of the basics of these systems and algorithms date back to the first AI explosion of the 1950s and 60s.

To emphasize again: the point isn't to piss on the extraordinary work of the scientists and engineers working in the last 50 years on these technologies. It is to recognize that the work of the pioneers of these fields from the 40s to the 60s is even more awe inspiring.

[ryan93]

What economic value comes from that stuff? reusable rocket boosters are a rounding error on the American economy.

[powerhour]

I absolutely reject the premise that the we should only consider inventions that single-handedly revolutionize the world. A lot of these so-called incremental rounding errors add up to significant sums.

[tsimionescu]

No one is saying that the last 50 years have not been good for progress, or that these discoveries do not have value.

But to claim that they amount to more progress than all of the rest of human history combined is objectively wrong, especially given the amazing advances of the 50-70 years preceding them (1900-1969), which did fundamentally revolutionize human knowledge and form the scientific advances that all subsequent progress is based on, from planes to rockets and from QM to fusion reactors today.

[ryan93]

Sorry i was specifically referring to the reusable boosters and astronomy.