[SKILNER]

Let's just imagine we're critiquing cars or planes in about 1910. They're so flawed. No one can say with certainty whether or how they will improve.

Side note of interest, from Wikipedia: "Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly" is an editorial published in the New York Times on October 9, 1903. The article incorrectly predicted it would take one to ten million years for humanity to develop an operating flying machine.

[suddenlybananas]

Conversely, imagine we're someone talking about colonising the moon in 1969.

[pzo]

I think we have heated debate because most people don't explain what's their `cost function`. For someone when they talk about AI they take a binary reasoning that if something is not perfect today then it will never be perfect or will never improve. For other is just they see something is useful today and know it will get better next year and don't have expectation of getting AGI.

In your reply it's equivalent of someone expecting AGI in next decade. The same is when people talk about if AI will take software dev jobs. Some just see all the flows in AI and they know they job is secure. Some other see that they are 2x productive and potentially your team mate not needed anymore. If AI can eliminate 50% of IT jobs in ~10-20 years then thats still job replacement. When we replaced horses with cars that doesn't mean we have no horses today or that nobody ride horses.

[suddenlybananas]

>In your reply it's equivalent of someone expecting AGI in next decade.

This seems an extremely widespread belief among AI boosters.

[Dylan16807]

If we had funded that as much as we're currently funding AI I think it would have been a plausible goal. Keep in mind we cut more than half of NASA's budget after we first landed.

[suddenlybananas]

I disagree.

[Dylan16807]

The gap between spending multiple days somewhere and spending months somewhere isn't that big.

It was only six years to go from the first multi-person spacecraft and first spacewalk to the first space station.

[suddenlybananas]

>It was only six years to go from the first multi-person spacecraft and first spacewalk to the first space station.

Yeah that's my entire point, technological process doesn't have a constant rate of acceleration. Some advances are quickly made one after another and others lag and take a very long time.

[Dylan16807]

How long do you think it would have taken to get a permanent moon presence if we kept up Apollo level funding indefinitely with that as the main goal? And since I only said "plausible", let's go with 80th-90th percentile best case scenario.

Even if technological progress stopped we could have launched enough parts to assemble a colony structure.

[SKILNER]

It's a good idea to think of a converse situation, but this is a bad example. The constraint was not about technology but about budget, perceived benefits and political will.

[zahlman]

What technologies existing in 1969 might have been used to create an environment with a breathable atmosphere and a self-sustaining ecosystem on the Moon?

What technologies existing today might be used for this purpose, assuming no financial or political limitations?