0. Man, I wish I could have been a 16 to 22-year-old in the summer of '69. Can you even imagine how powerful that experience would have been? (Maybe some of you can because you actually lived it?!?!)
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7. Expertise Michael Nielsen has this line in Reinventing Discovery that I really like: “The attention of the right expert at the right time is often the single most valuable resource one can have in creative problem solving.”
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During the mission, Apollo had hundreds, maybe thousands of experts carefully networked together and on-call, poised to solve any problem that might arise. A truly staggering concentration of expertise.
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8. Singular achievement You might wonder: Why haven't we accomplished anything like the Moon landing in 50 years? Has progress stagnated? Is our civilization in decline?
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The answer to those latter questions is "definitely maybe." But I think there's a bigger reason we haven't done something more inspiring than the Moon landing: There's just nothing like it left to achieve.
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The Moon landing was a binary, all-or-nothing venture. We either landed or we failed. Whereas almost every other technological advance is painfully incremental. Both failures and (more importantly) successes happen slowly.
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By the time we freeze and reanimate a human being, we will have done it a thousand times in mice and monkeys. Self-driving cars are already here, but only kinda sorta. Even AGI must come gradually.
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The modern internet is a goddamn miracle. We've made it possible for almost everyone on the planet to communicate instantly and at zero marginal cost. If there'd been a moment when the whole tech stack got switched on, zero to one, it would have blown our fucking minds.
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But in reality, the internet was built up slowly. And our appreciation got smeared out over decades, rather than focused onto a single celebratory moment.
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What else is out there, similar to the Moon landing? (This is a genuine question; I'd love to hear ideas.) What might we achieve in the next 50–100 years that can be celebrated all at once?
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I don't think there's anything quite like getting to the Moon (although I'd love to be proven wrong). Nothing as symbolic and intuitive even to children. Certainly putting someone on Mars will be *awesome*. But it's just not as novel. We already took the low-hanging orb.
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So that's why I think the Moon landing was so exceptional. Not because it's a height of progress we won't see again, but because it was our biggest and best shot at a singular technological *performance*. And we nailed it :D
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End of conversation
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and it's amazing to me that the whole mass of übercompetence was orchestrated by the US government!
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