Kevin Simler

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.”

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.