The eradication of various infectious diseases (each taken individually) should probably be the go-to charismatic megafauna of technological accomplishments, rather than Apollo. On a technological complexity scale, they're probably a 9/10 to Apollo's 7/10.
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yeah "rocket science" is a lot simpler than its reputation implies
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Yeah, that's partly why even I managed to earn credentials in it :D
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i mean yeah from a complexity standpoint obviously it's complex but it's like localized complexity, plus i'm always impressed when engineers eg land the curiosity rover on mars from a jet pack on a hook within 100m of the target, but like, the math actually works for that
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The main reason it is that way is that we have an underdetermined design space. You can pick and choose among dozens of different ideas to land a rover on mars until you find one that makes sense and seems to have a reasonable probability. Diseases, climate action, not so much.
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that and you only have a handful of events to be concerned about:
1) get off the planet without blowing up
2) (several million kilometres of literally nothing)
3) land on the other planet without blowing up
moreover if you *do* blow up, it sucks but the result is one dead gadget
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