http://www.youtube.com/SpaceCityFilms Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about the status of the US as a whole compared to the rest of the world from a technological stand point. About how our infrastructures are falling apart and we once had the best engineering accomplishments in the world, but now they are found in other countries. It is very interesting and I'd like to hear how others feel about it.
Wow. America spends more money on lip balm than they do on NASA. That's kind of sad. Hopefully the Phoenix lander gathers compelling data and generates public interest. People may feel the need now especially to do something constructive for our culture and replicate the national pride we saw during the Apollo missions. Thinking in terms of the future and legacy of mankind seems so unlike the kind of dangerous parochial thinking that costs us much much more money than we spend on NASA. $3.2 billion over 12 years sounds like a lot to me but a million dollars does too so hm. It's been an exciting weekend for mankind and it feels great to say that. What else do we see on the news that actually makes us feel good about ourselves that doesn't come from disaster responses? About the thread topic, he never gets too specific about what we can do to remedy the collapsing infrastructure. The comment about the 25% "smartest" Chinese outnumber the whole population of the United States struck me. The fact that we don't have the tallest building or the fastest train doesn't really bother me. We can't possibly be the best at everything. In fact that's a good sign that the rest of the world is modernizing and capable of technological innovations. Let them help. Whether that's good for us as Americans, I don't know. I don't know enough about economics.
We definitely some plans to fix out infrastructure. It seems like we have stop growing. We probably still have the best weapons, but everything else, we seem to be lagging behind.
i doubt it. a lot of the useful stuff were the inventions of ancient worlds. modern folks just made them better.
The problem is that's less and less true these days for new innovations. We stand on the shoulders of giants, but it's nothing we ourselves did.
Let me make a small list; and lets just keep it to the last 30 years: Internet Cell phones electric car hybrid car Lithium battery
hm... i guess our concept of inventions are bit different then. outside of the internet, the rest to me are just improvement. cell phones - back in the days, you just yell in the mountains and let the echoes travel or burn cow **** and let the smoke send your messages. electric cars - horse chariots with a different power source. hybrid cars - see above and replace with battery. lithium battery - once you have electricity, it isn't hard to imagine something to store it. to me, inventions are something that had never been utilized in other ways.
come on an electric car is little bit more than an improvement over the freaking chariot. and cell phones?? an improvement over smoke signals. i think you are skipping a few steps in between my friend.
alright, i take some of those comments back. but my point is, a lot of the modern inventions are not really inventions, just improvements over the old days. although i want to ride a chariot, but i am pretty sure my hybrid rides smoother than horses. and i can't yell that loud. we do have plenty of cow **** here though.
Sorry. The Internet and most of the technology behind it (i.e. TCP/IP, , SMTP, routers, etc...) were all invented right here in the USA. Largely by people doing projects for ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency). See Wikipedia You are thinking of HTTP which is the protocol used for the World Wide Web. The Internet is just a huge collection of inter-connected networks (hence the name "Internet" as in internetwork). We (as in humans) mostly use this collection of connected networks so applications we are using can talk to each other. For example, SMTP is the primary e-mail protocol used to get mail between hosts on the Internet. HTTP (which you are thinking of) is the protocal that allows web browsers and web servers to exchange data. So the Internet was invented in the US to keep the country connected in case of nuclear war. As it grew and more and more countries got connected more and more people from all over the world have contributed to applications that work on top of it (like HTTP). And before you say that the web is all we ever use, don't forget that when you use e-mail (even with a web front end), bit torrent, Napster, FTP, some Instant Messaging, nntp, etc... you are using the Internet. It is more than just the web! Another US government "invention" that we all benefit from now is GPS. The military put the GPS satellites in orbit so they could know where they are. At some point they allowed the general public access to the GPS signals but with some distortion introduced so you could only pinpoint your location to within several tens of feet. Now, I believe, that distortion is turned off and you are as good as your GPS receiver.
Considering that a considerable portion of NASA's budget is the manned spaceflight program which is essentially tossing money down the toiliet, it's really not that sad.
One of the things that sets America apart is our fantastic and well maintained (for the most part) interstate highway system. Very few countries, especially countries the size of the US, have as complete a system. If we were to invest in building up that infrastructrue (high speed trains along the interstates, etc) and also reinvest in our largest cities, we'd quickly arise again as an infrastructure leader. As far as technology, while much of the world has caught up, almost all the medical innovation in new drugs and procedures is in the US (and Western Europe).
I can understand how you could feel that way. Maybe the benefits of doing this are a little less directly obvious, but are extremely important for a healthy society. But like I said before, the money side of this is not my strong suit. I won't pretend to know where that extra money should come from. That's not to say that it couldn't be done. Since we do know that our government does waste money and is very good at it, maybe its my hope that the money will be freed up for this kind of thing when we stop wasting in other areas. Dr. Tyson in the video posted gives a pretty good account about what motivates people and why manned space exploration is important. We love robots, but there's not one school named after a robot. It doesn't inspire people on the same level. Why is inspiration important? If we suffer from a decline of innovators, then one possible explanation could be that individually maybe we're just not inspired to do great things anymore.
I guess if the economy gets real bad and the president's a liberal, we could have some more new deal programs. Otherwise, get ready for toll roads, internet tolls, and privatized ports.
Not sure about others but the Cell Phone kings are Japan & Korea, they are at least 1 generation ahead; as of lithium battery, IIRC Chinese are doing more research on it than most countries. In US, people rather buy bulk from Costco.
