In 1903, NY Times predicted airplanes would take 10M years to develop

https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-impossible/

by sandebert • 3 years ago

70 77 3 years ago

cubefox5• 3 years ago

Many Americans and even astronomers opposed the plan for various reasons. Even former President Eisenhower (who created NASA) said: “Anybody who would spend $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts.”

I think he was right.

syndicatedjelly3• 3 years ago

Why do you think he was right?

cubefox5• 3 years ago

The moon program was extremely expensive and the return (scientific or otherwise) was rather small in comparison.

unsupp0rted3• 3 years ago

Imagine a moonshot program for cancer(s) at the time. Or a moonshot program for computer chips.

It's not so much the money spent as the "we get to recruit all the smartest researchers and new grads for 2 generations to focus on a sole achievement" aspect.

Getting to the moon was inspirational, but functionally curing even one type of common cancer or ushering in the information revolution a decade or two ahead of schedule would be an order of magnitude more valuable.

standardUser2• 3 years ago

It wasn't just national prestige, it was a component of the arms race that defined all geopolitical relations in that era.

transcriptase• 3 years ago

So few people seem to realize that the point of many of these technological/societal achievements wasn’t necessarily the deliverable itself, but the development and implication of capabilities required to achieve them.

In simple terms, it was sending a global message: “If our propulsion and guidance technology can put people on the moon, imagine what else would be trivial for us?”

Pat_Murph• 3 years ago

40 billion is an insignifiant amount for a rich country like thr US and the scientific knowledge that was gained from it and is still going on today is immesurable.

Personnaly I think it was way worth it and we should keep going to further science and knowledge.

Totally worth it imo.

renegade-otter• 3 years ago

SBF couldn't even keep track of a $40B because it seemed like too much of a hassle. It's interesting that people like that are business visionaries and yet the government is deemed ineffectual unless it's operating with 100% efficiency.

But again, the stuff we got from the space program makes it all an extreme bargain.

jondiggsit• 3 years ago

The amount of learned knowledge and skills from an endeavor like the space program extends out to so many industries. We can thank the space program for vital inventions like the Super Soaker

dghlsakjg• 3 years ago

Apollo consumed 2.5% of gdp every year for a decade.

That’s a massively expensive prestige project.

Considering that the soviets concentrated on building space stations, yielding hardware that is still in use for active scientific purposes I would argue it wasn’t a good way to spend that value.

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

Accounting for inflation, that would be more like $335 billion today - still a manageable cost for a wealthy nation, but not peanuts.

ren_engineer• 3 years ago

Apollo helped subsidize and bootstrap the US aerospace and chip manufacturing industries(and other industries) during their early years and as a result probably have had a 100x ROI at least

probably one of the best US government investments ever, especially compared to some of the braindead modern programs we throw away money on

a1o• 3 years ago

These are important reminders that pathological cynics always will find a way to complain

Even Hacker News is cited in the piece!

jakubmazanec• 3 years ago

Ten million years? I hope in that time we evolve to have wings.

jakelazaroff• 3 years ago

Okay but "moondoggle" is actually a fantastic pun to put down the space race (even if it did turn out to be wrong).

Almondsetat2• 3 years ago

What is the point of publishing such an opinion on a newspaper?

People often point out how ridiculous these projections turned out to be, but seemingly nobody challenges their reason for existing.

AlecSchueler2• 3 years ago

It means people will still be talking about your article a century later, which is better than most journalists can hope for in terms of longevity.

micromacrofoot• 3 years ago

you can say the same thing about most opinion sections today! the nytimes still gives a platform to total fools this way — proliferating diversity of thought I suppose

Almondsetat2• 3 years ago

you can say the same thing about most opinion sections today!

Who says I amn't

swatcoder2• 3 years ago

It's not meant to be a rigorous analysis. It's just playful editorial snark because people read the paper over their coffee every morning and enjoy a mix of tones. A little "trouble brewing in Prussia" here, a little "lolz 'airplanes'!" there, and then a whole new batch of stuff to read and enjoy tomorrow.

onlyrealcuzzo• 3 years ago

Note that the first flight was also in 1903.

According to the legend I've heard - this was published the day before the Wright Brothers first flight in Dec 17 1903.

I didn't see the publication date in the article.

jjulius• 3 years ago

The article states:

Only nine weeks later, the Wright Brothers achieved manned flight.

andy0x2a• 3 years ago

according to the first paragraph of TFA, the first flight was 9 weeks after the 1903 article was published

Kon-Peki• 3 years ago

But that doesn’t really matter. They sent out a press release after Kitty Hawk; newspapers refused to publish it. Some instead published articles making fun of them.

Nobody believed them until 1908ish, when they flew over crowds in France and could no longer be ignored.

JonathonW• 3 years ago

The article says nine weeks before.

The NYT article mentioned is in their archives [1], dated October 9, 1903, which would be 9 weeks and 6 days. Close enough, although I'd probably round up to 10 weeks.

[1] https://nyti.ms/47ZyE3D (subscription probably required)

efields• 3 years ago

I'm certain this is a form of humor for the time period, or just what we think of as good journalism has changed over time. This figure maybe came out of thin air and the author of the piece ran with it, the editor having no idea either.

lnxg33k12• 3 years ago

Haters gonna hate is such a deep thought, I guess we have a new journalist competing for the pulitzer this year.

All in all, thinking about it, would have been better to have a world without flight, since I think it favoured globalisation and shrinking of working class rights, pollution, hypertourism and another kind of pollution, as italian i’d summon inhabitants of venice to see what they think of the americans flying in, I’d argue flying is a net negative discovery

syndicatedjelly3• 3 years ago

Good luck pushing your brand of decelerationism here. Maybe one day we can all return to being peasants farming fields and releasing zero carbon emissions in whatever world you're idealizing.

lnxg33k12• 3 years ago

I’m making an argument by offering some of the effects of a shrinked world on general population, you can also reply with less generalised response and say why each point was not correct, I am not advocating for farming probably, but more exposing my opinion of how each innovation has had destructive effects on us

I don’t have to push anything, I think it’s the planet itself that will push its own brand of antitech by displacing populations and becoming less inhabitable, hope all the servant of capitalism will be happy when they will die thanks to the effect of climate change thinking that thanks to them their corporate overlords will be mostly ok, will they have consumed enough? Will they have worked enough? Will they have been good subjects?

ryanmarsh• 3 years ago

Hacker News is not the audience for “haters gonna hate”.

The list of similarly cynical responses to great innovations and great businesses is a long one here.

wolverine876• 3 years ago

The NY Times quote in the image at the top of the article was clearly exaggeration and sarcasm after a failed attempt, not a prediction.

BoardsOfCanada• 3 years ago

It's a bit difficult to arrive at any number of years past 10,000 for any invention imaginable, past that they will all be unimaginable.

JumpCrisscross• 3 years ago

bit difficult to arrive at any number of years past 10,000 for any invention imaginable

The mean time between paradigm shifts in the natural sciences [1] is 25 years. (Max: 144 years, between Copernican cosmology and Vesalius's work on anatomy in 1543 and the transition to classical mechanics in 1687. Exempting that, the mean time is 18 years.)

I would take that, which is remarkably close to to the length of a generation [2], as being a fundamental factor of the maximum extent of our technological forecasting abilities. A century, 4x that factor, strikes me as the upper bound, though I could be convinced of even 10x in a very stable field. 400x, on the other hand, seems absurd.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift#Natural_science... ranges taken at midpoint

[2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm7047

gretch• 3 years ago

What about a Dyson sphere? Or time travel? Or FTL travel?

angiosperm4• 3 years ago

If we haven't figured out fusion by the time we could build a Dyson sphere-analog, and therefore have no need for such frippery, it will be our shame. Time travel is easy in the forward direction; we are all performing it at close to light-speed, in Minkowski space. FTL travel might turn out to be possible in the next millennium, even if not meaningfully useful. FTL travel and (backward) time travel are equivalent.

dist-epoch• 3 years ago

In 2016, days before the AlphaGo - Lee Sedol match, most HN posters were predicting that it was just a publicity stunt and that AlphaGo will lose all matches and that we were at least 10 years away from a computer beating the Go world champion.

swatcoder2• 3 years ago

And in light of that, can you believe there still remain cynics just as pessimistic about time travel, FTL travel, cold fusion, perpetual motion, agelessness, immortality, world peace, etc?

Absurd! You never know what's just around the corner!

vrosas• 3 years ago

Here's the full page in its original form --> https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1903/10/09/102...

ramosu• 3 years ago

ah, journalism and science..

protastus• 3 years ago

If we're discussing garbage content from the NY Times, then their criticism of Robert Goddard tops the list for me

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2018/07/19/the-corre...

angiosperm4• 3 years ago

Thomas Friedman's incessant promotion of invading Iraq probably tops that one. They still publish him.

ClarityJones• 3 years ago

This relates very well to AGI.

There can be long periods of minimal quantitative progress, even quantitative regression, before a massive qualitative leap that's the result of making a few small changes.

Planes either fly or fall.

The difference is that a super-intelligent AGI could provide immense value in secret. It's somewhat hard to keep a plane secret. It's value is largely in moving people, so people have to know about it and they fly right there in the sky for everyone to see. Also, massive rockets are hard to hide, and a lot of the value was publicity.

I expect that somebody somewhere is going to have AGI for a period of time when the rest of the world doesn't know they have it... and right now feels like that time. People are openly publishing LLMs that float awfully close to those motorized gliders that decidedly, definitely didn't fly... until suddenly they did. It's only a matter of time until someone figures out how to make these fly, and the question isn't when, but when we'll find out.

allturtles• 3 years ago

This isn't a prediction, it's a joke. The context of the article makes it clear that he's making a joking comparison to the evolution of birds.

akira2501• 3 years ago

So, the "Big Thinks" assertion here is that sometimes people are wrong and as a result incorrectly predict the future and that this pattern continues today. This is all so obvious and leads to no specific conclusion so I have to wonder, who is this article actually _for_? People who just don't like hearing the word "no?"

The Navy general was partly right. The government was the wrong entity to pursue flight and it was best left in private hands.

The New York Times was partly right. It took a lot of work to develop commercial and military flight to the level it is now. They were also on the verge of a worldwide communications upgrade, so those 10m person years came together faster than imagined.

The other article is also partly right. Flight is not so cheap that it is widely available, there are billions of living people on this planet who will never fly because they will never have enough money to afford it before they die.

The British astronomer just wanted a telescope instead of individual space travel. He was arguing about the best way to use a limited amount of money and specifically disclaimed any ability to predict the future.

Finally.. the original idea of the Apollo program was incredibly ambitious and was put forward in a top down fashion by the president. This was unprecedented for peace time America. Even then, they have to acknowledge that half the country was on board, and a vast majority actually sat down and watched the spectacle.

I hate articles like this, they try to wash away all nuance to end up with a self serving conclusion designed to mollify the "move fast and break things" crowd. The "Big Think" does some of the smallest thinking I've ever seen.

angiosperm4• 3 years ago

The cost of the Apollo program was pretty cheap considering it also, in remarkably short order, delivered integrated circuits, fly-by-wire aircraft control, and GPS navigation.

Claims on other advances might be taken with somewhat more skepticism, particularly as regards the ISS, STS, and wholly too numerous Mars landers, but it would be hard to justify complaints about the cost of Galileo or Cassini/Huygens.

quickthrowman• 3 years ago

The bigthink article took a joke out of context and called it a prediction. Here is the full NYT article text, the author is clearly making a joke about planes needing to evolve wings like birds did: http://www.bretswanson.com/index.php/2016/02/pessimistic-pre...

Whatever conclusion the big think article draws is on a misreading of the source NYT article.

antisthenes• 3 years ago

This is the equivalent of taking a single dumb tweet and trying to pick it apart scientifically.

Maybe it makes you feel good, but overall it was just a huge time waste for everyone.

kwertyoowiyop• 3 years ago

They were right about Langley’s machine specifically.

In 1903, NY Times predicted airplanes would take 10M years to develop

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