> Graduate students are also listening to postdocs, who in recent years have become increasingly vocal about the precarious nature of their positions and the challenges of getting by on a postdoc salary
This is exactly what saved me. I was an undergraduate research assistant and our postdoc warned me.
The missing part here is that there needs to be enough money to be made to offset the risk and startup costs to justify upfront investment.
The last decades have been dominated by tech giants building mostly software, and this has set the bar for risk/expectations when ideas are competing for dollars.
It is not at all obvious to me that a hugely expensive and insanely high risk venture such as putting humans on the moon would magically materialize as a product of a hypothetical free market in today's world.
Moonshots require risks and rewards shared by larger society. It would be impossible, for example, for NASA to capture the complete value of technology developed to go to the moon. However, the body of knowledge filtering out into society at large justifies NASAs continued funding (that and jobs in key states /s).
It would be hard to justify that SpaceX was a rational business venture without hindsight. And many emoyees who work for SpaceX are known to have made economic tradeoffs. There is definitely something beyond "free market" to the story.
> I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.
I've heard the idea expressed by many people in many different ways. Most versions compare our civilizations progress to a cancer or virus instead of just any old bacteria, because of the way we treat our environment. My favorite example is this[1] post about Factorio, which is a game in which you constantly add to a factory and expand to use more resources.
Yes this has been around for a long time. Sometimes instead of bacteria it's viewed as a cancer because cancer is metabolic and will continue to grow until is destroys it's host.
