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Understanding the Payoffs From Investing In Space Flight
A story at MSNBC.com explains how the technological benefits reaped from investing in the US space program are numerous, but often indirect or difficult to explain. Quoting:
"NASA has recorded about 1,600 new technologies or inventions each year for the past several decades, but far fewer become commercial products, said Daniel Lockney, technology transfer program executive at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. ... 'We didn't know that by building the space shuttle main engines we'd also get a new implantable heart device,' Lockney said. 'There's also a bunch of stuff we don't know we're going to learn, which leads to serendipitous spinoffs.' ... But some innovations do not appear as a straight line drawn from NASA to commercial products. The U.S. space agency may not claim credit for computers and the digital revolution that followed, but it did create a pool of talent that perhaps contributed to that transformation of modern life. NASA brought together hundreds of the brightest scientists and engineers in the 1970s to work on the guidance computers that helped the Apollo missions land humans on the moon. When the Apollo era ended, many of those people dispersed to private companies and to Silicon Valley."
If they were allowed to put their logo on everything they were involved in, then people would start to realize how important they are. Nothing garish, just something like the tiny UL logo you see on everything.
An ad campaign like the Army's would also help.
..is measured in what we won't produce and is therefore something we will never known.
From the article: "But signs exist all around us in daily life. For instance, NASA's need for smaller, lighter electronics in space has helped drive the greater trend toward shrinking smartphones and other miniaturized gadgets. " So, NASA invented Moore's Law, too?
JWST is doomed. The Republicans are too busy cutting spending so they can give the tax money back to their Fat Cat overlords. Meanwhile they haven't the attention span or the forethought a NASA project requires - anything farther in the future than the next election cycle simply doesn't exist for them.
I agree with NASAs contribution to research. However I don't agree with their day to day involvement with launches and maintenance of space vehicles.
We need NASA to continue doing research, creating cutting edge technology and building solutions like the Mars rover.
However the space shuttle didn't deliver on their main objective of affordable space launches.
The larger issue at hand is to end each and every lie to the cost of government projects. This applies to defense, space and other technology government projects.
If a project goes 20% over budget, there should be a huge fine that someone in the private sector pays for. Something that spells a full and complete end to cost overruns.
Trillions of dollars have been wasted in the last 20 years due to projects being priced at 50% or less of their real cost. This applies to the F-35 program, space shuttle, for instance.
The larger question is how to instill cost awareness into traditionally cost insensitive government workers.
There should be an end to all open cost projects. Everything should be fixed cost. Split it into stages.
One example of success is the SDB and SDB phase II bomb programs. The SDB bomb came on budget and ahead of schedule (something more like in record time) and is already completely functional helping the US military win the war on terror.
One example in the space arena is the SpaceX project that is almost ready to replace some of the space shuttle features to resupply the ISS. A contract that is completely fixed budget, with transparency standards that are causing serious concerns on the traditional space suppliers like Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and others.
I can think of a few NASA innovations, such as:
Edible toothpaste, Infrared ear thermometers, freeze dried food, scratch resistant and UV blocking eye-glasses, memory metal (flexible) eye-glasses & anti-scalding showers, silver ion bacteria-resistant home water filters/softeners, eco-friendly water treatment plants, carbon monoxide detectors, wireless headsets, air-chambered sole "athletic" footwear, liquid metal/metallic glass (stronger than titanium), temper foam, shock absorbing foam (for helmets, etc), cordless vacuums, high performance solar cells, the list goes on, and on...
Sure, throw a bunch of money at technology R&D and you get nice shiny things out. The problem is, if you invest all that space exploration R&D money straight into Earth-centric engineering and technology research you get a far better bang for your buck in terms of real, usable products. Now I'm a huge fan of space exploration for the scientific value of the research and because it inspires people to be involved in science but the neat little spin-off products are just a bonus, not the main reason for doing it. Not even remotely.
without the small package transistors, and integrated circuits already in development, that would not be possible
"NASA brought together hundreds of the brightest scientists and engineers in the 1970s to work on the guidance computers that helped the Apollo missions land humans on the moon."
No they didn't. NASA contracted with MIT Instrumentation Laboratory to develop the Apollo guidance systems. (The Instrumentation Laboratory then turned around and based the design on one the USN had paid for - the Polaris guidance computer.) NASA's main contribution was oversight, review, and general bureaucratic paper shuffling. They didn't even program the damn thing - that was done by the Instrumentation Laboratory as well.
Not to mention, it's not really a MSBNC story linked to above - it's an MSBNC rewrite of what amounts to a NASA press release.
Also IBM developed HASP which is still in use today on mainframes, in a more advanced version. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Automatic_Spooling_Priority
You have to look at the opportunity cost with things like this. All new research and development has unintended benefits. And NASA has been such a pork loaded boondoggle lately, it's hard to believe the money couldn't have been better spent. I realized today that the entire I405 improvement project cost as much as 1 space shuttle launch. And no new science comes out of launching the space shuttle, they've been doing that for 30 years. To put it bluntly, there's no way the cost of 115 space shuttle launches could have been worth benefits.
Yes, because Hubble was such a horrible failure. Why would we ever want to repeat that...
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
One of the problems with this argument is it ignores the very simple concept of "opportunity cost". That is, what else could we have done with the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the space program over the last few decades? If it's commercially useful technologies you want, for instance, I strongly suspect you'd get a whole lot more of them by simply giving the National Science Foundation a whole lot more money to fund scientific research, rather than funding the development of technologies specifically related to space flight, only a small fraction of which will find commercial applicability elsewhere. Space science and engineering, particularly that relating to crewed missions, should be funded or not funded on its own merits, rather than relying on arguments about better toasters and pacemaker batteries. They're a useful bonus, and advocates should treat them as such.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
What we will never know is what would have happened if the same money, talent, resources and political will had been used in directed towards stated, non-space related problems. Since we won't ever know, there's little point in speculating.
<sadly my suspicion is that it would just have been used for another pointless war, so for that reason alone the space programme was probably a good thing>
The one question that should be asked is "If we knew back when it all started, how much (or little) usable science and benefit to humanity would come out of the programme, would we have taken the same route?" But since we can't go back and ask that, the question is moot - as is trying to retroactively justify the programme on the back of some random discoveries and development it happened to make.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
You can't run an empire with no gold
Empires are run off the gold of the subjugated peoples. That's the main reason for wanting them.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
To get the alpha centauri victory of course!
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
...except that the entire amount that NASA has ever spent since it was formed is less than the current wars or bailouts.
citation
No sig today...
Yes, NASA and the aircraft industry before it among other things. Moore just adopted it as a business plan later but the trend was already well under way before Intel existed. In fact Apollo 7 was in a late stage of assembly before Intel was founded (July 18, 1968) and Intel didn't have a commercial microprocessor until the Apollo program was nearly over (1971). Fred Hoyle had an evil megacorporation called Intel in a SF novel but that was long before the real Intel was founded.
NASA is not a for profit business. It's in part about research (mostly in theory).
Since research IS about discovery and invention you absolutely must include all the spin off techs in determining it's value, they're much of the point.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Then stop spending all the fucking gold you bring in, plus more that you aren't bringing in. Spending more rather than spending wisely is a pretty fucking idiotic idea.
"America will continue to decline until "lavish spending promises" no longer win elections. You can't run an empire by spending more gold than you take in."
FTFY.
Also, don't confuse "tax rate" with "tax revenue" - they are not the same and do not move in lockstep. For a good example, see capital gains taxes: when the rate has been reduced, revenue has increased.
"Astronomical" is a bit of an exaggeration, no? NASA's funding is a minuscule fraction of the government's revenue.
The sum of the intelligence of the world is constant. The population is, of course, growing.
A commentator in Norway said that "American politics seems more like two groups of teenagers battling it out between each other, than two political parties", which I think sums it up greatly.
This is blinging
Hubble was enormously more expensive than it needed to be. For what we spent trying to shoehorn it into the Shuttle program (the most outrageously expensive and dangerous launch vehicle ever developed) we could have built and launched a whole series of Hubble Telescopes.
Just because something has value, it doesn't follow that it's worth what it cost.
You can run it on less gold then. Not as little gold as we currently collect, but less.
So, hey - it turns out that the problems of widespread rebellion and overtaxation are different in kind from the problems of under-taxation and repressive government policies. Who would have thunk that different problems require different solutions?
I mean, I could quote any number of irrelevant historical situations - but shit, who has the time for worthless endeavors. Short version - in our own history, the same trends we're seeing now (rampant power transfer to corporate entities, drops in collected revenue, reduced regulation) during the Gilded Age led directly into the worst depression the country has ever suffered. OH SNAP IT'S A RELEVANT HISTORICAL PRECEDENT! RUN! IT'S GOING TO GET YOU!
Well, you didn't bother to state what the tax situation was before this "young Caesar" went to work, so we have pretty much no idea if what you're stating is relevant or not. However, here's some simple logic: if taxes are too high you won't collect a lot of money because people will just not pay them. If taxes are too low, you won't collect a lot of money even if everyone pays because, well, taxes are too low. Go make everyone's taxes $20/year and I'll gladly pay them and even be thrilled about it. The country will go broke, of course. Now, since the right-wing answer to everything from inflation to deflation and booms to busts is to lower taxes on the rich, well, the current situation is unsurprising.
I'll bet that what the Romans DIDN'T have was a seemingly high tax rate on businesses (so you can say "we have one of the highest tax rates on businesses in the world") and exemptions and loopholes galore (so nobody actually paid that tax rate).
So here's some more logic: if you need to collect more money, THEN COLLECT MORE MONEY. If you do it by closing loopholes and lowering rates (like Kennedy) that works, or if you do it by keeping loopholes and raising rates, that works too. The current President understands taxation just fine. He understands that tax collections have been "redistributed" over the last 30 years so that the rich and especially corporations pay a much lower component of overall taxes than, well, pretty much ever. He gets that middle income people and small businesses have been shouldering more of the tax burden while the wealthy and large corporations gain most of the direct benefits. (Mining fees on federal lands that are so low they're almost nonexistant because the "free market" obviously doens't apply to We the People getting fair rates for our resources, the military protecting the business interests of multinationals overseas, low tariffs on foreign trade, over 50% of which is made up of US companies buying goods from their own offshore subsidiaries--keeping wages and domestic employment low. I could go on...) He also understands that what's going on right now is the rich paying their corporate owned news and talk show "talent" to rail against tax increases, even though the overwhelming majority of Americans and small businesses not only won't have to pay it, but have received tax cuts during his tenure in office. Getting the poor to take up for the rich is pretty much the goal of corporate propaganda machines masquerading as news outlets these days.
There's a lot the President doesn't understand, like how to reign in spy agencies and overzealous "law enforcement" and restore civil liberties, but especially he doesn't understand how to properly tell right-wing cranks to go to hell. Perhaps he'll learn. The odds of the other side learning anything are pretty much zero these days.
You hit a point of diminishing returns after playing space trucker for so long. NASA needs to do some *NEW* programs with *NEW* mission objectives that benefit science.
No - that's why you need entrepreneurs risking their own money to fund stuff. Politicians don't want to do anything unless they see the immediate reelection. Accept donations from $SPECIAL_INTEREST and feel instant gratification. Do the right thing, and there might be something in 10-15 years being developed because of it. No, we can't trust the government (who are actually people just like the "public") to fund something that's 10-15 or even more years down the road.
FTFY
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Realistically its almost impossible to calculate the payoffs from raw science and entities like NASA that do it.
its so huge and pervasive.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Hubble was enormously more expensive than it needed to be. For what we spent trying to shoehorn it into the Shuttle program (the most outrageously expensive and dangerous launch vehicle ever developed) we could have built and launched a whole series of Hubble Telescopes.
And launched a whole series of Hubble telescopes with what? Giant rubber band sling shots?
Since Hubble was really nothing more or less than a spy satellite that was pointed away from the earth, they could probably have used the same unmanned rockets that the Air Force has used for the last 30+ years.
Any investment of money in a big endeavor which has to push the tech envelope will generate payoffs as we are discussing. Spinoff tech and inventions came from military spending as well.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
While those discoveries and innovations are nice, they were simply side effects of the primary intention, so can't really be used as a justification for it.
That's not how cost-benefit analysis works when the goal is scientific progress. Any scientific progress is benefit and should be weighed against cost. If your goal is to produce a very specific scientific development then your point is valid, but what is being argued here is the overall benefit, not just the benefit to space travel; indeed, it is the entire point of the conversation, and to ignore it is to have a different conversation. Why not try having this one with us?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
On 1 - unless those individuals live off sunshine and rain (and discarded food and other items) and never EVER pay for anything.
They are paying taxes through the cost of items/services they pay for, which have their own taxes and levies included in the price, which is then pushed on to the final consumer.
Basically, if you are using the "coin of the realm" you are paying taxes - through the wonder of inflation.
On 3 - First problem with defining contribution to society is that it can't be defined no more than you can define all water everywhere simply by the H2O formula.
There is positive contribution, negative contribution, active, passive, voluntary, involuntary and coincidental etc. etc.
Then you can go through economic, sociological, biological, physical etc. ways of contribution and influence and "cross-join" that with all those mentioned above.
Only thing that is for certain is that EVERYONE contributes to the society by simply being there. Even just as the sum of all their molecules.
Most people contribute WAY more than that. Even when considered as simply "consumers", disregarding all other ways they influence the society.
What I'm saying is that it is not just "better to assume most people contribute to society in some way", it is a MUST.
Well... unless you don't mind operating with faulty logic, untruths and misconceptions.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The metaphor of a cash result betrays the mindset that everything that costs must have a financial reward.
What happened to teaching that learning and discovery were valuable beyond reckoning?
I am embarrassed to say that even most religions have got at least this right.
Do we need metaphorical monks working in metaphorical scriptoria to investigate basic science?
Constellation was a joke created primarily as space industry welfare and Obama was right to end it.
Spacex has done more in 3 years in getting a new rocket system off the ground than NASA did in 10 years
at 1/10 the cost. I have every reason to believe that the Falcon Heavy demo flight will launch next year and dragon
capsule will be ready on time to supply the space station.
Obama has done nothing but scrap unrealistic uberexpensive programs and focus on what is achieveable with what we actually
have which is refreshing and can actually work.
Silicon Valley. Silicon valley owes its life to NASA. Now, if we can get this to happen all over again, we would be doing just fine. One approach is for the military to push their smart phone as needing to be produced in America.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not a mod, but I can say that while not overrated, your proposition is, well, naive.
There is a reason why nearly all attempts at mass social engineering has failed utterly. There's also a reason why most attempts at marketing for world peace has failed.
The reason that social engineering has failed on a mass scale has to do with culture, tradition (folks do cling to those), and a total disregard for both by those who are out to build a 'perfect society'. 100 years ago, we had the likes of Lenin and the Bolsheviks who were trying to engineer a perfect society, and on the surface, it sounded ultimately equitable and fair ('from each according to his ability, to each according to his need', was a good summary of the ideal). Folks bought the ideal, but history shows the results, no? Now you're going to propose that we do something like that again? We also got to see, 80-some-odd years ago, what the other extreme brought (national/racial/ideological). Long story short, the biggest cause of human suffering and death in the 20th century wasn't famine, pestilence, or disaster... it was war and the internal miseries brought on by political experimentation gone horribly wrong. To be fair, maybe your political/social scientists might have a different idea altogether, but having seen where both extremes (communism and fascism) went, most folks are rightfully horrified at the idea, and prefer to stick with their imperfect-but-workable solutions.
The reasons that marketing for world peace has failed? Much simpler... most other folks have their own ideas, and it usually involves advantages gained at your expense. After all, it's drop-easy for the EU member state politicians and citizenry to preach about world peace and not really needing an army... they have more than sufficient security and backstopping provided courtesy of the US military. Same with Japan and South Korea, or numerous other nations.
Personally, I like the idea of not spending so much money on US military effort. We can start by proposing that we withdraw from all but a small handful of logistic-critical bases globally. Of course, every time the subject comes up, suddenly the population there isn't too keen on the idea. Even the most strident US-hating socialist cringes when the idea of defending themselves comes up (see also South Korea in the 1990's when the population wanted US personnel out of there... until the US began to consider the idea, leaving the whole peninsula practically defenseless against North Korea. Suddenly the South Koreans were all kinds of happy to see a US soldier in their neighborhood).
To sum it all up, things are a lot more complex than you propose, you know?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
While NASA is supposed to be a civilian outfit it should be noted that the first astronauts end even the first missiles started out as military rockets. Back in those days the crossover between the military and NACA (which later became NASA) was sort of into just about everything. The same contractors, test pilots and even some funding was shared by both. It was the cold war and there were other issues going on. The Russians had decent rockets and we needed to catch up. When the agency separated from the military and went on it's own budget without military help or working on military issues along with them the agency was slowly starved to death ever since. I suspect that if the military didn't believe in a need for NASA it would soon cease to exist.
Your argument does not really hold though since military R&D is extremely inefficient. NASA does an awful lot of research with that tiny budget compared to the current version of the "military industrial complex". There is a hell of a lot more pork in military R&D (thanks to the current political process) compared to the work NASA does and the way they do it.
bob@Osprey:~>
Nothing short of psychiatric attention can start the healing process with these people. Or time. We can only hope that in a few years, as private space fizzles, and space tourism is shown to be a one-time stunt, and as our energy runs out, these sadly-deluded people can attain some contact with reality again.
yes cause dealing with problems that effect thousands of people are less important than some dingleberry floating in space for the umteenth time
No, but there is a lot of photographic evidence.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
you must be one of those people who think "space program" must mean astronauts in a tin can going somewhere near earth. NASA still has a number of amazing programs in progress and soon to be launched that will vastly increase our knowledge of the universe. Some of them are in concert with asian and european space programs, but patriotism in big scientific research is a disease that limits acquisition of knowledge.
The impact isn't necessarily NASA (which has a bad case of "Old Elvis" at this point), but the impact of the whole space race. This program fired up a generation, perhaps two, of scientists and engineers, some of whom worked for NASA but I'd wager that the majority ended up in some other science/engineering endeavour. However, over the past decade the best-and-brightest have become quants on Wall Street because that's where the money/bright lights are, and we all know how well THAT has worked out.
Yes, it can be argued that NASA has squandered a lot of money over the years, and that it's a horrible poltical and PR animal these days (somewhat self-inflicted), but it was part of a program that led to a lot of what Americans take for granted today. These days it's just a huge jobs program (read "welfare for whitecoats"), and unless it manages to reinvent and reinvigorate itself it will go the way of the Old Elvis. Sadly, I don't think a recovery is possible due to bloat and lack of political will (read "cojones").
Carl Sagan has something to say also on this subject http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wJYpRJQVbo
MOD THE CHILD UP!
That's exactly it. I keep seeing arguments that the space program was justified by all the spinoff technologies. There's a similar argument, with more sinister implications, that most technical innovation comes from war.
The real lesson, it seems to me, is that if you provide lots of resources for solving a big technical problem, you're likely to solve that problem and invent a lot of other useful things along the way. And if that's the case, why not choose a big technical problem that we have a clear practical need to solve? That way, we may accomplish something important, whether or not there are any useful spinoff technologies.
There are plenty of good candidates for a big technical problem worth solving. Global climate stabilization comes to mind, or the related problem of sustainable energy production.
Because the argument that space exploration led to many useful spinoff technologies implies that space exploration was more likely to produce useful spinoff technologies than other projects that might have been chosen.
Despite being developed by the same contractor, there's no hard evidence that Hubbles shares technology with the KH-13 series, is there?
Other than being a large multispectral imaging platform with positioning capabilities, no.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Well said, except communism and fascism are the same extreme.
Another commentator said that "American politics seems more like two groups of psychotic badgers battling it out between each other than two political parties", which I think sums it up better.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
No person in the world makes a single influence on society. Or a single kind of influence. "Negative" OR "positive".
It is a highly complex chaotic system where one person continuously influences many other persons and objects (which in turn spread their own "influenced" influence further and so on, and so on...) in many different ways.
Butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane somewhere else - or a new iPhone to be produced.
A "bad, bad, BAD" person may commit a series of crimes and be killed or jailed for that (or not) - but his/her actions may trigger a change in law enforcement, justice system or locksmithing that would prevent such acts in the future, maybe saving lives in the process.
Which may lead to increase in population, causing crime rates to rise etc. Or not.
Only thing that is certain is that the system (society, civilization, humanity...) still keeps working - with continuous mending and upgrades.
Remember, slavery used to be all the rage at one time. Or feudalism.
Or treating people from another village like beasts.
And yet we got to where we are now. Not an utopia, but not that bad either.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Obama for eliminating thousands of jobs
I understand the compelling need to look for a short-term revenue reward.
However, that sort of thing is precisely what business is GOOD at.
It's the long-term, vague "specific monetary value to individual"-value stuff like highways, armies, and SPACE PROGRAMS where governments need to participate.
Raw material shortages? A single decent-sized asteroid would provide more metals in a single go than have been mined in human history.
Energy shortages? On any human scale, the energy available in space is infinite.
Further, any reasonable view of the history of this planet shows that as time passes the ultimate survivability of any species approaches zero. Eggs in a single basket, if nothing else.
No, none of this puts revenue in a corporation or even perhaps a government's pocket.
However, the scale of value to humanity as a whole of getting OUT of this gravity well, OUT of this solar system, and sustainably among the stars is truly incalculable
-Styopa
The reasons that marketing for world peace has failed? Much simpler... most other folks have their own ideas, and it usually involves advantages gained at your expense.
If it's happening generation after generation, it's not that they have their own ideas, it's that they trust those who came before.
Social change happens a lot, but it's hugely influenced by what's going on. It's why you can take emigrants from a divided and oft-warring continent, full of many disparate languages, settle on a far larger continent, and end up with 3 extremely large countries. If people were really as cruel and unsaveable as you seem to suggest, why did they unify under fair and representative governments (relatively speaking, at the very least) instead of splitting into dozens or hundreds of monarchies, each speaking different languages?
My personal belief is that world peace will be impossible until you can experiment with governance in a meaningful way--until you can do science to it. The various and miscellaneous ways and morays of governance are in fact incredibly complicated, and as a programmer I can say with clarity that finding the root cause of a procedural mistake can be next to impossible. If you could set up a nation to create a generation of supremely educated, wise, intelligent people--even if only 10% of the generation ended up like that, given the data you could gather along the way, the next generation could turn out differently, and then the next after that. Human beings are not mysteriously evil in some sort of cannot-be-accounted-for way. We learn and we trust, and those can be enough to create new evil every generation, if the world around us is set up for it.
The biggest issue with nasa is what could have been done with that money. Unmanned landers for every planet, space telescopes to watch for objects heading for earth, alternative power so we can stop sending money to middle east terrorists, a fast and convenient national transit system to eliminate the car, a cure for cancer- there are lots of things that could have been done. The USA has been the worlds police for decades, i suggest ending that. Your gov/country might get more credit for what it does, and/or you'd find the world more cooperative when you do. And you'd save Trillions in the meantime. Of course that won't happen as the reason you're spending so much time/effort/money on policing the world is so you can force the world to play by your rules (to your financial/political benefit).
Call me a space nutter because I pretty much fit that description. In the last part of your post you mention that our energy runs out. As a self proclaimed space nutter, may I ask you what we are supposed to do when we are over populated and the energy runs out? If somehow we were able to make it into space we could maybe use some of that energy out there? The argument is old but eventually we do have to leave the planet. So why not now?
100 years ago, we had the likes of Lenin and the Bolsheviks who were trying to engineer a perfect society, and on the surface, it sounded ultimately equitable and fair ('from each according to his ability, to each according to his need', was a good summary of the ideal). Folks bought the ideal, but history shows the results, no? Now you're going to propose that we do something like that again?
With the technological and sociological advantages that the western world has now, we should be able to make a better job of it than the Russians did 100 years ago. The Soviets had to transform an agrarian, backward economy into something modern, and they didn't have the luxury of an established democratic system in place to guide and control things.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
After all, it's drop-easy for the EU member state politicians and citizenry to preach about world peace and not really needing an army... they have more than sufficient security and backstopping provided courtesy of the US military.
The EU is more than capable of defending itself, especially once Turkey and Russia join up too.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Wow, and to think no one ever noticed that amazing historical parallel before. Oh, that's right, it's because there's absolutely no fucking similarity at all.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it