What's with this amazing inability of us Westerners to learn from past mistakes and endless optimism about benevolent intention of others? You'd think we would have corrected this by now, eg. after http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/russiago.... Personally FYI, I understand the optimism, but less so the inability to learn.

TL;DR Sorry, it's automatic. No such thing as ex-KGB. [/End of rant].

But the underlying reason why something is fascinating -- because it is connected with power -- doesn't change. So it is hypocritical to claim that "I want this and that, and my intention are innocent and sincere" when the object of your desire is a helicopter gunship. Now, something flying at 7.8 km per second is potentially far more dangerous than a helicopter gunship.

In other words, wanting space exploration to be free of politics is essentially wanting power to be free of politics. Which is a bit oxymoronic. As soon as your exploration produces something interesting, be it knowledge, materials, or even location, someone else is going to want it for themselves.

* http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/donglegate-adria-richar...

* http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/pr-executive-j...

* http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/09/10/busines...

* http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/30/paul-graham-responds-to-cri...

It's not the message, it's how it is delivered.

No. My conclusion was predicated on a belief that it is better that we have our Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle in the next 100-200 years rather than in the next 1000-2000. If you have budget of several tens of billions and you want to be judicious where you invest, it is unrealistic to expect to create magic in Africa over 100-200 years. In that situation the best you could hope to achieve for that continent is to invest in medicine aka what Bill Gates is doing, and hope that it will help turn the continent from 3rd world to something like Mexico (which is still far from great). And then what hope do you have that once all the work is done that people there won't elect someone like Chavez and start beating up students at local universities with baseball bats?

> you whitewash over the fact that we ARE in fact much much better-off than most people who have ever lived

Perhaps yes, but not if you listen to egalitarian vanguard. Just talk to OWS participants if you don't believe me. Though if we are indeed better off, how much of that is a function of technology rather than egalitarianism?

> you are looking for profit

What do you mean by "looking for profit"? As I said, my (hypothetical) motives are purely altruistic. I have fifty billion dollars and I am willing to spend them all to the last penny. All I want in return is the next Plato/Aristotle/Socrates within the next 100-200 years. Is that too much to ask? How do you interpret this motivation as "profit"? Who profits?

> There is no immediate pressure on us to produce Aristotles et. al. because they are not going to bring immediate benefit

First of all, it could be argued that someone like Plato has made a huge contribution to Greek and Roman civilizations. Aristotle was the personal tutor of Alexander the Great for God's sake. These individuals contributed tremendously, both within their lifetimes and in the millennia after. Second, even if you discount the influence these people had in the Ancient world, and assume that the majority of it is felt 1000 years after their death, then still it is better to have them sooner rather than later. For that means waiting 1000 years for the next step in our civilization rather than 2000 years.

> Darwinism requires diversity. Hence it is simply better to invest in disadvantaged

Why not invest in diverse but advantaged then? How is it that you jump from one proposition to the other (i.e. that diversity equals disadvantaged)?

> the truth is that you are coming from a position of an individual with significant wealth who is looking for next Aristotle to increase his personal wealth by taking his

No. We both agree that the next Aristotle probably wouldn't be the next billionaire. He will probably not be a poor man, but it is highly unlikely that he will turn my fifty billion into fifty trillion.

> All the arguments are simply dressings to make that short-sightedness and greed look good.

There! Just add that I'm a Zionist homosexual free-masonic Illuminati overlord. Perhaps you are that OWS supporter I mentioned above? In which case, I don't even have to invoke one as a literary device!

First, I agree that humans should probably not "devolve" into flowers (although "devolve" is a funny word -- technically, evolution, like entropy, is a one-way process, where even parasites can be said to evolve in their own way).

Second, I agree that exceptional individuals like the Greek scholars you mentioned contributed enormously to the human progress in the past two thousand years.

Third, I agree that average human condition in Africa is currently deplorable compared to average human condition on all other Earth's continents.

Where we seem to disagree is in the way we frame our questions and our solutions. Assuming I am an individual of significant wealth with altruistic motives, I would like to produce as many Aristotles, Platos, and Socrates in as short of a time frame as possible. Africa seems like a terrible, terrible place to invest my money with that goal in mind. First, as an individual investor, I can only invest during a timeframe of no more than approximately 20-30 years. Second, even if I open a foundation in my name that would continue doing my work after my death for centuries, Africa still looks bad (the worst in fact) because what happens if, for example, the country I invest in is taken over by a dictator or a warlord some fifty years from now (of which there is an extremely high risk throughout the entire continent of Africa) who brings the country back to the Middle Age or worse, while taking advantage of the invested results. Dictators have a common tendency of "cutting the tall poppies" when they come to power, which means that the African Aristotle I invested into will most likely be imprisoned or dead before he even becomes anything close to Aristotle.

I (as well as my foundation) would get a much better return on investment in a country like Romania that is "almost there" in terms of development and whose political situation is kept secure by a strong supranational organization like EU or NATO.

Finally, let me explain what I mean by the difference between individual and supra-individual. If you look at humanity's history over the past 3000 years, you will see that our attitude to things concerning politics was very different throughout. We had had pluralistic societies like Ancient Greece which simultaneously condoned slavery. Aristotle, for example, believed that certain individuals are superior "by natural right", and that others were better off serving their superiors, i.e. he was anti-egalitarian. I consider myself more egalitarian than Aristotle was, however I do not believe that our current fashion of rather extreme egalitarianism represents some final development; to me it appears as more of a "moral fashion" that always occurs at a certain phase of an outward wave of what I call "literatization" (as opposed to "civilization").

So to an individual mind in the early 21st century some truths (such as that societies have to be structured in one way and not another) may seem to be self-evident, but that's because an individual is always anchored to his or her historical epoch. Moreover, the desire to structure the society in a particular way seems to follow one's biological idiosyncrasies. For example, the primary driver of intellectual activities of a tall person may be an internalized wish to arrange the society in such a way that tall people are not discriminated against. Similarly, the primary driver of intellectual activities of a department of economics of a country X might be a motivation that the elite of that country stays in power.

For that reason, I tend not to trust neither egalitarians nor anti-egalitarians when it comes to evaluating whether a particular society is good or bad. Unfortunately, the only truly useful measure of a society's success (its ability to spread itself while maximizing the number of potential paths of realization of its individuals) is somewhat beyond of what can be measured over one's lifetime. So I tend to prefer to stay close to natural laws, and assume that if a particular gamete is "lucky", it is perhaps lucky for some reason that is unknowable to me.