zlacker

>>tedsan+(OP)
This is so much money with which we could actually solve problems in the world. maybe even stop wars which break out because of scarcity issues.

maybe i am getting to old or to friendly to humans, but it's staggering to me how the priorities are for such things.

>>deknos+6a1
We could do 20 Manhattan projects with it[1].

1) Build fully autonomous cars so there are zero deaths from car accidents. This is ~45K deaths/year (just US!) and millions of injuries. Annual economic cost of crashes is $340 billion. Worldwide the toll is 10 - 100x?

2) Put solar on top of all highways.

3) Give money to all farmers to put solar.

4) Build transmission.

And many more ...

The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $27 billion in 2023): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project

>>thelas+nb3
You can't just compare things to the Manhattan project. The Manhattan project was large for it's time, but the thing they were doing was ultimately, simple. You can build a nuclear bomb with simply a large enough sphere of enriched U-235 and it'll explode. Which is what the Hiroshima bomb was - a gun type assembly. This is not a complex device.

The relative complexity of projects only ever increases, because if they were simpler we would already have done them. The modern LHC is far more complicated then the Manhattan project. So is ITER. Hell, the US military's logistics chain is more complicated then the Manhattan project.

The fundamental attribution error here is going "look the power to destroy a city was so much cheaper!"