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'Oppenheimer' reminds us the titanic costs of advancing technology for all mankind [1]

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Date: 2023-05-08

A Sept. 1945 photo of Trinity Test program participants visiting the site for news crews. J. Robert Oppenheimer on the left is played by Cillian Murphy in the upcoming Christopher Nolan film. On the right is Lieutenant General Leslie Richard Groves Jr, who both oversaw construction of the Pentagon and directed the Manhattan Project and is played in the movie by.... (checks notes) Matt Damon? What? Someone get Kimmel on the phone for me..

Hey look, I’m writing a new diary without a particular billionaire influencer’s name in the title! Oh, don’t worry. His presence will linger, a haze over our topic.

But if you thought I was going to let J. Robert Oppenheimer, an actual theoretical physics genius, share space with a man drowning in scarves like a Lifetime original-movie version of Johnny Depp, you’re out of your mind.

Well shoot, right there I goofed and put Depp adjacent to the big O. There goes another buck in my swear jar.

We’ll keep this one short(er), but first — let’s watch today’s brand new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, releasing from Universal Pictures this December (it was pushed back from an original summer release):

In the trailer, Oppenheimer, played here by Cillian Murphy, has a series of dramatic lines describing the scale of the effort of The Manhattan Project:

“All America’s industrial might and scientific innovation, connected here. A secret laboratory.” “Keep everyone there until it’s done.” “Build a town, build it fast. We don’t let scientists bring their families, we’ll never get the best.”

Some of you might think this sounds like Boca Chica, Texas. Me, what jumps out is this line about bringing loved ones, because an uncomfortable truth is this likely didn’t extend to anyone straying from what we now think of (forgive me) as the nuclear family.

Sure hope there weren’t any brilliant queer scientists who may have brought something to the table. Heck, even Albert Einstein was too big of a weirdo for the U.S. government to play a part.

But we’re not here to distract ourselves with all of America’s problematic history. No, we’re going to talk briefly about the cost of technological advancement.

You probably think I mean this bit in the trailer, where on the eve of the Trinity test, Lieutenant General Leslie Richard Groves Jr. and Oppenheimer are depicted discussing the not-unreal possibility the bomb would incinerate the Earth’s atmosphere.

Groves: “Are you saying there is a chance when we push that button, we destroy the world?” Oppenheimer: “Chances are near-zero.” Groves: “Near-zero?” Oppenheimer: “What do you want with theory alone?” Groves: “Zero would be nice.”

Spoilers — it didn’t.

Obviously, losing the Earth would be a heavy cost. But no, let’s talk about actual dollars and cents, and the kind of mobilization and organization required to make this size of a technological breakthrough.

A brief scan of the Wiki for The Manhattan Project would give anyone an immediate sense of the sheer size and scope we’re talking about, because already you can see it’s longer than one of my wonky deep dives.

The next time someone wants to tell you government is incapable of big things, show them this video, from Newsthink:

Incidentally, in that video around 3:30 we’re introduced to Ruth Huddleston, who was 18-years-old when she joined the project:

Her job would have normally gone to a scientist, but there weren’t enough of them and young men were fighting overseas. So the government recruited farm girls, most of whom were hired straight out of high school. And they proved to be better at the job than the scientists. Scientists were too concerned with figuring out what went right and what had gone wrong, whereas these young women would simply alert their supervisors when there was an issue. They also didn’t overthink any adjustments that were needed, as a scientist might.

Now some might think this example illustrates some specific trait about either women (paging Dr. Peterson) or scientists (paging Dr. Rogan), but I prefer this view — it shows including more people and diverse voices improves overall performance.

Why would you choose for your business or thinking to be mired in a myopic perspective? This should be common sense, but America.

(One of these days we’ll have to talk about where all the amazing women engineers disappeared to when TV began grooming the public with relentless, in-your-face depictions of CIS white men in neat haircuts bringing home the bacon to doting wives. I did promise to keep it short, it’s just hard to wade through American history without stepping in something you’ve got to deal with before you can continue. File this under “the human cost.” )

World War II remains our costliest war ever at over $4 trillion (adjusted for inflation). Lots of interesting nuggets in this article from Moneywise.com, including:

In 1945, the war ended after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs were the result of the top-secret Manhattan Project, a research operation conducted in New Mexico. The Manhattan Project produced a total of four bombs, at a cost of $500 million each, or $2 billion total. That was a lot of money for the time, the equivalent of about $33 billion today.

Let me assure you, no private company on Earth (and very few countries) can pony up $33 billion dollars for a needle-moving leap forward in technology.

Sure, you might be thinking — that’ s a lot of money for “a bomb” that can kill us all.

As I keep pointing out, this is about the leap in technology, as we see from recent NextPlatform reporting:

Computing and nukes have been hand-in-hand partners from the beginning. The Manhattan Project had large teams of human calculators doing math at insurance companies – a kind of massively parallel processing – we know someone whose father worked at an insurance company in New York who did this tabulating work in a secure room for many months and never knew what it was all about until after the fact. The vacuum tube-powered ENIAC computer, which made Sperry Rand a powerhouse in early computing, was used to do calculations as part of the Manhattan Project by none other than John von Neumann, who was a mathematician at Los Alamos working on the bomb. Los Alamos installed a custom variant of ENIAC in 1952, called the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, And Computer or MANIAC for short. (Of course.) The long line of supercomputers installed by Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore will culminate this year with the installation of the capability-class, more than 2 exaflops “El Capitan” supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore, which will be based on the AMD Instinct MI300A hybrid CPU-GPU compute engines and which will cost $600 million to get the hardware and systems software into the field.

I’ve been ending my diaries with this common mantra of “Tax Musk. Fund NASA. Get a Different Result.” It’s meant to provoke, and I’ve enjoyed hearing reactions from readers in the comments.

The Manhattan Project is illustrative of why I repeat this mantra, and it’s only one of a long list of massive public works projects that have been done on our behalf under strict regulation and oversight for our common good.

The biggest line item on that list, by the way, is our Interstate Highway System at $571b (using 2021 inflation data). The next time a billionaire tries to tell you they did it all on their own because they wake up early, do hot yoga and meditation or some other hot nonsense like that, just think how well their businesses would function without utilization of the highway system we all paid for and built together.

Or did they get on their hands and knees and build their own roads? if so, correct me.

So I got wonky on a lazy Sunday afternoon, and what ostensibly started out as a question if Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rockets are as “reusable” as he claims, when you go deeper what begins to emerge is the story of a private space company, who got a huge leg up with Federal tax dollars, seemingly out to crush all competition.

Take note of Elon’s exchange with Kara Fisher at CodeCon 2022, at 10:05:

Elon Musk: “But my goal is not to send myself up, my goal is to open up space for humanity and ultimately set us on a path to becoming a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species.” Kara Fisher: “So you don’t want to go up yourself? Elon Musk: “It’s neither here nor there. I will go at some point.”

Any day now, Elon!

Seriously, does he mean “open up” — or does he mean “control the spigot?”

There’s plenty one could ask themselves about a private American company with no public oversight, already tangling with the FCC and FAA and dominating not just an industry, but the literal Space around our shared planet.

Seems like the only people excited about all this are fans of rocketry, who may labor under a misapprehension we’re really going to Mars anytime soon, or may not know that in 2019 the market shifted away from big rockets, making nearly every model SpaceX manufacturers (or has under known development), too big in a world where there is already 100% too much inventory.

Why then the massive Starship, again?

I’m sure excitement among investors hoping for a hot property to return a decent yield percolates, but I’m no financial advisor and probably don’t have the first idea here what I’m talking about.

Personally, I’d take cues from those hard-working farm girls doing their jobs as part of a collective, sustained effort with measurable goals. But that’s me.

Looking forward to seeing Oppenheimer. (not a paid endorsement, just IMHO) Obviously, there is so much to explore in the morality of all this, which I don’t address here. Above my pay grade.

And if someone wants to make Oppenheimer! go right ahead, since the simple addition of just one exclamation point transforms the vibe 180 degrees from a man struggling with the moral implications of his work into...

Tax Musk. Fund NASA. Get a different result.

Okay, I’m through. See you in the comments.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/8/2168130/--Oppenheimer-reminds-us-the-titanic-costs-of-advancing-technology-for-all-mankind

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