Covid went really well in all the intellectual bastions of liberal democracy right? NYC, SF? California famously no downsides from their policy choices at all.
And then to top it off, you compare response to China - the government that lied through it's teeth about covid from the beginning, jailed journalists and destroyed evidence.
Oh, nobody managed Covid well. The question was capacity to sacrifice for the common good.
New York is a bad example to call out since it was one of the first places to get hit, locked down hard after a delay, and yet came out with lower per-capita deaths and a stronger economy than most red states. (Speaking as someone who lives in one of the reddest states in the union.)
Maybe the issue is that people assume that a randomly selected population would consist of US citizens. What if you picked Japanese? They did well during covid. An they are know for having a strong communal responsibility. Maybe the average US citizen is just a bad choice for a generation ship? Then again given the choice between sending foreign citizen's or sending no generation ship would probably result in no generation ship bring launched.
People from latin america might be a good match - last time the fleet of generation ships not only reached the destination in sufficient number, but one of them even ahead of schedule[0]!
> The question is "Could we create a cadre of 400 highly effective people that could sustain a colony on a spaceship?"
For a generational ship, the question becomes even more complex because you would have to build a culture of expertise that can sustain itself over multiple generations.
> The question was capacity to sacrifice for the common good.
COVID didn't test for capacity to sacrifice for the common good. Sacrifice is voluntary. It tested for capacity to submit to authoritarian control for the common good.
> Rural Americans > high school dropouts
Lol HN you really are too much sometimes.
Covid went really well in all the intellectual bastions of liberal democracy right? NYC, SF? California famously no downsides from their policy choices at all.
And then to top it off, you compare response to China - the government that lied through it's teeth about covid from the beginning, jailed journalists and destroyed evidence.
Unreal