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thelastgallon | on: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
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

XorNot | parent | next
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!"

ahmeneeroe-v2 | parent | next
(contingent on the money actually being spent, which....) This is basically an AI-manhattan project. It would employ vast numbers of construction, tradesmen, manufacturing, etc.
philomath_mn | parent | next
This isn't a handout, it is an investment with an expected return. Which is good, because it is less likely to be applied to bad ideas like forcing solar roadways and solar farmers.
LMYahooTFY | parent
> 3) Give money to all farmers to put solar.

...on their roofs? Over all their crops? What's the play here?