what problem had more intellectual energy dedicated to it in the 20th century?

i think capitalism but the problem is significantly more complicated and the people involved were significantly less coordinated and so it largely washed out

@mutual_ayyde Why do you think capitalism? I was just looking at heat management for one of the rovers yesterday and it's much more advanced than I would have imagined and that's just a tiny thing.

@apodoxus the number of ostensible marxists counted in the millions over the course of the century alone

@mutual_ayyde @apodoxus if you want to count every ostensible Marxist as contributing intellectual energy....the entire US education was overhauled from the ground up to support the space program, so you also need to count every single HS calculus student since Sputnik.

@elfprince13 @mutual_ayyde This is an interesting point... Many who were educated to work on space-related stuff never actually got to work specifically at NASA. They ended up in Silicon Valley and Defense contracting and other stuff. Then there were the large masses which failed out of attempts at it (which there must be some equivalent in the masses of Marxists too.)

Counterpoint though: How big is the US educated population compared to the number of Marxists globally?

@apodoxus @mutual_ayyde ~64.6M HS graduates from 1959-2000, if I'm reading https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_219.10.asp (and using Excel) correctly.

Anyway, the mean, median, and modal contributions are all likely to be very low, but that's true for both populations.