Eratosthenes... knew that the Sun was straight overhead in... Syene at noon on the summer solstice, but that it was 7.2 degrees south of straight ove… - Max Tegmark

Some debaters have argued that designing an effective AWS treaty is hopelessly hard and that we therefore shouldn’t even try. On the other hand, John F. Kennedy emphasized when announcing the Moon missions that hard things are worth attempting when success will greatly benefit the future of humanity. Moreover, many experts argue that the bans on biological and chemical weapons were valuable even though enforcement proved hard, with significant cheating, because the bans caused severe stigmatization that limited their use.

[I]t's... a big mistake as a species if we don't create institutions and governments which support science. There have been a number of... economic studies that have shown... that investing in basic science is the highest return on investment, basically ever... Inventing the ... just basic... physics research... has benefited us so much, in so many ways... Inventing calculus... didn't cost that much, but it's... so, so valuable... This comes back to the whole media question again. There are much more people who have heard about the Kardashians than... can name three living scientists... let alone twenty. ...[W]e've created a culture where scientists... not only are they not particularly known... or viewed as role models or heroes, but they are even very actively attacked by... folks with power with whom what scientists are saying is inconvenient... One of the best things we can do for science funding is to create a less screwed-up media landscape where we actually appreciate how much we benefit from scientific research. That governments will actually support it again. ...We spend two billion dollars a day or more, in this county alone, on military... If you can get a puny, puny fraction of that into scientific research, we wouldn't even be having to have this conversation about how we get funding.

If consciousness is the way that information feels when it’s processed in certain ways, then it must be substrate-independent; it’s only the structure of the information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter doing the information processing. In other words, consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!