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The project to take a single picture of a black hole 55 millions years away cost $60 million. There's no immediate profit to be made from the discovery. It couldnt have happened if the scientists had to justify their work on the basis of commodities to be sold on the market
Or if they were beholden to private investors & quarterly earnings reports. It required public funding to liberate science from the bounds of profit. Or it wouldnt have happened. Nor could it have happened without deep international coordination (including with Russia and China)
While we can take pictures of previously unseeable things, 55 million light years away, global capitalism can't get all the abundance of food into the world's hungry bellies, all the homeless into empty homes, & how to guarantee the conditions of existence as social rights.
Because there's no profit to be made there. Quite the contrary. Our economies are bound by the profit motive and the systems of production, distribution, and technology are controlled by corporations. So massive social problems are widely considered natural, permanent, unsolvable
UN declared eradication of poverty and hunger Millennial Development Goals to be reached by 2015. They had celebrations & press conferences. But they failed. The people remained hungry. The rich got richer. All because of the bounds of the profit system.
Albert Einstein, whose theory of general relativity led to the theory of black holes, was also a socialist. He saw then, a full century ago, that there was more than enough for humanity to provide for the needs of the people if the economy were simply reorganized.
A century later the black hole theory has entered into the world of reality, while Einstein's plain observation that we can have a world without hunger, homelessness and poverty remains "theoretical."
That theory too can be made real. The scientists who made this breakthrough devoted their lives to it; it was not a passing interest. It will take a lot of dedication, hard work, trial, error and sacrifice to make our next, great collective "breakthrough for humanity."
No one needs an advanced degree to join this struggle. All that is required to join is a desire to end humanity's needless suffering and to remove the shackles placed on us by the lords of profit and their system / END THREAD
