6 ms·

Faxes from the far side of the moon

176 points by vinnyglennon 11y ago

ctdonath 11y ago
We tend to discuss (understandably) how we don't see the far side of the Moon, discuss the difficulty of the "radio shadow", and are delighted to occasionally see pictures thereof. Consider the reverse: someone (yes, hypothetically) living their life on the far side of the Moon would be completely unaware their quiet home is just 1.3 light-seconds away from a brilliantly reflective orb teeming with life.
- mediumdeviation 11y ago
  Well, all Moonies have to do to see the Earth is to travel to the opposite side of it, whereas to do the opposite from Earth requires launching a vehicle out of the planet's atmosphere, across the orbit of the Moon, and back to Earth again. Granted, it wasn't until several hundred years ago that Earthlings began to circumnavigate the globe, but the technology to travel long (cross-continental) distances have existed since ancient times.
  - TomSawyer 11y ago
    Moonies is not the preferred nomenclature — Mooninites, please.
    - bottlerocket 11y ago
      On the moon nerds get their pants pulled down and they are spanked with moon rocks.
    - the-dude 11y ago
      You're not wrong...
    - Rotten194 11y ago
      Moonmen, please.
  - ewams 11y ago
    Wouldn't at most they just have to move a quarter across the moon? Just thinking out loud.
    - malnourish 11y ago
      I think at most is incorrect, they could travel in the wrong direction.
      - Jtsummers 11y ago
        The furthest they could be is a point exactly center of the far side of the moon. If they travel along a great circle, they'd only have to travel a distance equal to one quarter to the moon's circumference to be able to see the Earth.
        klodolph 11y ago
        But they'd have to know which direction is the correct direction, and they wouldn't know which direction is correct until they knew where the Earth was.
        avmich 11y ago
        If they live not at the center of the far side - and if they choose the wrong direction (because how should they know?) - they can travel more than a quarter of the moon great circle.
        Jtsummers 11y ago
        Ah, good point. So really the at most is `0.5*circumference - epsilon` (starting just on the far side). In the worst case, if they manage to stay on a great circle.
        emiliobumachar 11y ago
        From the article: "Owing to various view angles from different parts of the Earth, the most ambitious jet-setting astronomer could have seen a maximum of 59 percent of the surface of our planetary companion. " If we take into account that fact that Earth is not a point, then epsilon is not so tiny after all, it's around 0.045 times circunference. This would make the final result 0.455 times circunference.
- david-given 11y ago
  At one point there was a theory that there was another Earth, in the same orbit as ours, but diametrically opposite so that it was always hidden by the Sun. There may actually be one. I'm not aware of anyone who has wasted expensive spacecraft time, energy and bandwidth to point an instrument in that direction to look.
  - breadbox 11y ago
    If there was anything of any size there, we would be able to measure its effect on the rest of the planetary orbits. Also, it would not be in a stable orbit, and would eventually either get ejected from the solar system, move into a different, stable orbit, or intersect with us (as Theia presumably did).
ck2 11y ago
It was great we had space races during the cold war (and the fact it was cold). Now we have no more space exploration and just hot wars in Syria. No troops on the ground - wait what, Russia is in Syria? Troops on the ground! Hey I know, let's give Russia millions of dollars to fly American astronauts to the space station because we can't do it ourselves because we drove NASA's budget into the ground, that will teach them.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  The wars today pale in comparison to the "cold" proxy wars that were fought between the USSR and the USA in Latin America, Asia and Africa during the space race. The effects of those wars nearly half a century ago are still being dealt with today.
  - tosseraccount 11y ago
    Countries that backed the US like South Korea and Chile are democratic and prosperous. Countries that back the USSR like North Korea and Cuba are Orwellian nightmares.
    - pampa 11y ago
      those russkies! how dare they spy on every person in the world and invade iraq under false pretense! oh wait...
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - pjc50 11y ago
      > Chile Apart from all the people tortured and "disappeared" by Pinochet?
      - bzbarsky 11y ago
        Let's put numbers to this, because I find people (myself included) often react to things like this without having looked at what was actually going on. The high-end estimates according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet and the links from it are that about 3,200 people were killed, about 30,000 tortured, about 80,000 interned, and about 1000 disappeared but are not known to have been killed (some of these definitely left the country, though). The official numbers accepted in Chile today are a bit lower (about 10-20%) than the above. That's over the 17 years 1973-1990. The population of Chile at the time is around 10-13 million people according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Chile#Population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Chile#Populati... Let's take the lower 10 million number as our total population, to make our per-capita numbers as bad as we can. If you assume that all the people who were interned were interned at the same time (not likely), that's an incarceration rate of 800 per 100,000. Which is, I agree, fairly high when I look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera... -- Cuba has an incarceration rate of 510 per 100,000. But again, this is assuming that all of the 80,000 people who were interned were in prison for all 17 years, which is unlikely. The execution rate, based on the numbers above, is somewhere between 30 and 40 per 100,000 over the 17-year timespan overall; I haven't looked into what the distribution over time looks like, but the average is 2-2.5 per 100k per year. For comparison, though it's harder to get data on Cuba because the government won't exactly allow an investigation, estimates are that somewhere between 8,000 (totally documented) and 140,000 (with some guessing) Cubans were killed by the Castro regime for opposing it, over the course of about 50 years. During this time Cuba had a population of about 7-11 million people (it grows over time). Taking the very lowest end estimates for the number killed and the highest-end population estimates, that gives us an execution rate of about 80 per 100k, for a time average of 1.6 per 100k per year. So the Pinochet regime was at most 1.5x as murderous as the Castro one, and we've totally stacked the deck in favor of Cuba any way we could here. Accepting that there are pretty much _any_ appreciable deaths in Cuba that are not in that "totally verified" list of about 8000 would easily put Cuba ahead in this weird competition. The 30,000 torture victims in Chile, though, that's just inexcusable. I can't find any useful data for Cuban equivalents, so let's assume nothing like this happened in Cuba, for the sake of argument. The upshot is you were more likely to be tortured in Chile, about equally likely to be imprisoned both places, possibly a bit more in Chile, and probably more likely to be executed in Cuba. And of course today Chile is a much nicer place to be than Cuba in all sorts of ways related to freedom of speech and whatnot....
avmich 11y ago
Boris Chertok described how the first picture was received from the Moon. Korolev and others were in the room, the printer started to print, a very vague picture appeared. Somebody said "we know now that the Moon is round" - so little could be seen on the picture. A chief project engineer apparently wasn't satisfied, said "we'll get another picture, a better one", took the paper print, torn it and threw into waste basket. Korolev was calm: "Do you understand, that this is the first - realize it, the first - image of the far side of the Moon, seen by humans?" They did get better pictures later :) .
anovikov 11y ago
Of course there wasn't an 'array of 1000 vacuum tubes'. There was just one. It worked as a good old photo telegraph machine http://gorod.tomsk.ru/uploads/34046/1289982897/ta2.jpg http://gorod.tomsk.ru/uploads/34046/1289982897/ta2.jpg
drumdance 11y ago
Fascinating story. What's even more fascinating to me is to ponder that the space race was part of an arms race that goes back eons. It's fun to imagine Og the caveman and his council trying to think up a defense mechanism against the evil Oog. The tribe of Oog's most recent innovation was the spear, allowing them to fight at a distance. Repeat a million times or two and now we have cyber warfare.

176 points by vinnyglennon 11y ago

We tend to discuss (understandably) how we don't see the far side of the Moon, discuss the difficulty of the "radio shadow", and are delighted to occasionally see pictures thereof. Consider the reverse: someone (yes, hypothetically) living their life on the far side of the Moon would be completely unaware their quiet home is just 1.3 light-seconds away from a brilliantly reflective orb teeming with life.

mediumdeviation 11y ago
Well, all Moonies have to do to see the Earth is to travel to the opposite side of it, whereas to do the opposite from Earth requires launching a vehicle out of the planet's atmosphere, across the orbit of the Moon, and back to Earth again. Granted, it wasn't until several hundred years ago that Earthlings began to circumnavigate the globe, but the technology to travel long (cross-continental) distances have existed since ancient times.
- TomSawyer 11y ago
  Moonies is not the preferred nomenclature — Mooninites, please.
  - bottlerocket 11y ago
    On the moon nerds get their pants pulled down and they are spanked with moon rocks.
  - the-dude 11y ago
    You're not wrong...
  - Rotten194 11y ago
    Moonmen, please.
- ewams 11y ago
  Wouldn't at most they just have to move a quarter across the moon? Just thinking out loud.
  - malnourish 11y ago
    I think at most is incorrect, they could travel in the wrong direction.
    - Jtsummers 11y ago
      The furthest they could be is a point exactly center of the far side of the moon. If they travel along a great circle, they'd only have to travel a distance equal to one quarter to the moon's circumference to be able to see the Earth.
      - klodolph 11y ago
        But they'd have to know which direction is the correct direction, and they wouldn't know which direction is correct until they knew where the Earth was.
      - avmich 11y ago
        If they live not at the center of the far side - and if they choose the wrong direction (because how should they know?) - they can travel more than a quarter of the moon great circle.
        Jtsummers 11y ago
        Ah, good point. So really the at most is `0.5*circumference - epsilon` (starting just on the far side). In the worst case, if they manage to stay on a great circle.
        emiliobumachar 11y ago
        From the article: "Owing to various view angles from different parts of the Earth, the most ambitious jet-setting astronomer could have seen a maximum of 59 percent of the surface of our planetary companion. " If we take into account that fact that Earth is not a point, then epsilon is not so tiny after all, it's around 0.045 times circunference. This would make the final result 0.455 times circunference.
david-given 11y ago
At one point there was a theory that there was another Earth, in the same orbit as ours, but diametrically opposite so that it was always hidden by the Sun. There may actually be one. I'm not aware of anyone who has wasted expensive spacecraft time, energy and bandwidth to point an instrument in that direction to look.
- breadbox 11y ago
  If there was anything of any size there, we would be able to measure its effect on the rest of the planetary orbits. Also, it would not be in a stable orbit, and would eventually either get ejected from the solar system, move into a different, stable orbit, or intersect with us (as Theia presumably did).

ck2 11y ago

It was great we had space races during the cold war (and the fact it was cold). Now we have no more space exploration and just hot wars in Syria. No troops on the ground - wait what, Russia is in Syria? Troops on the ground! Hey I know, let's give Russia millions of dollars to fly American astronauts to the space station because we can't do it ourselves because we drove NASA's budget into the ground, that will teach them.

merpnderp 11y ago
The wars today pale in comparison to the "cold" proxy wars that were fought between the USSR and the USA in Latin America, Asia and Africa during the space race. The effects of those wars nearly half a century ago are still being dealt with today.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  Countries that backed the US like South Korea and Chile are democratic and prosperous. Countries that back the USSR like North Korea and Cuba are Orwellian nightmares.
  - pampa 11y ago
    those russkies! how dare they spy on every person in the world and invade iraq under false pretense! oh wait...
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - pjc50 11y ago
    > Chile Apart from all the people tortured and "disappeared" by Pinochet?
    - bzbarsky 11y ago
      Let's put numbers to this, because I find people (myself included) often react to things like this without having looked at what was actually going on. The high-end estimates according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet and the links from it are that about 3,200 people were killed, about 30,000 tortured, about 80,000 interned, and about 1000 disappeared but are not known to have been killed (some of these definitely left the country, though). The official numbers accepted in Chile today are a bit lower (about 10-20%) than the above. That's over the 17 years 1973-1990. The population of Chile at the time is around 10-13 million people according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Chile#Population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Chile#Populati... Let's take the lower 10 million number as our total population, to make our per-capita numbers as bad as we can. If you assume that all the people who were interned were interned at the same time (not likely), that's an incarceration rate of 800 per 100,000. Which is, I agree, fairly high when I look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera... -- Cuba has an incarceration rate of 510 per 100,000. But again, this is assuming that all of the 80,000 people who were interned were in prison for all 17 years, which is unlikely. The execution rate, based on the numbers above, is somewhere between 30 and 40 per 100,000 over the 17-year timespan overall; I haven't looked into what the distribution over time looks like, but the average is 2-2.5 per 100k per year. For comparison, though it's harder to get data on Cuba because the government won't exactly allow an investigation, estimates are that somewhere between 8,000 (totally documented) and 140,000 (with some guessing) Cubans were killed by the Castro regime for opposing it, over the course of about 50 years. During this time Cuba had a population of about 7-11 million people (it grows over time). Taking the very lowest end estimates for the number killed and the highest-end population estimates, that gives us an execution rate of about 80 per 100k, for a time average of 1.6 per 100k per year. So the Pinochet regime was at most 1.5x as murderous as the Castro one, and we've totally stacked the deck in favor of Cuba any way we could here. Accepting that there are pretty much _any_ appreciable deaths in Cuba that are not in that "totally verified" list of about 8000 would easily put Cuba ahead in this weird competition. The 30,000 torture victims in Chile, though, that's just inexcusable. I can't find any useful data for Cuban equivalents, so let's assume nothing like this happened in Cuba, for the sake of argument. The upshot is you were more likely to be tortured in Chile, about equally likely to be imprisoned both places, possibly a bit more in Chile, and probably more likely to be executed in Cuba. And of course today Chile is a much nicer place to be than Cuba in all sorts of ways related to freedom of speech and whatnot....

avmich 11y ago

Boris Chertok described how the first picture was received from the Moon. Korolev and others were in the room, the printer started to print, a very vague picture appeared. Somebody said "we know now that the Moon is round" - so little could be seen on the picture. A chief project engineer apparently wasn't satisfied, said "we'll get another picture, a better one", took the paper print, torn it and threw into waste basket. Korolev was calm: "Do you understand, that this is the first - realize it, the first - image of the far side of the Moon, seen by humans?" They did get better pictures later :) .

anovikov 11y ago

Of course there wasn't an 'array of 1000 vacuum tubes'. There was just one. It worked as a good old photo telegraph machine http://gorod.tomsk.ru/uploads/34046/1289982897/ta2.jpg http://gorod.tomsk.ru/uploads/34046/1289982897/ta2.jpg

drumdance 11y ago

Fascinating story. What's even more fascinating to me is to ponder that the space race was part of an arms race that goes back eons. It's fun to imagine Og the caveman and his council trying to think up a defense mechanism against the evil Oog. The tribe of Oog's most recent innovation was the spear, allowing them to fight at a distance. Repeat a million times or two and now we have cyber warfare.