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Wouldn't it be easier to train astronauts to be artists than to train artists to be astronauts?
by consz 8y ago
Wouldn't it be easier to train astronauts to be artists than to train artists to be astronauts?
- abhikshah 8y agoThe point is to end the constraint that only astronauts can go to space, to open it up to everyone.
- wmf 8y agoIf monkeys can go into space I think we can send some artists.
- artursapek 8y agoA genuine Hacker News comment if I've ever seen one
- adtac 8y agoCan you even train artistic talent? Doesn't it require a natural gift that you're born with? Not to belittle astronauts, but space travel training is more teachable than true art.
- honkycat 8y ago>> Can you even train artistic talent? Yes. 100%. It's a muscle you train. >> Doesn't it require a natural gift that you're born with? It helps a lot, but from my experience having parents who can support you with lessons and prop you up well into your 20s is a bigger factor to being a successful artist. >> Not to belittle astronauts, but space travel training is more teachable than true art. In my mind it's much harder to be an astronaut than an artist, excluding extremely elite painters and musicians. And I doubt most artists would disagree with this.
- adtac 8y ago>excluding extremely elite painters and musicians I think that's what they're going for with this mission. Nearly every world-famous artist would be interested in something like this, so they won't be short of options. If you can, why not pick the absolute best?
- adamsea 8y agoBest? Who is better, Yo Yo Ma or Wayne Shorter? Bob Dylan or Paul Mcartney or Stevie Wonder? Or Bjork? Ai Wewei or Banksy or Stan Lee? Stephen King or Salman Rushdie? Sorry for getting snippy, but my Point is, art, especially of all things, while it certainly has its quantifiable aspects, is a domain where talking about “absolute best” and “world famous” is not very constructive or useful, imho.
- honkycat 8y agoDo not worry, I've got this: 1. Yo Yo Ma 2. Stevie Wonder 3. Salman Rushdie.
- felipemnoa 8y agoI believe you have to have good taste and take it from there. [1] [1] Ira Glass quote: > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
- perl4ever 8y agoSturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. Ironically, or fittingly, I've been reading a comprehensive collection of his short stories, because it was impressed on me early in my life that he was a great author, and I have recently been horrified at how terrible many of his more obscure ones are. The interesting thing is that the quality does not simply improve with time and experience. There are extreme outliers.
- FiatLuxDave 8y agoWeird question: I've been trying to find a short story I read years ago, which I think is by Sturgeon. Is there any chance you have run across it? In it, an engineer is brought into a war zone, where giant tank-like creatures are on the edge of overrunning the front lines. The lines must be maintained in a cave system to keep extracting a valuable mineral. The generals keep pressuring the engineer for weapons, but he wants to understand the problem first. After lots of analysis, he directs the troops to destroy a certain structure. Within days all the tank creatures die. Then the engineer explains that the cave system is actually the inside of a caterpillar on a cosmic sized leaf, and the tank creatures were its immune system. Killing the caterpillar allowed the troops to loot the caterpillar's body in peace. Ever heard of it? I'm not sure that my memory is completely accurate.
- yesenadam 8y agoCan you even train artistic talent? Doesn't it require a natural gift that you're born with? (musician/artist here) I don't believe in 'talent' or 'gifts', and I don't believe art/music, like a lot of things, is something you can teach (mostly). You can learn it, but you can't teach it. (Botvinnik - founder of the 'Russian School of Chess' (!) - said that about chess, I keep seeing people in different fields saying that.) You learn it by doing it. A lot. And learning from what you love, e.g. the greats in your field. And you won't do that day after day for decades unless you really love doing it. No-one else knows what you should be working on, or what you love. Everyone's bad at anything when they start. I hear a lot of people saying they wished they played flute (or something), but they're not talented. That myth does a lot of harm. I tell them, well, just start!. It's all anyone can do. Art is essentially about doing your own thing, not willfully, but following what your nature dictates. 'You' don't create it; it just flows out of you. So I'd also think that space travel training is more teachable than art, for different reasons. A (probably apocryphal) story: ...a woman once came up to Fritz Kreisler after one of his concerts and said to him, “I’d give my life to play as beautifully as you do.” To which Kreisler replied, “I did.” One's own path. - If we take the decisive step and enter upon the path which is called our 'own path', a secret is suddenly revealed to us: all those who have hitherto been our friends and familiars have imagined themselves superior to us, and are now offended. The best of them are lenient with us and wait patiently for us soon to find our way back to the 'right path' - they know, it seems, what the right path is... - Nietzsche, Daybreak, 484
- nopriorarrests 8y agoThere was an anti-soviet joke popular among soviet intelligencia 60-70 years ago. "Before the revolution, Tula province only had one writer - Leo Tolstoy. After the revolution, Tula province has 100 writers, all of them card carrying members of Soviet Writers Union; so situation with literature is now 100 times better".
- melvinram 8y agoYou likely could to a limited extent but artistry would not be their core competency.
- empath75 8y agoI don’t think you can train people to be artists. You can train people to be better writers or painters, but I don’t think you can train people to have the mindset of an artist.
- colordrops 8y agoNo.
- imsofuture 8y agoPossibly this is the dumbest technonerd comment ever!
- jhammond1 8y agoNo.
- kazagistar 8y ago- Not sure why they would need to be "trained" astronauts. - Easy doesn't seem to have any place here. - It sounds like bringing in diversity of perspective is a large priority here, and starting with trained astronauts would severely constrain that.
- HelloFellowDevs 8y agoNot as easy as you'd think.
- nerdb0t 8y agolol.. have an upvote. i think everyone replying to you just got wooshed.
- ceejayoz 8y agoThey're passengers, there to convey the experience to us still stuck on the ground for now. As Contact put it, "they should have sent a poet". I'd expect crew will accompany them - they've batted around a 100 passenger number in the past - and it's likely to be highly automated as well. The sculptor's certainly not gonna go hop out for a spacewalk to fix an antenna.
- komali2 8y agoFor those missing the reference: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ben_Affleck https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ben_Affleck Ben Affleck, talking to Michael Bay about the movie Armageddon, in which oil drillers are sent to an asteroid to drill a hole in it, drop a nuclear bomb into the hole, and then detonate that bomb: >I asked Michael (Bay) why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers. He told me to shut the fuck up
- rsync 8y agoIt really is worth your time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ahtp0sjA5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ahtp0sjA5U
- bhhaskin 8y agoThanks for sharing! It was pretty good.
- trainingaccount 8y agoActually for Apollo 17 it was found to be easier to train a geologist to be an astronaut than the other way around.
- psergeant 8y agoI guess as long as a high enough percentage of the crew are flight people, you can teach someone else to not get in the way too much?
- manicdee 8y agoOr it turns out that 20 years if field experience is harder to teach than 5 years experience in wearing pressure suits and zero/low gravity.
- rory096 8y agoThe Apollo astronauts were also trained quite extensively in geology. Highly recommend the Apollo 12 episode of From the Earth to the Moon for a great look at that.
- hiccuphippo 8y agoAre they really training to be astronauts though? I understand training for the physical endurance they'll need but they'll be passengers not pilots.
- js2 8y agoNASA chose to train scientists to be astronauts for the later moon missions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Group_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Group_4
- mmustapic 8y agoSurprised no one mentioned it already. Alexey Leonov, first man to perform a space walk, is also an artist. He penciled an orbital sunrise during that mission.
- pohl 8y agoIf the goal is to inspire them to spend their days after they return producing works of art, then your suggestion would likely be ineffective. Had the astronauts wanted to spend their lives creating, they probably would have become creators.
- pohl 8y agoI'd like to nominate Christopher Tin as the musician to send. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQYN2P3E06s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQYN2P3E06s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJiHDmyhE1A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJiHDmyhE1A