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44 years after the Wright Brothers first flew 120 feet, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. 22 years after that, man landed on moon. 51 years later ... still
by melling 6y ago
44 years after the Wright Brothers first flew 120 feet, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. 22 years after that, man landed on moon.
51 years later ... still waiting for the future to arrive.
- medium_burrito 6y agoHopefully not for long. Tomorrow hopefully will be a big step forward with SpaceX's 12.5km hop. EDIT: Or the Israeli ex-gov guy saying "It was definitely aliens".
- Zhenya 6y agoContext for aliens: https://m.jpost.com/omg/former-israeli-space-security-chief-says-aliens-exist-humanity-not-ready-651405 https://m.jpost.com/omg/former-israeli-space-security-chief-...
- softwaredoug 6y agoWould watch this Netflix show
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoHopefully Commander Orange was kept in the dark about this. Then again the aliens can just use a neuralizer on him and we might be spared the coming inane tweet storms.
- awiesenhofer 6y ago> Eshed provided more information in his newest book, ... Ah, that explains it.
- hourislate 6y ago'We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" - Peter Thiel
- standardUser 6y agoA witty quote from a white supremacist.
- rl3 6y agoA decade earlier, in a 2000 IBM commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzm6pvHPSGo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzm6pvHPSGo
- numpad0 6y agoLaser based additive manufacturing in solar orbit when
- andbberger 6y agoWell technically we've been doing that all along
- numpad0 6y agoShould have specified serial production O’Neill colony built on it
- justhw 6y agoReminds me of this tweet: 60yrs from Wright Cycle Co. to Supersonic https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1332292031427833858 https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1332292031427833858
- bartread 6y ago> 51 years later ... still waiting for the future to arrive. I feel this acutely too. The trajectory we've been on feels a lot more Bladerunner than it does Star Trek[0] and it's honestly somewhat disappointing. All that promise, and possibly all that hubris, come to naught. We have to acknowledge the impact the Cold War had and, perhaps, with it winding down as the 80s wore on the impetus was no longer there. Nobody wanted to spend the money on these grand developments and great explorations any more. Yes, we've sent probes to many parts of the solar system but, whilst much better than not going at all, in no way is this comparable to going ourselves (it's much easier and safer, for one thing). It is weird though, because the drive towards flight and, ultimately, space exploration predates the Cold War, kicking off big time back in the Victorian era, so it's unclear why the end of the Cold War also marked the end of that era of advancement. I don't think it had to be inevitable. Our dreams didn't have to become smaller; nobody forced us to become less. (Of course I realise Mars is a much tougher proposition than the moon, but we haven't even really bothered to try, which is what frustrates me.) [0] Don't worry: I realise Star Trek is ridiculous.
- claudeganon 6y agoNot to be pedantic, but Star Trek predicted that America would experience an extreme period of inequality and social decay in the 21st century, only finding its way out of its selfish, destructive ideology after being ravaged by nuclear war. Seems pretty accurate to me (minus the whole genetic engineering war interregnum, but who knows, it’s only 2020...) https://www.startrek.com/news/ds9s-take-on-homelessness-is-all-too-real https://www.startrek.com/news/ds9s-take-on-homelessness-is-a...
- abcd9090 6y agogrt
- remarkEon 6y agoNot sure why this is being downvoted, it's accurate. As far as predictions of the future go (or the past, as it were), Star Trek (DS9 in particular) got a lot of stuff right. Though I think Star Trek had Irish Unification happening in 2020 so we're already a bit behind.
- raldi 6y agoI'm typing this on a pocket-sized device that can translate between hundreds of languages, instantly send a message to the other side of the world, and answer questions tapping into an encyclopediac database of human knowledge.
- smunky 6y agoyeah, butt it's medicine just a radio
- HenryKissinger 6y agoYes, smartphones are dope. But, what then? What's the next groundbreaking evolution?
- raldi 6y agoMy watch is pretty neat. Self-driving cars, when perfected, will prevent incredible amounts of death and suffering. Electric bikes and the plummeting costs of solar tech and batteries will save the planet. And it's unbelievable how fast these covid vaccines were developed, tested, manufacturered at gigascale, and (soon) distributed to every corner of the planet.
- stonogo 6y agoIs this an intentional reference? “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- ryandrake 6y agoYea, yea... but besides the Internet, smartphones, smart watches, self-driving cars, electric bikes, solar tech, advanced batteries, and amazing mRNA vaccines, where is my promised future??
- claudeganon 6y agoThat’s what happens when you pin your advancement to competition with the Soviets. Once it was no longer necessary to demonstrate Capitalism’s ability to create broad social and scientific improvement, we embraced an ideology where our most base, cruel, and vulgar impulses were justified so long as they made more money. Unsurprisingly, this yielded exactly the kind of “future” we currently inhabit.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- steve76 6y agoThe material dialectic derives from a wrong translation of Hegel. Hegel's focuses on very high levels of philosophy, abstraction taken to the highest degree. Choose an "-ism". Reality pushes against it, creating ideals. From the start, Marx is wrong. At his time, he had a very limited understanding of nature. Wealth doesn't tend to concentrate. The business cycle turns novel scarcity, such as electricity, into commonplace utilities or even waste they pay you to take or find a way to reuse. Free markets exist today which require zero wealth to start, all skill and knowledge. Wealth tends to inflame character flaws and speed up individual demise or force people into charitable giving. The world's much too big for one special interest. The needs of the proletariat will never become the same as the needs of the state. For that to happen, everyone will have to become poor, and wealth just leaves. The opposite occurs. The richest people are Xi, Maduro, Castro, Iranian Mullahs. The richest place in the world is Washington DC. Wealth is the interview. Power is the job. If you can't do it yourself, why do you get to tell everyone what to do? We have advanced quite a lot since the moon landing: The November Revolution in particle physics at Cornell Voyager I & II Bell's Theorem Antiparticle applications Mapping human genome NIH Brain initiative Parker Solar Probe The Event Horizon global radio telescope array Interferometry Mining asteroids worth a hundred times the global GDP I think this ends with pointing a telescope at a really empty region of space thinned out by cosmic inflation, and manipulating the thin boundary of a black hole to bring galaxies into existence from nothing, a true gravity application. If we can do that, we can put chemicals or matter waves into orbit, and do it to ourselves, have complete control over what's inside. We see a star. Everyone else sees a black hole.
- zymhan 6y agoWe have rocket stages that fly back to the launch pad to be reused.
- qayxc 6y agoThat's not new - we had a space plane that could do that in 1981.
- billforsternz 6y ago1903 - 1947 - 1969 - 2020, so 22 years not 12 (sorry, it just didn't feel right so had to check).
- avmich 6y ago12 years after Armstrong was the first Columbia flight. We definitely did a lot in space since the one small step. The whole concept of orbital stations went from idea to everyday reality. Commercialization of space - like, successes of Ariane-4 and then Dennis Tito and others is also a significant step. We're expecting more any year now.
- inglor_cz 6y agoIn some sense, the space shuttle was a step to the side. The original idea was to get travel to orbit almost on level of airliners, reasonably priced and with short turnaround times, a mission every week or so. The final design of the space shuttle was not able to support this kind of use. Very expensive and refurbishment demanded a lot of human work. So it sapped a lot of money and workforce from the space program.
- qayxc 6y ago> The final design of the space shuttle was not able to support this kind of use It very well could have been. The trouble was that the initial cost projections called for 50+ flights per year, but demand only warranted 3.5 flights per year on average. It's a fate that every heavy orbital transport system shared so far - just look at the Falcon Heavy. How many launches did it have? Two (technically three, if you include the maiden flight)? That's 1 flight per year with another two classified DoD payloads scheduled for next year. There's simply no demand for heavy lift vehicles outside of building space stations and DoD contracts. In the end STS was too big and expensive for just ferrying people into space and too complex for just getting payloads into LEO. It could've made up for that by always doing both, but there simply wasn't a destination in LEO for people to go to and not enough 27.5t LEO payloads (~10t GTO). For instance in 1985 there were only 25 orbital launches in total, 9(!!!) of which Space Shuttle launches and 6 other US rocket launches. Nowhere near the envisioned weekly or even just fortnightly launch cadence required to get the cost down.
- bmcn2020 6y ago100% in agreement. Rather, we went from big, visual, dramatic accomplishments to whatever we have now -- a tightening of the status quo? advances that boost consumer spending? I'm reading The Trouble with Physics (2007) now, and it's about the same themes (lack of progress in physics since ~1980s [besides higgs boson i guess]). Overall though, seems that human advances, for the sake of humanity, have fallen by the wayside for...stuff like the red-bull sponsored jump
- darig 6y agoWhich big, visual, dramatic accomplishment are you talking about? Challenger or Columbia?
- sounds 6y agoI am optimistic about the future of the human race. I won't put a persuasive essay here, but just say, I am optimistic about it.
- wyldfire 6y agoBesides the Highs-Boson, the LIGO, Hubble, JWST, what have the Romans ever done for us?
- joshualross 6y agoThere have been amazing leaps in astrophysics; gravitational wave detection, planet detection around other stars (>4000), first image of a black hole, not to mention all the space probes doing science throughout the solar system. Outside of astrophysics, I think CRISPR has tremendous potential as well. I don't disagree that too much of our collective intelligence is spent trying to sell advertisements, it's a shame.
- RobRivera 6y agoThe future comes in many forms and I find this kind of talk to overlook the phenomal advances all fields of science have made. From the stars to the cell, the future isn't lost
- forrestthewoods 6y ago51 years over 3 billion humans have a pocket super computer that has access to the entirety of human knowledge and the ability to instantly communicate with any human anywhere on the planet
- redis_mlc 6y ago> still waiting for the future to arrive. So create it. There's nothing more pathetic than HN space fanboys whining about not being entertained about recent space developments. It's not, and has never been, about you. To add some things that are actually informative and constructive: - Chuck Yeager did a fantastic job as an X-plane test pilot. Half of his colleagues died, and Yeager and most of the others were severely injured in accidents at the bleeding edge. Stopping the X-plane program to focus solely on the space program was a huge mistake at the time, but has partially been revived. There is/will be a lot more research around the world into hypersonic flight. - We're finally at the time when engines are as powerful as needed, and twice as efficient as 50 years ago (they improve on average 1% per year in terms of efficiency.) This is why narrow-body airliners like te A320 are being used for 8.5+-hour flights now. - the challenge facing militaries today is how to defend against drones, as shown in the recent Syrian and Azerbaijan/Armenia conflicts. (Turkey supplied a drone with 50-pound missiles that can destroy tanks and radar sites.)
- sien 6y agoIn 1970 there 300 million passengers transported in a plane. In 2018 it was 4.2 billion. The future is that vastly many more people fly in a plane every year and it's much, much cheaper than it was in 1970. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.AIR.PSGR https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.AIR.PSGR
- astatine 6y agoThe International Space Station, started 1998 and continuing, is a great milestone. Continued habitation of space by man is an achievement as big as the others ...
- jjk166 6y agoI know it's impressive but somehow "we have remained in this same place for 20 years straight" doesn't really scream progress to me.
- netsharc 6y agoI remember reading a great presentation about how progress plateaus. People got jet engines and imagined space colonies, but at a certain point it was "good enough" and Mach 0.8 jumbo jets were fast enough to carry us halfway around the world...