6 ms·

It's crazy that only 120 years elapsed between these two events. It's a short time to go from flying on earth for the first time to flying on Mars for the first

by isolli 6y ago

It's crazy that only 120 years elapsed between these two events. It's a short time to go from flying on earth for the first time to flying on Mars for the first time.

vecter 6y ago
Dark forest. Technological explosion. (All kidding aside, I don’t believe in the dark forest theory one bit)
- HenryBemis 6y ago
  Dark Forest theory: https://thoughtcatalog.com/christine-stockton/2021/02/heres-what-the-dark-forest-theory-is-and-why-its-so-terrifying/ https://thoughtcatalog.com/christine-stockton/2021/02/heres-... Imagine you are alone walking through a dark forest. You hear a noise. Is it your inclination to be friendly to anyone or anything you happen to stumble across while exploring the unknown? I bet many of us sometimes think that, some advanced civilization is playing SIMs iRL :) For the Trekkies (such as myself), we may be part of a bet of four Qs, each one started a 'SIM' game in each quadrant of our galaxy. The first one to find someone else, wins! Plot twist, one of the Qs made the Borgs.
usrusr 6y ago
But the progress of those 120 years completely pales in comparison to the progress during their first 70. Make it 75 and you go from rudimentary cars and the occasional glider experiments all the way to Apollo and the Concorde. After that... not much. We moved on to information I guess, far more scalable wrt natural resources.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Aviation largely reached "good enough" for general use. With phones and now video conferencing, there's very little legitimate need outside of military purposes to get somewhere faster than the speed of sound.
  - sneak 6y ago
    I have a feeling that the success of the future ballistic passenger service on Starship is going to prove this statement incorrect. That is, if they can get over the geopolitical hurdles of shooting ICBMs full of people between major world powers. There's no way for an early-warning detection system to know if there's 40 rich businesspeople on board or 40 MIRV warheads. I imagine this challenge will be about on par with the difficulty of building starship in the first place.
  - usrusr 6y ago
    But is it limited by good enough, or is it actually limited by approaching the plateau of what is possible? (this is where a presentation would silently flash a picture of a B52) My bet is on the latter, because if you could build a decisively better aircraft you'd own a massive market and all the old stuff would lose any semblance of good enough in a blink. Consider high bypass turbofans, the most important change of the last fifty years (change, not innovation, the turbofan principle had been studied since before the first turbojet took to the air). If we had airframe geometries supporting arbitrarily big fans, would we eventually see bypass ratios that could only be accurately described with the term ferris wheel? I highly doubt it. Diminishing returns, maybe even some identifiable theoretic optimum long before (just guessing, I might be wrong). Thought experiment: imagine Star Trek engineering (recent-ish stuff, not Kirk), if they had a competition in building the best airplane without star trek energy sources and all that force field stuff. I'm not sure that the winner would look much different from what we have, if the goals are consistent with those of our designers. Some things are just mostly find. There'll still be development because in a market of a plateauing technology even the tiniest refinement can separate winners from losers, but there wouldn't be a meaningful increase in innovation of you funneled half of the world's economy into r&d. (until some day, maybe there is a sudden major jump, think of foiling in sports sailing) The single most amazing aviation innovation by the way is the bug wiper. Amazing stuff. Unfortunately no English language Wikipedia, Google it if you never heard of it.
- kaesar14 6y ago
  The last 50 years went from the amount of computing power used to power Apollo to being available hundredfold in everyone's pocket, it's as impressive in its own way
  - jahnu 6y ago
    Closer to a hundred million fold :)
  - criddell 6y ago
    The technology is impressive. How we're using it often is not.
    - kaesar14 6y ago
      Eh, it also often is. Better transportation, better medical devices, better energy grids. Aviation was and is used to drop bombs on other human beings! Nothing is black or white.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Apollo went to the moon. My pocket doesn't. Spaceflight is not compute-bound.
    - kaesar14 6y ago
      It was just an example
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    A bit offtopic but I recently saw a surprisingly interesting talk about the Apollo board computer[0], and it's incredible how carefully they engineered the whole thing. Software hardcoded in the wiring, error correction for every memory access, ability to restart the whole system in any situation without losing state...this thing might have been rudimentary in today's standards, but the quality of the software was a different beast. [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=B1J2RMorJXM https://youtube.com/watch?v=B1J2RMorJXM
- ramraj07 6y ago
  Watching 2001 again pains me endlessly for what could have been. What was just background technology in that movie (Skype and iPads) is the best we’ve managed from it.
  - eecc 6y ago
    Well, there's an energy wall we still haven't figured out how to work around.
    - scottLobster 6y ago
      And have no real desire to figure out, if you look at the relatively paltry funding given to energy research compared to other endeavors.
  - scottLobster 6y ago
    All comes down to economics. I grew up with the sunny optimistic notion of the human drive for exploration, projected onto everything from Paleolithic Tribes populating the world to Christopher Columbus to Oregon Trail Pioneers to Star Trek. The older I get and the more history I read, well the paleolithic tribes were probably chasing prey or trying to get away from other hostile tribes, no one was interested in Columbus's findings until he told them there was gold/other valuables in the new world. The western pioneers largely had so little economic opportunity on the east coast that going thousands of miles over hostile terrain just to perhaps start a successful farm/mine gold seemed like a good idea. Star Trek is predicated on a post-scarcity, participation-based society (where "doing your best" is tracked and rewarded) which is basically enlightened communism but with open-source algorithms replacing the corrupt humans for pricing/resource allocation. So sure, once we figure that little thing out maybe we can move up Maslow's hierarchy to the "human spirit of exploration". Until then most people are just trying to not go bankrupt, minimize their own misery and perhaps have something left for their kids.
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  I think Peter Thiel hit the nail on the head when he wrote that America went from being led by definite optimists ("I am going to invent the future and it's going to be great"), to being led by indefinite optimists ("the future's probably going to be great, but I'm going to focus on my investment portfolio"). The social capital shifted from inventors and innovators to bean counters at some point after the 60s. FWIW I'm from the UK and we haven't been definite optimists since the 1800s.
  - scottLobster 6y ago
    Yeah, and there's a bit of a bucket crab effect where trying to be a definite optimist in a world of indefinite optimists is much harder. Reminds of me of "The General" from Asimov's Foundation and Empire (spoiler alert for an amazing book from 1952). In a time where the galactic empire is collapsing/shrinking, General Bel Riose makes it his mission to restore the empire militarily and re-conquer the lost territory. He's actually a good commander, has overwhelming force, and looks to be in the process of achieving complete victory in the style of historical military commanders that made the empire great. In light of his achievements, the Emperor sees him as a potential rival, despite the fact that he never appears to have any ambitions to the throne (he's presented as an Imperial True Believer), recalls him right on the cusp of complete victory over the Foundation, and the Foundation survives being snuffed out in its infancy. Even trying to emulate the old greats with the best of intentions will fail if you don't account for your environment. If everyone else is more concerned about their portfolio, to some degree you have to be as well, even if it distracts from the greater goals.
  - runarberg 6y ago
    Did it really? Or is this a bias in favor of private investment. There has been a lot of investments to government programs such as NASA and NOAA (as well as the military for better or worse). Also universities continue to innovate with plenty of new innovation to show for it. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the American private sector has moved from being led by...
    - beaconstudios 6y ago
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Improving on speed stopped making sense for civil aviation. Concorde was technologically cool, but didn't solve a major problem.
- LaMarseillaise 6y ago
  A helicopter... on Mars. That is not much? Also, over one hundred space shuttle flights, a space station, a space telescope, GPS, and public satellite photos.
  - usrusr 6y ago
    Fully agree on the ISS, it was high on my list of "not much, except" that I sacrificed for brevity. And GPS has more impact on my daily life than the entirety of aviation from Wright Brothers to Ryanair. But I'd tend to bin GPS under information, the field of innovation that displaced aerospace (and it's also surprisingly old, project start is approaching its 50th and apparently prototype satellites in space when the Concorde was still manufactured. But impact on daily lives is certainly much more recent, it was hardly more than an oddity before smartphones).
- cletus 6y ago
  Apollo was a political endeavor. It was rivalry with the Soviet Union. The spending on it in modern dollars is as a percentage of GDP or the Federal budget just wouldn’t happen now. Science obviously has value but this was a huge price to pay. What changed since was a poor successor (the Space Shuttle) followed by the shift from political to economic motivations in space. As for Concorde, that was a product of the belief in supersonic transport bring the future that was just plain wrong. Where you can use it is too limited and subsonic jets became way more efficient and reliable than anyone predicted. You may say that not much has changed but air travel 50 years ago was massively expensive. Now air travel is ridiculously cheap. That might not be as flashy but it has massively changed how people live.

by isolli 6y ago

It's crazy that only 120 years elapsed between these two events. It's a short time to go from flying on earth for the first time to flying on Mars for the first time.

vecter 6y ago

Dark forest. Technological explosion. (All kidding aside, I don’t believe in the dark forest theory one bit)

HenryBemis 6y ago
Dark Forest theory: https://thoughtcatalog.com/christine-stockton/2021/02/heres-what-the-dark-forest-theory-is-and-why-its-so-terrifying/ https://thoughtcatalog.com/christine-stockton/2021/02/heres-... Imagine you are alone walking through a dark forest. You hear a noise. Is it your inclination to be friendly to anyone or anything you happen to stumble across while exploring the unknown? I bet many of us sometimes think that, some advanced civilization is playing SIMs iRL :) For the Trekkies (such as myself), we may be part of a bet of four Qs, each one started a 'SIM' game in each quadrant of our galaxy. The first one to find someone else, wins! Plot twist, one of the Qs made the Borgs.

usrusr 6y ago

But the progress of those 120 years completely pales in comparison to the progress during their first 70. Make it 75 and you go from rudimentary cars and the occasional glider experiments all the way to Apollo and the Concorde. After that... not much. We moved on to information I guess, far more scalable wrt natural resources.

ceejayoz 6y ago
Aviation largely reached "good enough" for general use. With phones and now video conferencing, there's very little legitimate need outside of military purposes to get somewhere faster than the speed of sound.
- sneak 6y ago
  I have a feeling that the success of the future ballistic passenger service on Starship is going to prove this statement incorrect. That is, if they can get over the geopolitical hurdles of shooting ICBMs full of people between major world powers. There's no way for an early-warning detection system to know if there's 40 rich businesspeople on board or 40 MIRV warheads. I imagine this challenge will be about on par with the difficulty of building starship in the first place.
- usrusr 6y ago
  But is it limited by good enough, or is it actually limited by approaching the plateau of what is possible? (this is where a presentation would silently flash a picture of a B52) My bet is on the latter, because if you could build a decisively better aircraft you'd own a massive market and all the old stuff would lose any semblance of good enough in a blink. Consider high bypass turbofans, the most important change of the last fifty years (change, not innovation, the turbofan principle had been studied since before the first turbojet took to the air). If we had airframe geometries supporting arbitrarily big fans, would we eventually see bypass ratios that could only be accurately described with the term ferris wheel? I highly doubt it. Diminishing returns, maybe even some identifiable theoretic optimum long before (just guessing, I might be wrong). Thought experiment: imagine Star Trek engineering (recent-ish stuff, not Kirk), if they had a competition in building the best airplane without star trek energy sources and all that force field stuff. I'm not sure that the winner would look much different from what we have, if the goals are consistent with those of our designers. Some things are just mostly find. There'll still be development because in a market of a plateauing technology even the tiniest refinement can separate winners from losers, but there wouldn't be a meaningful increase in innovation of you funneled half of the world's economy into r&d. (until some day, maybe there is a sudden major jump, think of foiling in sports sailing) The single most amazing aviation innovation by the way is the bug wiper. Amazing stuff. Unfortunately no English language Wikipedia, Google it if you never heard of it.
kaesar14 6y ago
The last 50 years went from the amount of computing power used to power Apollo to being available hundredfold in everyone's pocket, it's as impressive in its own way
- jahnu 6y ago
  Closer to a hundred million fold :)
- criddell 6y ago
  The technology is impressive. How we're using it often is not.
  - kaesar14 6y ago
    Eh, it also often is. Better transportation, better medical devices, better energy grids. Aviation was and is used to drop bombs on other human beings! Nothing is black or white.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Apollo went to the moon. My pocket doesn't. Spaceflight is not compute-bound.
  - kaesar14 6y ago
    It was just an example
- alpaca128 6y ago
  A bit offtopic but I recently saw a surprisingly interesting talk about the Apollo board computer[0], and it's incredible how carefully they engineered the whole thing. Software hardcoded in the wiring, error correction for every memory access, ability to restart the whole system in any situation without losing state...this thing might have been rudimentary in today's standards, but the quality of the software was a different beast. [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=B1J2RMorJXM https://youtube.com/watch?v=B1J2RMorJXM
ramraj07 6y ago
Watching 2001 again pains me endlessly for what could have been. What was just background technology in that movie (Skype and iPads) is the best we’ve managed from it.
- eecc 6y ago
  Well, there's an energy wall we still haven't figured out how to work around.
  - scottLobster 6y ago
    And have no real desire to figure out, if you look at the relatively paltry funding given to energy research compared to other endeavors.
- scottLobster 6y ago
  All comes down to economics. I grew up with the sunny optimistic notion of the human drive for exploration, projected onto everything from Paleolithic Tribes populating the world to Christopher Columbus to Oregon Trail Pioneers to Star Trek. The older I get and the more history I read, well the paleolithic tribes were probably chasing prey or trying to get away from other hostile tribes, no one was interested in Columbus's findings until he told them there was gold/other valuables in the new world. The western pioneers largely had so little economic opportunity on the east coast that going thousands of miles over hostile terrain just to perhaps start a successful farm/mine gold seemed like a good idea. Star Trek is predicated on a post-scarcity, participation-based society (where "doing your best" is tracked and rewarded) which is basically enlightened communism but with open-source algorithms replacing the corrupt humans for pricing/resource allocation. So sure, once we figure that little thing out maybe we can move up Maslow's hierarchy to the "human spirit of exploration". Until then most people are just trying to not go bankrupt, minimize their own misery and perhaps have something left for their kids.
beaconstudios 6y ago
I think Peter Thiel hit the nail on the head when he wrote that America went from being led by definite optimists ("I am going to invent the future and it's going to be great"), to being led by indefinite optimists ("the future's probably going to be great, but I'm going to focus on my investment portfolio"). The social capital shifted from inventors and innovators to bean counters at some point after the 60s. FWIW I'm from the UK and we haven't been definite optimists since the 1800s.
- scottLobster 6y ago
  Yeah, and there's a bit of a bucket crab effect where trying to be a definite optimist in a world of indefinite optimists is much harder. Reminds of me of "The General" from Asimov's Foundation and Empire (spoiler alert for an amazing book from 1952). In a time where the galactic empire is collapsing/shrinking, General Bel Riose makes it his mission to restore the empire militarily and re-conquer the lost territory. He's actually a good commander, has overwhelming force, and looks to be in the process of achieving complete victory in the style of historical military commanders that made the empire great. In light of his achievements, the Emperor sees him as a potential rival, despite the fact that he never appears to have any ambitions to the throne (he's presented as an Imperial True Believer), recalls him right on the cusp of complete victory over the Foundation, and the Foundation survives being snuffed out in its infancy. Even trying to emulate the old greats with the best of intentions will fail if you don't account for your environment. If everyone else is more concerned about their portfolio, to some degree you have to be as well, even if it distracts from the greater goals.
- runarberg 6y ago
  Did it really? Or is this a bias in favor of private investment. There has been a lot of investments to government programs such as NASA and NOAA (as well as the military for better or worse). Also universities continue to innovate with plenty of new innovation to show for it. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the American private sector has moved from being led by...
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
MattGaiser 6y ago
Improving on speed stopped making sense for civil aviation. Concorde was technologically cool, but didn't solve a major problem.
LaMarseillaise 6y ago
A helicopter... on Mars. That is not much? Also, over one hundred space shuttle flights, a space station, a space telescope, GPS, and public satellite photos.
- usrusr 6y ago
  Fully agree on the ISS, it was high on my list of "not much, except" that I sacrificed for brevity. And GPS has more impact on my daily life than the entirety of aviation from Wright Brothers to Ryanair. But I'd tend to bin GPS under information, the field of innovation that displaced aerospace (and it's also surprisingly old, project start is approaching its 50th and apparently prototype satellites in space when the Concorde was still manufactured. But impact on daily lives is certainly much more recent, it was hardly more than an oddity before smartphones).
cletus 6y ago
Apollo was a political endeavor. It was rivalry with the Soviet Union. The spending on it in modern dollars is as a percentage of GDP or the Federal budget just wouldn’t happen now. Science obviously has value but this was a huge price to pay. What changed since was a poor successor (the Space Shuttle) followed by the shift from political to economic motivations in space. As for Concorde, that was a product of the belief in supersonic transport bring the future that was just plain wrong. Where you can use it is too limited and subsonic jets became way more efficient and reliable than anyone predicted. You may say that not much has changed but air travel 50 years ago was massively expensive. Now air travel is ridiculously cheap. That might not be as flashy but it has massively changed how people live.