8 ms·

It's hard to believe that it's been over 50 years since humans have been outside of low earth orbit. It's like we sprinted forward so fast, going from horse dra

It's hard to believe that it's been over 50 years since humans have been outside of low earth orbit. It's like we sprinted forward so fast, going from horse drawn carriage to space flight in a generation, only to get frightened and recede back from the highest point, never to go back. Granted there has been an enormous amount of innovation in the last 50 years, but by some accounts we've been going backwards. Humans are no longer capable of mach 3 flight, or making Roman concrete. I think we assume that technology will keep progressing. We assume Moore's law will continue into the future and we forget that there are people behind the progress. The technology that produced those pictures are gone, we might be able to take ones like them again, but never with the same rockets and never with the same photo-chemical processes. Progress is fragile, not inevitable and everything we have can be lost in a generation just as easily as it was made.

2III7 5y ago
If you had the money, you could rent a rocket from SpaceX and send a film camera to take more pictures. But what would be the point?
flohofwoe 5y ago
You really need to take the power and "reality distortion effect" of propaganda during the Cold War into account. Massive projects were started without much rational sense just to beat the other side in an imaginary race (and a very concrete military race). What's the point of landing a man on the moon, if the technology to do so was so rushed and held together by duct tape that it wasn't useful for anything else? What's the point of the Space Shuttle if launches were more expensive than disposable rockets? What's the point of the Buran, if the Soviets didn't feel like they need an answer to the space shuttle "just in case", even though they couldn't see any point in the shuttle design (except as a nuke carrier)? Etc... etc... the list goes on for both sides. I rather have slow and steady progress that actually makes economical and scientific sense in the long run. PS: I thought the secret of Roman concrete had been cracked long ago (a certain type of volcanic ash)? But it's just not economical to produce large quantities since modern sky scrapers are not expected to "survive" for thousands of years anyway (and AFAIK the Romans didn't know much about the special properties of their concrete either, it more or less was a "happy little accident").
- leadingthenet 5y ago
  > since modern sky scrapers are not expected to "survive" for thousands of years anyway And maybe that’s a problem! Why exactly are we not building beautiful landmarks that will survive eons like the Romans did? We have a throwaway culture, and nobody ever dares question it.
  - WJW 5y ago
    I think you are suffering a bit from survivorship bias here. Way less than 0.001% of Roman buildings are still standing and the ones that remain have been continuously maintained over the centuries. If humanity will keep maintaining the White House for centuries it will look just as good in 4021 as it does today.
    - leadingthenet 5y ago
      The White House is not a modernist / postmodernist building that was designed with planned obsolescence in mind, so I'm not entirely sure why you've used it as an example. In fact, it's a perfect example of a beautiful neoclassical landmark that was intended to inspire and last through the ages. Survivorship bias is always brought up in these discussions, but I believe it to just be a cop-out. Take a look at any well-preserved medieval / renaissance / early industrial era city in Europe (Bruges, Edinburgh, Venice). They are all absolutely gorgeous, even the buildings used historically by the lower classes (ones that were not even built with longevity in mind). No, something flipped around the 1920s, and architecture, along with our whole societal philosophy around it, has clearly changed. I'd argue that it's for the worse.
      - Retric 5y ago
        Needs changeover time. Thick stone walls can provide insulation, but their hell on WiFi etc. Growing up in a 200+ year old building you find a lot of architectural designs and modifications that don’t fit with modern usage. Pre AC maximizing summer cooling involved maximizing airflow where now we want maximum insulation. Before central heating we wanted chimney’s everywhere. And before wood stoves we wanted giant fireplaces everywhere. Even central heating has gone through several iterations, many different radiator designs for steam/water, central air, and now a zigzag of pipes underfloor. Very old buildings may look nice, but they aren’t inherently better.
mrtksn 5y ago
I think it’s a case of picking the low hanging fruits once the technology is unlocked, then moving on. We have the same not only with space but with everything. Steampunk is essentially the feature we never had with advanced enough mechanical machines. Somehow we sprinted towards harnessing the energy of the steam stoping short from coal powered AI robots but was that the case? IMHO what happened is, we exploited the feasible part and moved on. The same with space. With the science and tech we harnessed so far, it’s simply not feasible to do more than what we have done already. With the advancements made in recent decades, some more stuff might have moved within the range of feasible but nothing revolutionary. We are not going to the nearest star anytime soon and that’s not simply because we lost interest in it. The best we probably can do in human travel is Mars.
hyko 5y ago
Technology has not regressed since the 1970s though. We have the latent capability to go any time we want, it’s just very expensive and there’s no point.
- pbronez 5y ago
  Still planning to do it again within the next decade just to reassure ourselves about it.
  - hyko 5y ago
    The most expensive reality TV show ever made.
  - willis936 5y ago
    Actually doing it is important. “I can go to the moon anytime I want” stops being true after a solid generation of not doing it. There is institutional knowledge in doing something in the present world. Further, specs and documents are nice, but rarely sufficient. A famous example is the F-1 engine. Every one of them was made off spec and if you took the factory drawings alone you would never make a working engine. You need builders who understand the design and modify it. It’s all possible to do this, but the longer you wait to do it again, the more factors change and the more work it will be. NIF exists to keep a team of nuclear bomb experts warm in case we need them. It isn’t to make a power plant or to make new bombs; it’s just there to keep the kettle warm. Anecdote: I work at a physics project. When the PI asked for 200 million USD to build a new machine after 20 years they were awarded 3 millions USD to do an upgrade to the old machine. The funders are making sure that a team can still be assembled and get shit done under the PI’s leadership. If the upgrade goes on time and on budget then the new machine might be on the table. The same thing is going on with many physics projects. Small prototypes get funded. “If you can make that and it works, then we’ll talk about the next step.” It’s slow, but it’s safe.
    - astroflask 5y ago
      For SLS a group looked into making boosters powered by modernized F-1's... Turns out a lot of knowledge about welding them had been lost. They managed to get an old unflown F-1A to work, but it's a bit unclear how much they managed to do with the new design, the F-1B. Wikipedia[0] has a few details and some links, but it falls short of telling the end fate of this effort. Obviously, the F-1B booster wasn't picked for the SLS and they went with the improved 5-segment SRBs[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1#F-1B_booster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1#F-1B_booster [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Booster#Five-segment_booster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Boo...
himinlomax 5y ago
People have been hiking to the top of mount Everest for a while now, but you still can't ask an Uber to take you there. Because there isn't much worthwhile to do there, the interesting thing is going there, not being there. At the moment. When/if it can be done for cheap and on the regular, there might be stuff to do.
pjc50 5y ago
Humans are capable of Mach 3 flight. It's just a "latent" capability. Something we could do but is not currently cost-effective. > The technology that produced those pictures are gone, we might be able to take ones like them again, but never with the same rockets and never with the same photo-chemical processes. You can never step in the same river twice, and we are all mortal. This is just a statement about the passage of time. > Progress is fragile, not inevitable and everything we have can be lost in a generation just as easily as it was made. This, on the other hand, is important, and why it's important not to let people wreck it by lying about everything. Worth questioning the "whig view of history" backwards as well; a lot of what we call progress had very large costs for certain groups of people at the time and made their lives worse. Or got them killed.
astroflask 5y ago
Okay, I came here to talk about how the images are a bit soft and a quick, subtle pass of Richardson-Lucy deconvolution restores some detail (and enhances the film grain, that's a plus for me but some people may find it a bit too much -- it is still there in the pictures though). And then I read your comment and you totally throw me into a Wikipedia rabbit hole with the Roman concrete... Speaking of which, what do you mean we can't make Roman concrete nowadays? Wikipedia even says that there are corporations and municipalities looking into it as a viable, environmental-friendly, long-lasting alternative to regular concrete[0] ! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete#Modern_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete#Modern_use
- pjc50 5y ago
  It's essentially an old meme; the exact details had been lost, since the technology was not in continuous use and no written record survived, but the footnote on Wikipedia details its reconstruction. This great paper: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/msa/ammin/article/98/10/1669/45726/Unlocking-the-secrets-of-Al-tobermorite-in-Roman https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/msa/ammin/article/98/10/166... Essentially it relied on volcanic ash from specific locations, and they forensically traced those locations.
  - astroflask 5y ago
    Right, that's the impression I got from reading. And it looks like we have regained that technology, which is what threw me off the remark. Will take a look at that paper, however I'm totally a stranger to most geo-something sciences, just a regular software engineer here (with quite a bit of scientific curiosity though).
tomnipotent 5y ago
> Humans are no longer capable of mach 3 flight, or making Roman concrete We have plenty of aircraft capable of mach 3 or faster just not for commercial purposes, and most modern concrete is superior to Roman concrete in most dimensions specifically cost (not to mention its modern mythos is completely based on a single study published in American Mineralogist).
- ghaff 5y ago
  The supersonic passenger flight thing is the one I have to really chuckle at. Nothing against the work being done in this area--hey, not my money. But effectively you have lots of folks, who probably mostly fly coach, super-excited that maybe one day CEOs and high-end lawyers will once again be able to fly from NY to London to have lunch, shake hands on a deal, and be home in time for dinner.
  - curtainsforus 5y ago
    The passenger flight thing is the one I have to really chuckle at. Nothing against the work being done in this area--hey, not my money. But effectively you have lots of folks, who probably mostly take trains, super-excited that maybe one day CEOs and high-end lawyers will be able to fly from NY to London.
    - flohofwoe 5y ago
      France is actually doing something very sensible here (banning domestic flight between cities if the travel time by train is under 2.5 hrs): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56716708 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56716708
      - anchpop 5y ago
        why is that sensible?
        ghaff 5y ago
avereveard 5y ago
such a nihilistic view has little ground in reality > been outside of low earth orbit we stopped pushing that frontier because we've been there and found it dull and empty, as a matter of fact, we decided zero g experiment were more important than playing with regolith, and build a freaking human habitat in the void to support that endeavor. beside, we've got regolith here on earth now, we can experiment on it in the commodity of our backyard if needed be. > mach 3 flight except the routine space launches that ship scientist back and forth from the space station, going through literal plasma on the descent leg. > Roman concrete this has just been widely romanticized, we don't use that because it's incompatible with fast building processes requirements, is too heavy for large structures and it's hard to dismantle when a structure is no longer needed or need renovation. sure, some other stuff one can cite as having reached an apparent sub-optimal minima, like average speed of travel, but that's not because we're backward, it's because we're learning to take care of our own environment. slowly, but we're getting there. just because the tradeoff are different it doesn't mean that a golf id3 is just worse than a bugatti eb110 or a recess from peak technology.
- Griffinsauce 5y ago
  Your last point resonated with me. An extremely boring electric car that makes some significant leap in affordability, efficiency or whatever can be the thing that brings our entire society forward and literally saves it. If anything you can argue that the latest Bugatti with a slightly larger engine is moving us backwards by the waste of resources (in design, production and use). Peak technology right now is not the big sexy machine, it's whatever makes the good stuff boring for the masses.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  The primary purpose of ISS is to be a jobs program, not scientific experimentation. The Russians are involved specifically to keep their engineers from going to work for hostile states.
  - avereveard 5y ago
    But still, we're to the point where not a state, not a government entity, but a rich, bored dude is sending people into space as a viable business model Thinking our space tech is going backwards is severely myopic
jeromenerf 5y ago
Meanwhile a little copter is spinning its wings. On Mars. Mars dammit.
pimlottc 5y ago
> I think we assume that technology will keep progressing. We assume Moore's law will continue into the future and we forget that there are people behind the progress. The technology that produced those pictures are gone, we might be able to take ones like them again, but never with the same rockets and never with the same photo-chemical processes. Progress is fragile, not inevitable and everything we have can be lost in a generation just as easily as it was made. It's good to be aware of our blindspots. The idea of progress as a monotonically increasing upward trend is a very modern and Western perspective. It's not inevitable.

2III7 5y ago

If you had the money, you could rent a rocket from SpaceX and send a film camera to take more pictures. But what would be the point?

flohofwoe 5y ago

You really need to take the power and "reality distortion effect" of propaganda during the Cold War into account. Massive projects were started without much rational sense just to beat the other side in an imaginary race (and a very concrete military race). What's the point of landing a man on the moon, if the technology to do so was so rushed and held together by duct tape that it wasn't useful for anything else? What's the point of the Space Shuttle if launches were more expensive than disposable rockets? What's the point of the Buran, if the Soviets didn't feel like they need an answer to the space shuttle "just in case", even though they couldn't see any point in the shuttle design (except as a nuke carrier)? Etc... etc... the list goes on for both sides. I rather have slow and steady progress that actually makes economical and scientific sense in the long run. PS: I thought the secret of Roman concrete had been cracked long ago (a certain type of volcanic ash)? But it's just not economical to produce large quantities since modern sky scrapers are not expected to "survive" for thousands of years anyway (and AFAIK the Romans didn't know much about the special properties of their concrete either, it more or less was a "happy little accident").

leadingthenet 5y ago
> since modern sky scrapers are not expected to "survive" for thousands of years anyway And maybe that’s a problem! Why exactly are we not building beautiful landmarks that will survive eons like the Romans did? We have a throwaway culture, and nobody ever dares question it.
- WJW 5y ago
  I think you are suffering a bit from survivorship bias here. Way less than 0.001% of Roman buildings are still standing and the ones that remain have been continuously maintained over the centuries. If humanity will keep maintaining the White House for centuries it will look just as good in 4021 as it does today.
  - leadingthenet 5y ago
    The White House is not a modernist / postmodernist building that was designed with planned obsolescence in mind, so I'm not entirely sure why you've used it as an example. In fact, it's a perfect example of a beautiful neoclassical landmark that was intended to inspire and last through the ages. Survivorship bias is always brought up in these discussions, but I believe it to just be a cop-out. Take a look at any well-preserved medieval / renaissance / early industrial era city in Europe (Bruges, Edinburgh, Venice). They are all absolutely gorgeous, even the buildings used historically by the lower classes (ones that were not even built with longevity in mind). No, something flipped around the 1920s, and architecture, along with our whole societal philosophy around it, has clearly changed. I'd argue that it's for the worse.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Needs changeover time. Thick stone walls can provide insulation, but their hell on WiFi etc. Growing up in a 200+ year old building you find a lot of architectural designs and modifications that don’t fit with modern usage. Pre AC maximizing summer cooling involved maximizing airflow where now we want maximum insulation. Before central heating we wanted chimney’s everywhere. And before wood stoves we wanted giant fireplaces everywhere. Even central heating has gone through several iterations, many different radiator designs for steam/water, central air, and now a zigzag of pipes underfloor. Very old buildings may look nice, but they aren’t inherently better.

mrtksn 5y ago

I think it’s a case of picking the low hanging fruits once the technology is unlocked, then moving on. We have the same not only with space but with everything. Steampunk is essentially the feature we never had with advanced enough mechanical machines. Somehow we sprinted towards harnessing the energy of the steam stoping short from coal powered AI robots but was that the case? IMHO what happened is, we exploited the feasible part and moved on. The same with space. With the science and tech we harnessed so far, it’s simply not feasible to do more than what we have done already. With the advancements made in recent decades, some more stuff might have moved within the range of feasible but nothing revolutionary. We are not going to the nearest star anytime soon and that’s not simply because we lost interest in it. The best we probably can do in human travel is Mars.

hyko 5y ago

Technology has not regressed since the 1970s though. We have the latent capability to go any time we want, it’s just very expensive and there’s no point.

pbronez 5y ago
Still planning to do it again within the next decade just to reassure ourselves about it.
- hyko 5y ago
  The most expensive reality TV show ever made.
- willis936 5y ago
  Actually doing it is important. “I can go to the moon anytime I want” stops being true after a solid generation of not doing it. There is institutional knowledge in doing something in the present world. Further, specs and documents are nice, but rarely sufficient. A famous example is the F-1 engine. Every one of them was made off spec and if you took the factory drawings alone you would never make a working engine. You need builders who understand the design and modify it. It’s all possible to do this, but the longer you wait to do it again, the more factors change and the more work it will be. NIF exists to keep a team of nuclear bomb experts warm in case we need them. It isn’t to make a power plant or to make new bombs; it’s just there to keep the kettle warm. Anecdote: I work at a physics project. When the PI asked for 200 million USD to build a new machine after 20 years they were awarded 3 millions USD to do an upgrade to the old machine. The funders are making sure that a team can still be assembled and get shit done under the PI’s leadership. If the upgrade goes on time and on budget then the new machine might be on the table. The same thing is going on with many physics projects. Small prototypes get funded. “If you can make that and it works, then we’ll talk about the next step.” It’s slow, but it’s safe.
  - astroflask 5y ago
    For SLS a group looked into making boosters powered by modernized F-1's... Turns out a lot of knowledge about welding them had been lost. They managed to get an old unflown F-1A to work, but it's a bit unclear how much they managed to do with the new design, the F-1B. Wikipedia[0] has a few details and some links, but it falls short of telling the end fate of this effort. Obviously, the F-1B booster wasn't picked for the SLS and they went with the improved 5-segment SRBs[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1#F-1B_booster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1#F-1B_booster [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Booster#Five-segment_booster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Boo...

himinlomax 5y ago

People have been hiking to the top of mount Everest for a while now, but you still can't ask an Uber to take you there. Because there isn't much worthwhile to do there, the interesting thing is going there, not being there. At the moment. When/if it can be done for cheap and on the regular, there might be stuff to do.

pjc50 5y ago

Humans are capable of Mach 3 flight. It's just a "latent" capability. Something we could do but is not currently cost-effective. > The technology that produced those pictures are gone, we might be able to take ones like them again, but never with the same rockets and never with the same photo-chemical processes. You can never step in the same river twice, and we are all mortal. This is just a statement about the passage of time. > Progress is fragile, not inevitable and everything we have can be lost in a generation just as easily as it was made. This, on the other hand, is important, and why it's important not to let people wreck it by lying about everything. Worth questioning the "whig view of history" backwards as well; a lot of what we call progress had very large costs for certain groups of people at the time and made their lives worse. Or got them killed.

astroflask 5y ago

Okay, I came here to talk about how the images are a bit soft and a quick, subtle pass of Richardson-Lucy deconvolution restores some detail (and enhances the film grain, that's a plus for me but some people may find it a bit too much -- it is still there in the pictures though). And then I read your comment and you totally throw me into a Wikipedia rabbit hole with the Roman concrete... Speaking of which, what do you mean we can't make Roman concrete nowadays? Wikipedia even says that there are corporations and municipalities looking into it as a viable, environmental-friendly, long-lasting alternative to regular concrete[0] ! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete#Modern_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete#Modern_use

pjc50 5y ago
It's essentially an old meme; the exact details had been lost, since the technology was not in continuous use and no written record survived, but the footnote on Wikipedia details its reconstruction. This great paper: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/msa/ammin/article/98/10/1669/45726/Unlocking-the-secrets-of-Al-tobermorite-in-Roman https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/msa/ammin/article/98/10/166... Essentially it relied on volcanic ash from specific locations, and they forensically traced those locations.
- astroflask 5y ago
  Right, that's the impression I got from reading. And it looks like we have regained that technology, which is what threw me off the remark. Will take a look at that paper, however I'm totally a stranger to most geo-something sciences, just a regular software engineer here (with quite a bit of scientific curiosity though).

tomnipotent 5y ago

> Humans are no longer capable of mach 3 flight, or making Roman concrete We have plenty of aircraft capable of mach 3 or faster just not for commercial purposes, and most modern concrete is superior to Roman concrete in most dimensions specifically cost (not to mention its modern mythos is completely based on a single study published in American Mineralogist).

ghaff 5y ago
The supersonic passenger flight thing is the one I have to really chuckle at. Nothing against the work being done in this area--hey, not my money. But effectively you have lots of folks, who probably mostly fly coach, super-excited that maybe one day CEOs and high-end lawyers will once again be able to fly from NY to London to have lunch, shake hands on a deal, and be home in time for dinner.
- curtainsforus 5y ago
  The passenger flight thing is the one I have to really chuckle at. Nothing against the work being done in this area--hey, not my money. But effectively you have lots of folks, who probably mostly take trains, super-excited that maybe one day CEOs and high-end lawyers will be able to fly from NY to London.
  - flohofwoe 5y ago
    France is actually doing something very sensible here (banning domestic flight between cities if the travel time by train is under 2.5 hrs): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56716708 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56716708
    - anchpop 5y ago
      why is that sensible?
      - ghaff 5y ago

avereveard 5y ago

such a nihilistic view has little ground in reality > been outside of low earth orbit we stopped pushing that frontier because we've been there and found it dull and empty, as a matter of fact, we decided zero g experiment were more important than playing with regolith, and build a freaking human habitat in the void to support that endeavor. beside, we've got regolith here on earth now, we can experiment on it in the commodity of our backyard if needed be. > mach 3 flight except the routine space launches that ship scientist back and forth from the space station, going through literal plasma on the descent leg. > Roman concrete this has just been widely romanticized, we don't use that because it's incompatible with fast building processes requirements, is too heavy for large structures and it's hard to dismantle when a structure is no longer needed or need renovation. sure, some other stuff one can cite as having reached an apparent sub-optimal minima, like average speed of travel, but that's not because we're backward, it's because we're learning to take care of our own environment. slowly, but we're getting there. just because the tradeoff are different it doesn't mean that a golf id3 is just worse than a bugatti eb110 or a recess from peak technology.

Griffinsauce 5y ago
Your last point resonated with me. An extremely boring electric car that makes some significant leap in affordability, efficiency or whatever can be the thing that brings our entire society forward and literally saves it. If anything you can argue that the latest Bugatti with a slightly larger engine is moving us backwards by the waste of resources (in design, production and use). Peak technology right now is not the big sexy machine, it's whatever makes the good stuff boring for the masses.
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
The primary purpose of ISS is to be a jobs program, not scientific experimentation. The Russians are involved specifically to keep their engineers from going to work for hostile states.
- avereveard 5y ago
  But still, we're to the point where not a state, not a government entity, but a rich, bored dude is sending people into space as a viable business model Thinking our space tech is going backwards is severely myopic

jeromenerf 5y ago

Meanwhile a little copter is spinning its wings. On Mars. Mars dammit.

pimlottc 5y ago

> I think we assume that technology will keep progressing. We assume Moore's law will continue into the future and we forget that there are people behind the progress. The technology that produced those pictures are gone, we might be able to take ones like them again, but never with the same rockets and never with the same photo-chemical processes. Progress is fragile, not inevitable and everything we have can be lost in a generation just as easily as it was made. It's good to be aware of our blindspots. The idea of progress as a monotonically increasing upward trend is a very modern and Western perspective. It's not inevitable.