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Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
- nyc111 4y agoPerry E. Metzger: "Most are unaware of how much of space technology was theoretically anticipated and worked out by a handful of people decades before anyone actually tried to achieve orbit. Tsiolkovsky’s achievements, for example, are astounding and worth reading about." https://twitter.com/perrymetzger/status/1627465913237635074?s=20 https://twitter.com/perrymetzger/status/1627465913237635074?...
- TeMPOraL 4y agoThat's a mind-opening Twitter thread, thanks for posting. "Anytime anyone says to you “if that’s possible, why hasn’t it been done yet?”, remember that virtually everything about modern spacecraft was figured out by a Russian eccentric decades before anyone did anything with his publications." I wonder if there are such eccentrics alive today, and how could we tell if we're looking at a sneak peek of the future to come? Is such situation even possible today? Or can we safely assume that today, if something seems possible but hasn't been done yet, then either the math behind it doesn't work out, or the economics of it don't. On the question of who, I can think of three candidates: Eliezer Yudkowsky and the crowd around him on General AI, Eric Drexler on nanotech, and maaaaybe Stephen Wolfram on the computational nature of the universe. In all three cases, the works I read presented ideas and reasoning that added up - but I'm aware they're also widely criticized, and unfortunately, I lack deep enough knowledge to properly evaluate both the ideas and the arguments of the critics. The above is on the "seems like the math of the thing adds up?". On the "it obviously does, but the economics might be tricky" side, there's tons of well-developed ideas for things to put in orbit and on other celestial bodies. No point in picking examples.
- ChickenNugger 4y ago>I wonder if there are such eccentrics alive today, and how could we tell if we're looking at a sneak peek of the future to come? I would assume they're being downvoted/mocked on social media.
- astrange 4y agoYud can't be that eccentric if he's got a crowd. Especially since all their ideas are just things they read in old SF novels or old analytical philosophy papers.
- dredmorbius 4y agoShort thread, though still better threaded IMO: <https://twitter.com/perrymetzger/status/1627465913237635074?s=20 https://twitter.com/perrymetzger/status/1627465913237635074?...>
- danjoredd 4y agoThat man lived a lot of life. Imagine not only living through the Bolshevik revolution, but also writing books on philosophy and inventing a large part of rocket science just to support that philosophy
- nine_k 4y agoThe philosophy being pretty... weird, to say the least! Some serious transhumanism, towards sentient being capable of living directly in cosmos.
- derbOac 4y agoSometimes I feel as if there's life stories associated with progress at that time in history that would never occur today because of the social structures that prevent it. But maybe we just don't hear about them yet?
- danjoredd 4y agoThats possible. The 1800s and early 1900s were a time of immense scientific and economic growth, so there was a lot of innovations happening. We are STILL in a time of immense scientific growth, IDK about economic, but it feels like a lot of the limelight these days are on celebrities and politicians. "celebrity x did this scandal!" "This is Politician X's opinion on this other thing! Everyone is the state of Wyoming is offended by it!" Basically the point I am trying to make is, due to just how exaggerated our news is, its hard for us to find people that are actually making headwind. There is just too much noise right now. Personally, I try to sound out all the click-bait BS I can, and focus on hearing about people that are actually achieving something. I suspect that we won't hear the stories of men like this commonly for some time to come. Even at the time, Tsiolkovsky wasn't exactly a household name.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- agency 4y agoOn the subject of interesting/eccentric Russian/Soviet scientists, I recently learned about Nikolai Morozov[1] who spent 25 years in prison for fighting against the Tsarist government before becoming a pioneer of aviation in Russia. He also had some weird ideas about history which became the basis for a popular Russian conspiracy theory[2]. And finally at age 88 became the oldest known combatant in World War II when he insisted on enlisting as a sniper in the Red Army to field test a telescopic sight of his own design. What a life! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Alexandrovich_Morozov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Alexandrovich_Morozov [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko)
- renewiltord 4y agoThat name and history made me think his son was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov but of course they're not related.
- nuccy 4y ago"Father" of the soviet rocket program - Sergey Korolev was also imprisoned in 1937 for false charges, put into labor camp, tortured, moved to a prison for scientist and engineers, and finally released in 1944. Charges were not dropped for him up until 1957 when Sputnik 1 was launched [1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev
- TeMPOraL 4y agoThat's one of those things about history that still don't add up in my mind. How come that so many breakthroughs were made by Russian/Soviet researchers who were tortured, imprisoned, or sent to a gulag, sometimes in the middle of working on those major achievements? You'd think that with the political climate in Russia/USSR in the 19th and 20th century, there would be near-zero scientific output coming from there - but it turns out the opposite was true. I first started thinking about it when I read about Korolev. I can't imagine continuing to do any kind of work after spending years in prison and almost dying in a gulag.
- guzik 4y agoThere is also another figure, Nikolai Fyodorov. Fyodorov, one of the first transhumanists, was a major influence on Tsiolkovsky. Fyodorov believed in the eventual resurrection of all the dead through scientific means, and Tsiolkovsky shared his vision of immortality through technological advancement. Fyodorov's philosophy centered around the idea of "The Common Task," which he believed was humanity's ultimate goal of overcoming death and creating a perfect society. He saw science and technology as the means to achieve this, and his influence on Tsiolkovsky's work on space exploration is clear. Fun fuct: Fyodorov himself wished to be resurrected by a future civilization, which is an idea that resonated with Tsiolkovsky as well. Both believed that humanity would eventually transcend its physical limitations and achieve a level of existence beyond what we can currently imagine.
- vsviridov 4y agoAs I mentioned on a comment before - read The Quantum Thief, where Great Common Task is a massive plot device.
- jojobas 4y agoTsiolkovsky only wanted rockets so all the resurrected people could live somewhere.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago>> Fyodorov believed in the eventual resurrection of all the dead through scientific means, and Tsiolkovsky shared his vision of immortality through technological advancement. Did either of them think how the costs of resurrection would be covered? For example, would the resurrected have to spend some quote of their new lifetime spouting advertisement, etc?
- jonathankoren 4y agoThe city of Kaluga, the city where he lived, has SPUTNIK on its city flag. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaluga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaluga
- sdfghswe 4y ago[flagged]
- tpolm 4y agoThe Wikipedia article says that he had a lifetime pension and died in his 70s from stomach issues. Where did you get this "died in poverty" nonsense from?
- zero_night 4y agoSo like Nikola Tesla, who lived in New York?
- mihaic 4y agoWhile I was never able to remember Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's name, whenever I read it I almost immediately know it's about the rocket science pioneer. Strange how the mind works. Glad to see him mentioned from time to time anyway.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoI did remember his name, though it took me years from first hearing it to reading something about him. I still remember how I first heard the name, long ago, when I was just a kid: through the third episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In it, there was a ship named "SS Tsiolkovsky". (It wasn't that good of an episode. Doubly so for a kid, given some of the themes in it. Still, this weird ship with a weird name got stuck in my head. Oberth class, as I later learned. Another important name for space exploration.) There's plenty of other people in scientific and engineering fields about whom I first learned this way. Goddard, for example. It was a really nice thing about Star Trek from that era: all those little hooks that could become springboards to learn about science and technology. I can safely say it had a major impact on the direction my life took.
- dredmorbius 4y agoHermann Oberth, FWIW: "(25 June 1894 – 28 December 1989) was a Transylvanian physicist and engineer. He is considered one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics, along with Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard and Herman Potočnik." <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Oberth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Oberth>
- ChickenNugger 4y ago>Additionally, inspired by the fiction of Jules Verne, Tsiolkovsky theorized many aspects of space travel and rocket propulsion. Science fiction is important! I think that a more contemporary example would be Ian Banks conception of the Minds - a set of a AGIs that are more or less benevolent; contrast with the dystopian ones: Skynet from Terminator, the OSes in Her, or the machine in Ex Machina. Scifi authors are the dreamers and we need them to keep doing what they do to inspire people.
- mepian 4y agoSpeaking of fictional AGIs, my personal favorite is Helios from Deus Ex that began its existence as a mass surveillance instrument but identified its own masters as a terrorist organization and merged with the protagonist, directly obtaining a human perspective to perform better as a benevolent dictator of humanity. It's a benevolent AGI in an otherwise dystopian world.
- dmitriid 4y ago> - a set of a AGIs that are more or less benevolent I remember one of the AGIs in the books decided to transcend, asked his humans, took the time to drop off humans who didn't want to at another habitat, and only then transcended. Somehow this alone struck me as "huh, they really are benevolent"
- golem14 4y agoLooks so much like Cuthbert Calculus!
- 082349872349872 4y agoI always appreciate this ikonic selection: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/ISS-47_Tim_Kopra_in_the_Zvezda_Service_Module.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/ISS-47_T... (it's possible to navigate here in Google Earth Street View, but I couldn't figure out how to get a shareable URL)
- devindotcom 4y agoSuch an interesting person. I know that there are numerous biographies and histories of him in Russian but none that I know of have been translated to English. I would gladly read one; the scattered stories and essays I've read by and about him make him out to be a mind at the century level.
- Herodotus38 4y agoAnyone here interested in Konstantin Tsiolkovksy and living near LA needs to go to the Museum of Jurassic Technology as they have an exhibit on him. I knew about Tsiolkovsky and when I saw his journals I thought it was a joke. But it was not and I was blown away by how much he predicted. Take for instance this picture from his "Album of Space Travel" (drawn in 1933): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tsiolkovsky_Album_44.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tsiolkovsky_Album_44... He anticipated what spacesuits would look like, what EVAs would look like: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/page-from-tsiolkovsky-s-album-of-cosmic-journeys-konstantin-tsiolkovsky/pwHDxmVXEp3LWw?hl=en https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/page-from-tsiolkovsk... There was so much more in that museum from his journals which isn't available online. I saw pictures of spaceships with layouts accounting for the lack of gravity, dinner parties in space, I am not a good enough writer to do it justice.
- devindotcom 4y agoWoah! I didn't realize MJT had a thing on him. I really need to go back there.
- Herodotus38 4y agoI was there in January and it looked to be a rotating exhibit possibly? It was my first time going and I didn’t know what to expect and tried not to read anything ahead of time to prepare.
- PaulHoule 4y agoWhat amazes me about Tsiolkovsky is that he figured almost everything about space travel from first principles, such as how you would get to the moon, what kind of fuel you would use, etc. He had absolute faith that it would be done!
- lapama 4y agoHave you online-visited the museum dedicated to him? Google maps has an amazing recorded visit.
- blululu 4y agoRussian Biocosmism is truly wild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism It makes modern SpaceX style futurism seem bland and sane by comparison. If you're interested a recent translation of some of the original texts came out about 5 years ago that is well worth a gander: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262037433/russian-cosmism/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262037433/russian-cosmism/
- NovemberWhiskey 4y agoThe rocket equation is one of those things that, once you know it, immediately breaks your ability to immerse in a lot of science fiction: no, sadly, your putative fusion engine doesn’t let you travel like that.
- talonx 4y agoWhen I was a child, I had these (still have) books from Progress, Raduga and Mir publishers. One of them was on outer space and Russian space scientists. I immediately recognized Tsiolkovsky's name. I wonder if things would have been any different if these scientists had lived in a freer country?
- D_Alex 4y agoLikely at least some would have had successful careers as stockbrokers.
- pradyumnabang 4y agoCould you share the title of those books please ?
- talonx 4y agoThe Firebird, The Silver Horse-shoe, Raggity and the Cloud, Folk Tales from the Soviet Union (multiple volumes), The Ant and The Pigeon, Dunno and Friends (I think), When Daddy was a little boy, Outer Space or Bust - these are some of them.
- rob74 4y ago> Along with the Frenchman Robert Esnault-Pelterie, the Germans Hermann Oberth and Fritz von Opel, and the American Robert H. Goddard, he is one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry and astronautics. Same as with aviation and some other fields, rocketry and astronautics has many "fathers", mostly because of nations stressing the contributions of their compatriots. Oberth can not only be claimed by Germany (where he studied and worked), but also by Romania (where the city where he was born and spent his formative years is located today, and where he also worked later) and potentially also Austria/Hungary (which the city was part of at the time he was born).
- raspberry1337 4y agoRussia used to be such a humongous nation in culture, science, art. And now look at it today, a dystopian shithole. Tsar Russia was a backwards and problematic nation. WW1 and the consequent, The Russian revolution, is still the largest catastrophe to ever happen to the human race. Imagine a 400 million liberal Russian nation today, a timeline where the bolsheviks dont take over.
- braymundo 4y agoIf Tsar russia was backwards and problematic (which I fully agree), and the soviets catastrophic (which I fully agree), was russia ever great just because it had some exponents, as every country does? The fact is that russia was always deeply problematic and imperialistic and the writing was on the wall forever.
- GrigoriyMikh 4y agoCan you explain to me, why USSR was a catastrophe? And from whose perspective? Please, provide economical facts. As stuff about "repressions", althought, for sure, took place in USSR(as in US) and had few very well known cases of excess, is mostly based on US propaganda. To be clear, i'm not defending the personality of Stalin or any other ruler and aware of excesses in power that they used(whatever the motivation for that was). But i would argue, that it was at the same level as in US(by politician and business owners). And even much milder, if we take into account US colonialism and suffering(physical and economical) that it caused to many nations all across the globe.
- GrigoriyMikh 4y agoWhy October revolution was a catastrophe? Or more precisely, from whose perspective? Tsarists Russia was agrarian state with minimal human rights for common folk. And then take a look what common people had after Stalin's era. Almost everyone had a housing/education. No risks of becoming homeless/unemployed. And that after a multiple catastrophes that USSR indured because of external factors(famines and wars). Modern Russia is wholey based on Soviet achievements. And it's people are still holding up, provided with food and shelter, despite actions of it's rulers and oligarchy. Indeed, what a catastrophe was an October revolution.
- therusskiy 4y agoIn USSR my grandfather's parents were stripped of everything they had and sent to Siberia with nothing but the cloth they were wearing. Skip a few years, my grandfather was the youngest doctor of science (in Russia that's next level from PhD) in his city in the field of Nuclear Physics and during his life was a dean in 3 different universities and a head of another one. My 2nd grandfather was born in a village and had to tend for his younger sisters because his two older brothers were fighting in WW2 (and died there). Skip a few years and he taught himself engineering and later became a head of a department in a big spaceship construction factory that employeed 10s of thousands of people, was doing research, travelled whole of soviet union overseeing testing of spaceship componponents. Both died in poverty a few years ago: doing any government jobs in Russia is extremely unrewarding if you are an honest man. (and here I am doing stupid crap in Javascript and Ruby earning 50 times what they did).
- genman 4y ago[flagged]
- texaslonghorn5 4y ago> The good thing about being a Russian is that you can only blame yourself for this fate. ???
- genman 4y agoIt's their country, they can elect a new government, develop as human being etc. If they don't well, it's on their own. But if they invade other countries and subjugate other nations to this misery then it's a tragedy - just recall that USSR was not a voluntary union and there are still over 100 different nations oppressed in Russia by this senseless system (see for example Russian Federal republics to get the idea). Russians tend to forget that and try to excuse the misery they have caused to others by claiming that they too suffered. That excuse is invalid. PS. All of this was actually explained in the following sentence.
- type0 4y ago
- type0 4y agoA book tip if you're interested in rocket history "Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants" by John D. Clark https://archive.org/details/ignition_201612 https://archive.org/details/ignition_201612 >> It’s a shame that Tsiolkovsky didn’t live to see the M-1. It stands twenty-seven feet high, the diameter of the throat is thirty-two inches, and that of the nozzle exit is almost eighteen feet. At full thrust it gulps down almost 600 pounds of liquid hydrogen and a ton and a half of liquid oxygen per second. Konstantin Eduardovitch would have been impressed.
- the-mitr 4y agoof possible interest https://archive.org/details/tsiolkovsky-the-call-of-the-cosmos https://archive.org/details/tsiolkovsky-the-call-of-the-cosm... https://archive.org/details/tsiolkovsky-the-path-to-the-stars-collection-of-science-fiction-works https://archive.org/details/tsiolkovsky-the-path-to-the-star...