5 ms·
It’s so inspiring when you see how these things are just built to last. quote: “In the past, engineers have compared keeping the probes operational to keeping
by alex_suzuki 3y ago
It’s so inspiring when you see how these things are just built to last.
quote:
“In the past, engineers have compared keeping the probes operational to keeping an old car running. The tech is severely outdated, yet it keeps ticking over – a trend often seen in the spacecraft of past decades.”
At some point us humans will probably simply have forgotten how to maintain them.
- bayindirh 3y agoYou should read "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster. Also, "Pump Six" from "Pump Six and Other Stories" will also do fantastic job of diving into this "forgetting how to maintain them" reality.
- tass 3y agoRingworld
- skywal_l 3y agoFire upon the deep, where space ships runs on a future version of unix and only one guy knows what the unix epoch means.
- larperdoodle 3y agoI don't recall that in that book. Maybe you're thinking of A Deepness in the Sky? I haven't read that one yet.
- twoodfin 3y agoI think the reference is in Fire: It’s an offhand line about an ancient timekeeping system which the modern engineers mistakenly believe is calibrated to humanity’s first steps onto another celestial body.
- r2_pilot 3y agoAs A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorite books (it's been a while since I've read it- my copy is currently on tour), I'd like to chime in and say I remember this reference, but I believe it's in A Deepness In the Sky, which goes more into Pham's backstory. It's definitely one of these two books though.
- Freaky 3y ago> Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. - Chapter 17, A Deepness in the Sky
- dekhn 3y agoAt a conference I met Vernor Vinge and told him my entire career was basically because I read his books in high school. He was very happy.
- NikolaNovak 3y agoI loved that aspect of it - it's becoming more and more true as we build more and more frameworks/abstractions. Once we got to Kubernetes and some of the modern web frameworks, the notion of "Programmer-at-Arms", the one-in-thousands master developer who'd actually dig into the depths of these abstractions, made perfect sense!
- marssaxman 3y agoYes, that bit is in "Deepness".
- joshstrange 3y agoI really love that series. It's been a little bit since I last re-read them but there are certain concepts/ideas in them that I still think of from time to time.
- dekhn 3y agoI think the first half of the first book is the best. Much less interested in Tine's world
- joshstrange 3y agoLoved this series when I first read it and it will always hold a special place in my heart but I did reread a few months ago and the way Teela Brown (and some other women) is talked about/to left me feeling very uneasy.
- winrid 3y agoKeep in mind if you start the Ringworld series there's also a tie in series that starts 200 years before Ringworld (Fleet of Worlds) and both end with the same last book. Niven and M. Learner wrote so many books...
- alex_suzuki 3y agoAwesome, thank you! Just as I was again running out of things to read.
- tleilaxu 3y agoThe most incredible thing about The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster is how casually prescient it is - first published in 1909! Instant messaging, video calls, the internet…
- the_af 3y agoPump Six really nails that feeling of "this thing we don't really understand keeps filling the log with warnings we don't know what to do about, let's ignore them and pray it just keeps working." Any similarities with the real world are surely coincidental.
- ilyt 3y agoMany apps have warning/errors that are undecipherable from the very beginning, let alone 20 years later. Or only make sense when looking into source code that is long gone
- sand500 3y agoThe worst is when the log line is constructed in a way that makes it really hard to find the source. Source code file name and line number is ideal but a tag like on Android auffices.
- eastbound 3y agoAnd to say that people are paid to find traces of attacks in logs, while after 5 years, everyone ignores everything that’s in the logs.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- freilanzer 3y ago> "forgetting how to maintain them" reality I serve the Omnissiah.
- joshstrange 3y agoThe Foundation series covers this as well though I can't really recommend the book series. I tried a re-read when the TV show came out and felt pretty icky with how women were portrayed in the books. Also they aren't as good I remember. The TV completely diverges from the books but in a good way IMHO. Normally that bothers me a lot but after rereading the first book again I think I prefer the TV show.
- pstuart 3y agoI loved the series as young teen but rereading the first book was a disappointment. I'll be checking out Foundation after I finish Silo.
- swozey 3y agoSpace opera is my favorite genre but I've failed to get through the Foundation series probably 20 times now so this may be terrible advice but it's recommended to not read them in publication order by Asimov himself. This has a good breakdown: https://www.reddit.com/r/Asimov/wiki/seriesguide/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Asimov/wiki/seriesguide/ edit: Somehow I got Foundation mixed up with Banks' Culture series. I think I have gotten through most of Foundation if not all but I've had a hard time with the Culture series, there I usually start with Player of Games..
- joshstrange 3y agoThe Culture series is good but I've struggled with getting through it all as well. If you like space opera I can highly recommend the Honor Harrington series, the first book being On Basilisk Station [0]. This has held up for me for well over a decade and I've reread the entire series (~14 books IIRC) at least 4-5 times. I've heard it described as "Horatio Hornblower in space" but I never read that series so I can't speak to that. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35921.On_Basilisk_Station https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35921.On_Basilisk_Statio...
- a_e_k 3y ago
- WWLink 3y ago> At some point us humans will probably simply have forgotten how to maintain them. Nah, these systems are simple and incredibly well documented. A ton of people have operated them, too. They'll be fine. I'd expect something like that to happen to a university cubesat lol.
- op00to 3y agoWe can only hope that because they're so well documented, we can work around any "dead hardware" or "dead media" issue. Like, I hope the Voyager manual doesn't say "see disk 2 for firmware", and disk 2 has turned to dust 10 years ago.