7 ms·
I always have a sense of pride and a feeling of respect for us as a human race when reading about V'ger. It's astonishing that we were able to send a space prob
by voytec 3y ago
I always have a sense of pride and a feeling of respect for us as a human race when reading about V'ger. It's astonishing that we were able to send a space probe, designed and built to be so robust that it's still doing its thing and sending us postcards after 46 years(!!!) of flying away from us in an extremely harmful environment, while we still fuck simple stuff up back home.
- LAC-Tech 3y agoWhat the US accomplished from 1950-1980 is incredible.
- nemo44x 3y agoIndeed. A group of people went through 15 years of financial hardship and horrific war and it made them so strong willed and determined to do something with surviving that. I’m grateful to not have to have gone through all that but also accept that they formed a certain wisdom we can’t appreciate fully. That era should be looked on like we do the renaissance, etc. Just a remarkable era that we still are building on today. The springboard.
- layer8 3y agoThe atomic bomb triggering large investments in physics education and research has a lot to do with it.
- dimator 3y agoSo true. NASA's achievements are the highest of human accomplishments, imo. Sometimes I picture being on the team that built these triumphs, I think I would be overtaken with pride forever.
- mycologos 3y agoThere's a nice 2017 documentary about Voyager called The Farthest [1]. It includes interviews with many of the now very old team members, and they do exude (deserved) pride, and a still fresh sense of wonder that they pulled it off. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farthest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farthest
- daveslash 3y agoFANTASTIC documentary! Beautifully made, engaging, entertaining for those well familiar and very accessible to the layperson. I caught it by accident, right at the beginning, while flipping through public-access TV and spent the next hour+ positively glued in front of the TV. Didn't even move to the couch - just transfixed in front of the TV where I was standing when I caught it. Later bought it on BluRay. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu3kuUB1sOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu3kuUB1sOQ
- jacquesm 3y agoThat was the pinnacle. Now we're too busy with wealth extraction and making a couple of dudes ever richer.
- brandly 3y agoEh, the future of space travel and exploration is very bright.
- jacquesm 3y agoI'm not so sure about that. Humanity is turning ever more inward and education is getting worse and worse with the peak somewhere in the 1950's. If we have a bright future in space travel none of the countries with launch capability today look like they will be the ones driving it.
- manicennui 3y agoThere are many, many unmanned missions happening now making amazing discoveries. Cassini was nothing short of mind blowing. I'm somewhat sympathetic to your claims, and I wish more people were intellectually curious, but there are very likely more people in absolute numbers performing scientific research now than ever.
- jacquesm 3y agoI'll believe it when I see it. For now the Voyagers are the only thing out there that are expanding our envelope of influence, everything else is just data and will eventually evaporate. Think about it from a non-solar system perspective. Nothing we've done since Voyager has had any effect outside of our solar system and if we don't change our attitude it is quite likely that nothing ever will. Everything else we've done will long term only be a little bit of radiation, some of it structured but so far below the noise floor it will be unrecoverable.
- yreg 3y ago
- btach 3y agoI appreciate the Star Trek reference (V'ger incase somebody doesn't know what I'm talking about - Star Trek, The Motion Picture). That movie awed me as a kid.
- userbinator 3y agoBack then, more people were hired not for who they are, but what they could do.