Wouldn't it be easier to train astronauts to be artists than to train artists to be astronauts?
I'd like to nominate Christopher Tin as the musician to send.
Dear Moon
211–220 of 246 posts
Re: Dear Moon
#212Honestly, this is beautiful. Let's fucking do it. No seriously...let's do it. We're humans - this is the kind of funny, beautiful, impossible stuff we can uniquely do. Capital allocation? Bleh, don't be so boring and uninspired!
How much of your capital do you plan to allocate? And do you plan to allocate any of mine (i.e., the taxpayer)?
> How much of your capital do you plan to allocate? And do you plan to allocate any of mine (i.e., the taxpayer)?
Do you ask the same of, or have any say in how much of your capital is invested in other ventures, for example, how much your country spends on its military, or civilian surveillance?
Re: Dear Moon
#213This puts Yusaku Maezawa up there in league with the de Medici's and Borgia's in terms of patron of the arts.
And patrons of science. Remember the Medici stars? It's the old name Galileo gave the moons of Jupiter.
Re: Dear Moon
#214I have the feeling this should be bigger. This was 03:00 localtime for me and I expected to wake up to headlines about the moon everywhere. But even here it vanished from the front page. No trends (Germany) on Twitter or YouTube. No top news on news sites. My "friends" on Facebook aren't talking about it. My twitter timeline only has tweets from the obvious accounts (SpaceX, Elon Musk, …) about it. What happened?
Elon Musk has evaporated the public's trust in him.
Shill reporters and publications have their fair share of the blame, too.
Re: Dear Moon
#215This puts Yusaku Maezawa up there in league with the de Medici's and Borgia's in terms of patron of the arts.
Perhaps in terms of absolute expenditures, but unlikely anything like it in terms of bang for the buck.
I agree. I dread to think who they'll send. The musician will be a popular twerker rather than someone musical, and so on. It's a cute idea, but I expect the result will be cheesy fluff. We'll see.
Re: Dear Moon
#216I honestly thought they are landing on the Moon and got excited... I was a bit put off when Musk chose a possibly worse design over aesthetics. Unrelated to him smoking cannabis on the radio show, he always looks a bit high to me. He was definitely unprepared for this event as well.
Re: Dear Moon
#217Honestly, I don't see how this is any bigger of a deal than going to the moon in the first place. There is a level of forced sentimentality here, as if a painter or a musician is going to see something different from a regular astronaut, because they're just special. Any time I see something like the level of response somewhere, I can't help but assume everyone thinks they're saying what they're supposed to say. "Thi…
> as if a painter or a musician is going to see something different from a regular astronaut A scientist, after years of training, can look at a physical system, break it down into its component parts, figure out how to model each part using mathematics, synthesize the models, and then do experiments to confirm the overall model. An artist, after years of training, can look at a scene from twenty different perspectiv…
>If you are not an expert at something, then don't reduce what they can see and do, to only what you can see and do, and declare that they are doing nothing interesting.
Perfect, this is what I was thinking for years but couldn't put into (very good) words. If you don't understand something, don't presume to understand it via "common sense".
Re: Dear Moon
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird question: I've been trying to find a short story I read years ago, which I think is by Sturgeon. Is there any chance you have run across it? In it, an engineer is brought into a war zone, where giant tank-like creatures are on the edge of overrunning the front lines. The lines must be maintained in a cave system to keep extracting a valuable mineral. The generals keep pressuring the engineer for weapons, but he…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killdozer!_(short_story) ?
No, it's not killdozer, but thank you for the reply.
Re: Dear Moon
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> on a once in a lifetime trip AFAIR, Burt Rutan said he wasn't that keen to watch Apollo-11 landing because he assumed it's soon going to be routine. So far it wasn't. But why do you think it will not become more routine - perhaps a lot more routine - this time? Surely one can't count on that - but we do can dream and we do can bring some of our dreams to reality, even though we aren't always good with predicting wh…
There's literally (yes, literally literally) nothing there on the Moon, and going there costs more than going to the Mariana Trench. No, it will not become more routine.
The Moon may be just a stepping stone to greater things. Maybe we "mine" on it, maybe we use it to more efficiently send things into orbit, maybe just tourism, who knows? You can't possibly know what possibilities there exist, right now.
I think we're lucky that ancient mariners didn't listen to the people who told them "there's literally nothing, nothing, in the Great Water".
Re: Dear Moon
#220"Some kind of celestial event. No — no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful... I had no idea."[0] What a beautiful sentiment. This humanizes space travel. I really hope the team succeeds on this mission, even with delays. As a kid, I always felt a sense of awe reading about space and space travel. Now I am in grad school and lost that feeling of awe along th…
We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars. Carl Sagan, Cosmos
What is even more poetic is that the "most used" spaceport in the future is likely to be on the Somali coast, just north of the Great Rift Valley where Homo sapiens saipens first evolved and looked out at the sea for the first time. [0] History, though it does not repeat exactly, certainly does rhyme.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_moder... (ok, well, maybe that was the Atlantic, not the Indian, but still, Africa)