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India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

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Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#191

Post by dragonsh »

DuskStar wrote: post #150
dragonsh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will disagree with your views, scientifically we are same race and our genetic differences are insignificant. Our ancestors originated in Africa. Indeed today most nation's are a hotpot of multi-culture, language, colors, food etc. All these difference you talk about came from our tribal nationalistic mentality. Indeed the reason USA and many other countries succeeded is due to openness to embrace diversity. Single…

> I will disagree with your views, scientifically we are same race and our genetic differences are insignificant. Insignificant except for the ability to digest lactose in adulthood, resistance to malaria, efficient metabolization of alcohols... And that's just off the top of my head for "significant genetic differences that tend to be associated with a race". And if you're saying that "99.99% of our dna is shared, s…

> So, a question for you - do you have any scientific basis for your views, or are they based on an idea of how the world should be?

The average nucleotide diversity (pi) for the 50 segments is only 0.061% +/- 0.010% among Asians and 0.064% +/- 0.011% among Europeans but almost twice as high (0.115% +/- 0.016%) among Africans. The African diversity estimate is even higher than that between Africans and Eurasians (0.096% +/- 0.012%). From available data for noncoding autosomal regions (total length = 47,038 bp) and X-linked regions (47,421 bp), we estimated the pi-values for autosomal regions to be 0.105, 0.070, 0.069, and 0.097% for Africans, Asians, Europeans, and between Africans and Eurasians, and the corresponding values for X-linked regions to be 0.088, 0.042, 0.053, and 0.082%. Thus, Africans differ from one another slightly more than from Eurasians, and the genetic diversity in "Eurasians is largely a subset of that in Africans, supporting the out of Africa model of human evolution." Clearly, one must specify the geographic origins of the individuals sampled when studying pi or SNP density. [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1462113/

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#192

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

rjf72 wrote: post #91
ekianjo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the fact that people always bring stuff like: > hey you can find McDonalds and Starbucks even when you don't expect it, so it means the world is closer than it has ever been right? You could find pottery exported in multiple places even in antiquity, that did not mean they had a single culture or single belief system in place. Do not equal exchange of goods with the assumption of a mono-culture.

Tea is also a phenomenal example here since it's been so globally traded that it no longer even has a cultural identity. And then when you get into the age of sail you suddenly see a massive intercontinental trade of sugar/cotton/tobacco/coffee/etc. I also never understood why people seem to think that a multinational corporation selling stuff to different cultures is somehow doing anything but increasing the corpora…

Interesting fact: if tea arrived via land, it's nomenclature is rhyming with chai. If it arrived via the seas, it rhymes with tea.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#193

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

coldtea wrote: post #97
selimthegrim wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kashmir would like a word with respect to 2)

Kashmir, and Pakistan and Bangladesh, and co... Still, India as of today remains huge (1.4 billion people) and mostly homogenous and more long lived than most other nations, the claim wasn't that it was a monolithic thing that never had any splits/ethnic issues... The comparison I explicitly made was to e.g. the Babylonian empire (now totally gone), the Roman empire (now totally gone), the British colonial empire (no…

> Still, India as of today remains huge (1.4 billion people) and mostly homogenous

India is ethnically, culturally, geographically, religiously, linguistically one of the most diverse countries in the world.

One of the main reason space launches like this are in English and English is one of official language is because not everyone has a common background

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#194

Post by ever1 »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #163
neoplatonian wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" the reason USA and many other countries succeeded is due to openness to embrace diversity." - I'd say it was due to a combination colonialism of Asia, subjugation of Africa by the slave trade and world wars recking Europe. By 1950s, USA was already ahead of the rest of the world. Because it was in that position that it was able to attract immigrants which then helped to sustain its position. There are many countrie…

The USA just had a lot of land and a low population. America already had a better quality of life than Europe in the 1700's.

source ?

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#195

Post by greglindahl »

rayiner wrote: post #48
ineedasername wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collaborating on scientific endeavors is not the same as a single world government. It also doesn't account for way we and other countries do collaborate on large scientific projects, such as the LHC. Then there are the technologies that India and other countries have not developed themselves, but instead acquire or license and avoid having to reinvent the wheel, and come to understand themselves much faster than sta…

I don’t disagree with that concept, but note that a lot of international cooperation that exists presently doesn’t help countries like India develop their own technology. Putting Indian astronauts or experiments on American space missions, for example. Taking their own shot at going to the moon, independent of US efforts, is an important step forward for India.

Wait, what? The US has no rule against Indian astronauts flying to the ISS, or Indian hardware flying on American-led space missions. This very Indian mission had US hardware on it, in exchange for DSN time. Similarly, India's Mars mission had some NASA cooperation. All of this is easily discovered information.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#196

Post by detaro »

greglindahl wrote: post #195
rayiner wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree with that concept, but note that a lot of international cooperation that exists presently doesn’t help countries like India develop their own technology. Putting Indian astronauts or experiments on American space missions, for example. Taking their own shot at going to the moon, independent of US efforts, is an important step forward for India.

Wait, what? The US has no rule against Indian astronauts flying to the ISS, or Indian hardware flying on American-led space missions. This very Indian mission had US hardware on it, in exchange for DSN time. Similarly, India's Mars mission had some NASA cooperation. All of this is easily discovered information.

Parent didn't say that such cooperation doesn't exist? But that it doesn't transfer all knowledge on how to do it.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#197

Post by cthalupa »

coldtea wrote: post #71
nafey wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well let's revisit this statement in 500 years. Every decade has brought the world closer. Even the recent developments (brexit, trump) are reactions to increased pace of integration. You can find kfc, coca cola in socities as diverse as Mongolia and Madagascar. It will be extremely difficult to turn the clock back on this and this will only keep on intensifying in my opinion.

> Every decade has brought the world closer. Well, (1) there are more sovereign nations now than ever, (2) all the big empires (from Babylonian, to Alexander's, to Roman, to Byzantium, to Persian, to Incas, all the way to the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British and French colonial empires, USSR, and more) -aside from the Chinese and Indian who are more homogenous racially/culturally - have collapsed (3) there is way m…

>aside from the Chinese and Indian who are more homogenous racially/culturally

China and India are not very homogenous at all, now or historically. I can bring up plenty of examples, but here's one that caused huge amounts of political unrest and dispute just last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaveri_River_water_dispute

>Yeah, that's a huge cultural (and dietary) destruction...

Culture only has value if people decide it have value. There is nothing innate in the concept of culture that makes it valuable or positive. Certain aspects of existing cultures I think most people on HN would agree are detrimental to humanity - things that result in harm, control, removal of agency, etc. from the unwilling. Those shouldn't be protected just because they're part of culture. And by the same token, if a more homogenous culture is required for humanity's descendants to become a spacefaring civilization (which is ultimately required for something resembling humans to survive in the long run), people might value that over cultural diversity. I'm not really convinced that that is required, as diversity generally makes us better, but there might be aspects that are incompatible.

But even focusing on something like food - there's nothing inherently wrong with people deciding they prefer to eat some type of food more than what may have historically arisen in their culture or geographic location. I love trying different types of food and hope that it is preserved in some way, but no ones owes it to me, or anyone else, to eat something they don't want to in the name of preserving culture. Every individual has agency, and we should let the people that want to preserve aspects of their culture do so, and those that want to shed aspects should certainly be allowed to do so as well. At any rate, I doubt the people eating KFC and drinking Coke in Mongolia and Madagascar need or appreciate those of us on Hackernews telling them they should or shouldn't eat and drink.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#199

Post by wumpus »

rjf72 wrote: post #106
jackyinger wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of fractious factionalist junk that is designed to stoke terrestrial xenophobic fears. Anecdotally I have traveled and met folks abroad as well as interacted with many immigrants domestically, at the end of the day I think it’s safe to say the basic nature of being hunt leads to us all having more in common than not. Now governments being divisive for short sighted power grabs? Sure, but don’t say it…

I completely agree with you, but I also think you cannot hand wave away the small differences. Islam is such a perfect example of this. Sunni and Shia Muslims have been literally killing each other for about 1400 years now. Why? One side believes that Mohammed's father-in-law should have been his successor, the other side believes that his son-in-law should have been his successor. Their fundamental views and values…

Thanks for the whataboutism! Islam is a perfect example? In history, the same damn thing happens between Christian factions, occasionally involving a large number of deaths.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#200

Post by greglindahl »

detaro wrote: post #196
greglindahl wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? The US has no rule against Indian astronauts flying to the ISS, or Indian hardware flying on American-led space missions. This very Indian mission had US hardware on it, in exchange for DSN time. Similarly, India's Mars mission had some NASA cooperation. All of this is easily discovered information.

Parent didn't say that such cooperation doesn't exist? But that it doesn't transfer all knowledge on how to do it.

Uh, OK, that's not what I thought parent said.

There's actually tons of knowledge transfer, everything but ITAR. For example, NASA publishes a lot of information in the open, as long as it's not ITAR-restricted.

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