41–50 of 136 posts
> Collins, who remained in orbit on the Command Module, is behind the lens. Every other human is in front of it. This caption is so powerful.
Climb a hill and take a photo of the floor with your telephone. If there are no planes/spatial stations nearby, then you'll have the same thing.
By the way, his book “The Precipice” is quite worthwhile to read!
It's hard to believe that it's been over 50 years since humans have been outside of low earth orbit. It's like we sprinted forward so fast, going from horse drawn carriage to space flight in a generation, only to get frightened and recede back from the highest point, never to go back. Granted there has been an enormous amount of innovation in the last 50 years, but by some accounts we've been going backwards. Humans…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Climb a hill and take a photo of the floor with your telephone. If there are no planes/spatial stations nearby, then you'll have the same thing.
If you have a 179.99 degree wide angle lens.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You really need to take the power and "reality distortion effect" of propaganda during the Cold War into account. Massive projects were started without much rational sense just to beat the other side in an imaginary race (and a very concrete military race). What's the point of landing a man on the moon, if the technology to do so was so rushed and held together by duct tape that it wasn't useful for anything else? Wh…
> since modern sky scrapers are not expected to "survive" for thousands of years anyway And maybe that’s a problem! Why exactly are we not building beautiful landmarks that will survive eons like the Romans did? We have a throwaway culture, and nobody ever dares question it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Climb a hill and take a photo of the floor with your telephone. If there are no planes/spatial stations nearby, then you'll have the same thing.
If you have a 179.99 degree wide angle lens.
It's hard to believe that it's been over 50 years since humans have been outside of low earth orbit. It's like we sprinted forward so fast, going from horse drawn carriage to space flight in a generation, only to get frightened and recede back from the highest point, never to go back. Granted there has been an enormous amount of innovation in the last 50 years, but by some accounts we've been going backwards. Humans…
> been outside of low earth orbit
we stopped pushing that frontier because we've been there and found it dull and empty, as a matter of fact, we decided zero g experiment were more important than playing with regolith, and build a freaking human habitat in the void to support that endeavor. beside, we've got regolith here on earth now, we can experiment on it in the commodity of our backyard if needed be.
> mach 3 flight
except the routine space launches that ship scientist back and forth from the space station, going through literal plasma on the descent leg.
> Roman concrete
this has just been widely romanticized, we don't use that because it's incompatible with fast building processes requirements, is too heavy for large structures and it's hard to dismantle when a structure is no longer needed or need renovation.
sure, some other stuff one can cite as having reached an apparent sub-optimal minima, like average speed of travel, but that's not because we're backward, it's because we're learning to take care of our own environment. slowly, but we're getting there. just because the tradeoff are different it doesn't mean that a golf id3 is just worse than a bugatti eb110 or a recess from peak technology.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a 179.99 degree wide angle lens.
Not sure how does the lens angle change the front/back position of the objects around it. But still; cheaper than a whole space program ;)
Technically you can do that with a planar lens if you stick your eyeball onto the lens.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You really need to take the power and "reality distortion effect" of propaganda during the Cold War into account. Massive projects were started without much rational sense just to beat the other side in an imaginary race (and a very concrete military race). What's the point of landing a man on the moon, if the technology to do so was so rushed and held together by duct tape that it wasn't useful for anything else? Wh…
> since modern sky scrapers are not expected to "survive" for thousands of years anyway And maybe that’s a problem! Why exactly are we not building beautiful landmarks that will survive eons like the Romans did? We have a throwaway culture, and nobody ever dares question it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You really need to take the power and "reality distortion effect" of propaganda during the Cold War into account. Massive projects were started without much rational sense just to beat the other side in an imaginary race (and a very concrete military race). What's the point of landing a man on the moon, if the technology to do so was so rushed and held together by duct tape that it wasn't useful for anything else? Wh…
> What's the point of the Space Shuttle if launches were more expensive than disposable rockets? What's the point of the Buran, if the Soviets didn't feel like they need an answer to the space shuttle "just in case", even though they couldn't see any point in the shuttle design (except as a nuke carrier)? Rather than nukes, I always thought the main advantage of the Shuttle was the ability to bring things back to Ear…
Put a few nukes on the Shuttle, and you can drop them anywhere in the world with much less warning time than intercontinental ballistic missiles. At least that's what I read about the reasoning of the Russians building their own shuttle, because when they ran the numbers on the Space Shuttle they concluded that a "civilian use" didn't make much sense.