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Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

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Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#111

Post by beaconstudios »

pmarreck wrote: post #109
beaconstudios wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taste is individual, but I just don't understand how you could find a heap of concrete slabs to be beautiful. To me, beauty is life-affirming, and brutalism is the physical embodiment of a philosophy that denies life in favour of rigid functional structure. It's the physical representation of kafkaesque bureaucracy.

I’m glad you’re respecting taste, especially when you’re throwing such anthropomorphological argument against it ;) I’m not sure why there is such a significant aesthetic difference between cutting stones and stacking them (masonry architecture) and filling the exact same form with concrete, especially when the latter is usually far more robust and thus, safer (read: actually life-affirming, by being neither flammabl…

Architecture follows philosophy. Skyscrapers (internationalist style) and large curved glass buildings (modernist style) have the same core philosophy as neoliberalism, for instance. Brutalism came about as an explicit rejection of aesthetics and "higher purpose" to building facades - an idea deeply rooted in materialist philosophy, hence its adaptation by the Soviets. The grandparent comment demonstrates this perfectly: "IMHO a healthy society should be "above" this sort of stuff". Your argument to building materials is also an example of this - while it's true, it is reductionist; living in a concrete jungle is not better than living in a wooden fishing village just because the materials are less flammable.

The philosophy of architecture isn't really a "anthropomorphological argument" when architecture exists for humans, at the behest of humans, and represents human values. The idea that a building is just a box that people exist in is itself a philosophical position, one that is exemplified by brutalism, and one that I and many other people are opposed to.

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#112

Post by hyko »

willis936 wrote: post #39
pbronez wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still planning to do it again within the next decade just to reassure ourselves about it.

Actually doing it is important. “I can go to the moon anytime I want” stops being true after a solid generation of not doing it. There is institutional knowledge in doing something in the present world. Further, specs and documents are nice, but rarely sufficient. A famous example is the F-1 engine. Every one of them was made off spec and if you took the factory drawings alone you would never make a working engine. Y…

I agree that there’s probably not much value in just retreading the old specs, but I’d argue that just having the knowledge that it has been achieved in practice still puts you ahead of the engineers in 1961, and that the intervening decades of progress put you even further ahead.

There’s no reason to think that an equally well funded greenfield effort couldn’t land on the moon from a standing start within a decade; it’s not like we’re living in the shadow of an ancient advanced civilisation with no present day industrial capacity.

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#113

Post by anchpop »

flohofwoe wrote: post #69
curtainsforus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The passenger flight thing is the one I have to really chuckle at. Nothing against the work being done in this area--hey, not my money. But effectively you have lots of folks, who probably mostly take trains, super-excited that maybe one day CEOs and high-end lawyers will be able to fly from NY to London.

France is actually doing something very sensible here (banning domestic flight between cities if the travel time by train is under 2.5 hrs): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56716708

why is that sensible?

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#114

Post by pimlottc »

matsemann wrote: post #51

I once saw a video (reenactment but original voices maybe?) of how one of these images was taken. How the earth appeared over the horizon and they scrambled to find a camera or so. Anyone knows which video I'm talking about and could help me find it? Edit: finding out the picture in question had a name, Earthrise, made it easier to find. Here's the video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dE-vOscpiNc

Wow, what a great video, very cool how they combined the original photos, mission audio and 3D models of the lunar surface. Thanks for the link!

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#115

Post by inimino »

flohofwoe wrote: post #7
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #6

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…

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…

> without much rational sense just to beat the other side

Assumes that just beating the other side was not a sufficient rational motive. Which, given that the threat both sides faced was "you and your way of life will be utterly obliterated", is a pretty irrational criticism.

What's the point of , if ? There's tremendous hindsight bias in criticising even the Shuttle program on the basis of what we know now, while disregarding the value of everything we learned from doing it.

Even copying another country's technology on the basis of speculative military applications may not be irrational, unless you're somehow privy to all the knowledge that was available at the time when those decisions were made.

The remarkable MAD doctrine itself can be criticised as inhumane or insane, but hardly irrational. It's a triumph of rationality and a counter-intuitive application of game theory, the iron laws of mathematics elevated to places where we really would rather see common sense and humanity prevail.

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#116

Post by pimlottc »

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #6

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…

> I think we assume that technology will keep progressing. We assume Moore's law will continue into the future and we forget that there are people behind the progress. The technology that produced those pictures are gone, we might be able to take ones like them again, but never with the same rockets and never with the same photo-chemical processes. Progress is fragile, not inevitable and everything we have can be lost in a generation just as easily as it was made.

It's good to be aware of our blindspots. The idea of progress as a monotonically increasing upward trend is a very modern and Western perspective. It's not inevitable.

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#117

Post by vkou »

rainbowzootsuit wrote: post #108
astroflask wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changing orbital plane requires delta V, and the Shuttle had barely enough to make it to LEO (the highest it ever went was servicing the Hubble). Cargo capacity... Not that much really, since you're carrying yourself a whole lot of orbiter already. It had a large volume in the cargo bay, and the mentioned ability to retrieve things in that cargo bay. But yes, DoD/military influenced the design of the Shuttle. It just…

From some distant memory the dimensions of the Space Shuttle cargo bay was specifically matched to accommodate the launch and servicing of the Hubble Space telescope. I'm not sure which design drove which.

The HST was a close variant of various military spy satellites. The difference is that it was pointed into space, as opposed to towards Earth.

Consider that a large number of Shuttle missions were classified, then put two and two together...

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#118

Post by proc0 »

So stars are not visible from space? I'm assuming not because they're not in the pictures, but because there are no pictures of just stars from space, which I assume would be a point of interest for any astronaut. That is weird, and I wonder if almost every single sci-fi scene in space should have no stars as well.

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#119

Post by evan_ »

proc0 wrote: post #118

So stars are not visible from space? I'm assuming not because they're not in the pictures, but because there are no pictures of just stars from space, which I assume would be a point of interest for any astronaut. That is weird, and I wonder if almost every single sci-fi scene in space should have no stars as well.

Stars are visible in space but the Earth is so bright that if you expose it properly, the stars are underexposed. It’s basically the same reason we don’t see the stars in the daytime: the sun is much brighter.

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#120

Post by proc0 »

evan_ wrote: post #119
proc0 wrote: post #118

So stars are not visible from space? I'm assuming not because they're not in the pictures, but because there are no pictures of just stars from space, which I assume would be a point of interest for any astronaut. That is weird, and I wonder if almost every single sci-fi scene in space should have no stars as well.

Stars are visible in space but the Earth is so bright that if you expose it properly, the stars are underexposed. It’s basically the same reason we don’t see the stars in the daytime: the sun is much brighter.

Right but does that mean astronauts don't see stars because it's always "daytime" in space? If we can see the Milky Way in the night sky of remote places away from cities, then the atmosphere must be playing a huge role in allowing us to see stars. I'm just wondering if those night skies are also visible in space, perhaps from the dark side of the moon.
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