261–270 of 326 posts
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You're going to be blown away when you discover people have been reliably passing down information to future generations for many many centuries.
"Reliably" passing down information for future generations is a recent phenomenon. Just go and look at the history of mathematics and there were multiple periods where information was lost and rediscovered.
Conoaring this to 3 generations ia peak absurdity
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The mastery of reliably passing down information is likely older than anything you've read. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedas > The Vedas have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques. That's at least 4000 years of lossless transmission.
We are talking past each other, I would not consider a few religions being able to pass down information about that specific religion to future generations as humanity as a whole being able to pass down information reliably. Especially given that the "Vedas" is wholly useless information while things like the Pythagorean theorem were discovered, lost, then rediscovered. We've only recently rediscovered how Romans cre…
And documentation to an average software project is lost in 1 year.
> 4000 years really only represents 160 generations of humans I don't consider that impressive
But 3 generations at Nasa is?
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You're going to be blown away when you discover people have been reliably passing down information to future generations for many many centuries.
"Reliably passing down information" includes a lot of stuff a lot less impressive than "reliably passing down the information required to keep operational a spacecraft mid-flight at the edge of our solar system."
I don’t understand why we are not sending these off in every direction constantly. The price can’t possibly be that prohibitive considering what we can accomplish with 40 year old technology.
"Every direction" isn't what you think it is. Even if we had a voyager travelling the "opposite" direction, once outside the solar system they'd appear to be travelling at almost the same speed with respect to the orbit of the solar system around the milky way. The solar system is estimated to orbit ~200km/sec around the centre of the milky way. Even with a perfect ejection, at the estimated speed of Voyager you'd en…
1/(2sqrt(2) - 3) ~ 5.83
times more energy to throw an object to the center of a gravity well than it does to throw it out of orbit.
It doesn’t matter how close your initial orbit it, or whether you’re orbiting around the Sun or Sagittarius A*. The ratio is always the same, though gravitational assistance from other bodies often affects the calculations in practice.
I expect we’d send a satellite outside the Milky Way long before we get one anywhere near the center of the galaxy. Not that either mission seems particularly feasible with current technology.
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I've long thought universal healthcare (& UBI) would enable more people to take entrepreneurial risks, but I hadn't considered that passion jobs like NASA could also be beneficiaries.
UBI and universal healthcare would enable _so_ many people to take risks that they can't today. We would see an explosion in the arts, in fundamental science, in passion projects like this. It would be absolutely incredible. Except according to half of the people in charge it would mean The Wrong People would get money and all they would do is buy drugs. And that's why we can't have nice things.
> Except according to half of the people in charge it would mean The Wrong People would get money ...
If you look at that 'half' as people representing the status quo power, they don't want an explosion in such things that cause change.
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We are talking past each other, I would not consider a few religions being able to pass down information about that specific religion to future generations as humanity as a whole being able to pass down information reliably. Especially given that the "Vedas" is wholly useless information while things like the Pythagorean theorem were discovered, lost, then rediscovered. We've only recently rediscovered how Romans cre…
> Pythagorean theorem were discovered, lost, then rediscovered. And documentation to an average software project is lost in 1 year. > 4000 years really only represents 160 generations of humans I don't consider that impressive But 3 generations at Nasa is?
How do either of these still have any propellent left? If they were originally scheduled to last only four years, how did they manage to get launched with enough propellent to last decades and billions of miles past their original mission? According to this article from 2003, the probes have enough hydrazine to last until 2034 and 2040: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/11/what-voyager-1-u... Edit: this "Voyag…
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> NASA funding, which peaked during the Apollo program in the 1960s, has dwindled, making it next to impossible to recruit young computer-science majors away from the likes of Google and Facebook. This problem can be attacked in a couple of ways, one way is to increase compensation sure, but another is to make it possible to have healthcare and housing on the salary they do offer. The chasm between pay and cost of li…
I've long thought universal healthcare (& UBI) would enable more people to take entrepreneurial risks, but I hadn't considered that passion jobs like NASA could also be beneficiaries.
They are doing it all wrong. Who runs on-prem hardware these days??? They should put it all in the cloud, they can replicate and have many instances of virtual Voyagers, not the measly 2. CDN should help with latency too, I hear their latency is measured in many hours, and is getting worse every day! Also, software update, big deal - use CI/CD! They probably don't have a Kanban board either... Dinosaurs!