Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released • Hacker News Board

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#71

Post by leadingthenet » Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 1:11 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #63

curtainsforus wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the first wikipedia paragraph, I don't see anything wrong with building things so they'll look cool a) when they're maintained and in use and b) when they're badly maintained and crumbling. I'll take 'Ruinenwerttheorie' buildings over brutalist concrete piles that look disgusting the day they're built and worse as they age. The 3rd Reich had a lot of problems, but they had some good aesthetics (Huge Boss, etc).…

I think the point is that it takes a sort of hubris that's quite typical for autocratic regimes to show off to the rest of the world - and future generations - with gigantomanic architecture. IMHO a healthy society should be "above" this sort of stuff.

Instead of showing off to the rest of the world, we should ensure that people feel oppressed and demoralized by their every day surroundings. That'll show those autocrats!

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#72

Post by sizzzzlerz » Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 1:26 PM UTC

Missing is the Voyager 1 image looking back to Earth from 4 billion miles, the one referred to by Carl Sagan as "the pale blue dot, a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam". It doesn't have the resolution these images have but it's impact on our civilization is over-whelming.

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#73

Post by kingkawn » Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 1:28 PM UTC

leadingthenet wrote: post #36

flohofwoe wrote: post #7

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.

even more insidious is our culture of hollow sentimentality

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#74

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

avereveard wrote: post #47

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…

such a nihilistic view has little ground in reality > 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…

The primary purpose of ISS is to be a jobs program, not scientific experimentation. The Russians are involved specifically to keep their engineers from going to work for hostile states.

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#75

Post by Retric » Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 2:12 PM UTC

leadingthenet wrote: post #68

Retric wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Needs changeover time. Thick stone walls can provide insulation, but their hell on WiFi etc. Growing up in a 200+ year old building you find a lot of architectural designs and modifications that don’t fit with modern usage. Pre AC maximizing summer cooling involved maximizing airflow where now we want maximum insulation. Before central heating we wanted chimney’s everywhere. And before wood stoves we wanted giant fir…

> Very old buildings may look nice, but they aren’t inherently better I never said they were. I only said that they were built to last and that they were infinitely more aesthetically pleasing because we actually gave a damn about these things as a society. Now we don't. Old buildings can be upgraded (I should know, I live in one, and have both functional pipes, insulation, heating, and Wi-Fi). So let's upgrade them,…

> we actually cared about this things as a society

No, the buildings that survived are generally more aesthetically pleasing, most old buildings where shacks. Walk around an old plantation for example and the slaves quarters didn’t survive. Search around for some original outhouses and you realize what survived isn’t simply representative of what was built.

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#76

Post by driggs » Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

protoman3000 wrote: post #3

Unbelievable that all life there ever was, is contained on this little marble.

Given the scope of the universe, and aided by the perspective of photos like these, many would certainly describe this idea - that life has only ever existed and will only ever exist on Earth - as "unbelievable".

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#77

Post by projectileboy » Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

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…

For what it’s worth, the space race along with the desire to build up missile technology in general are the reason we have computers today as we know them. Not many people outside of the space and defense industries were willing to shell out buckets of cash for a single transistor.

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#78

Post by avereveard » Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #74

avereveard wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

such a nihilistic view has little ground in reality > 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…

The primary purpose of ISS is to be a jobs program, not scientific experimentation. The Russians are involved specifically to keep their engineers from going to work for hostile states.

But still, we're to the point where not a state, not a government entity, but a rich, bored dude is sending people into space as a viable business model

Thinking our space tech is going backwards is severely myopic

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#79

Post by dylan604 » Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 2:31 PM UTC

astroflask wrote: post #57

flohofwoe wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK the Russians were mainly concerned about the ability of the Space Shuttle to quickly change its orbital plane, combined with the planned high frequency of flights (which never happened though) and high cargo capacity. 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…

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…

Would the ISS be possible without the Shuttle?

Re: Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

#80

Post by willis936 » Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 2:33 PM UTC

sfifs wrote: post #70

willis936 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.…

I agree. Importantly Space-X’s engines are actually cutting edge. They are the best performers man has made, so we’re not walking backwards. However, that progress was not guaranteed and if we stopped all space travel for fifty years there would need to be another monumental effort to relearn how to build rockets.

I play with CRTs as a hobby. It’s popular these days, but it will never be popular enough to manufacture another CRT. The last assembly lines closed a decade ago. The physics knowledge is there, and electronics have gotten better, but it would take many iterations to make a trinitron equivalent in another 20 years. The people who understood the magnetics (ie how horizontal output transistor and flyback transformer characteristics interacted with the impedance of the steering coils) are dead or retired. The same for the experts in mask manufacturing. We can figure it all out again and do it better than ever, but it would be a lot more work than if we had continued making them.

Again, it’ll never happen because they’re too big and require too much material compared to other display technologies. It’s just interesting how fast they disappeared when they were an integral part of human society for nearly all of the 20th century.