we are creators
we are creators
259 comments
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And fifty years later we still mope around in low earth orbit. Progress has slowed down a lot since the billionaires took over.
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Fifty years later we have reached mars with drones and created space probes to expand our knowledge of space.
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Actually the rate of major mission launches and new "firsts" was highest in the late 60s/70s, slowed significantly in the 80s/early 90s, and resumed at a moderate and consistent pace from the mid-90s until today (although today missions became far more complex and focused on detailed science rather than just achieving things).
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The reason why spaceflight stagnated for 50 years is because IT came in the middle of it.
All the smart people went to build computers instead of rockets, and now we have smartphones and the internet.
Now that IT is stagnating (enshittification), smart people will probably go back to spaceflight.
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They followed the money. The US Congress saddled NASA with a mandate for a Shuttle without funding it properly. The Russians never even developed crewed rockets that could do anything interesting beyond LEO. Everyone else wasn't doing much until the last decade or so.
There have long been plenty of smart people at NASA, and they're wasted on poor funding and management. It has nothing to do with IT.
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The bigger issue is that there isn't much point to having humans in space.
After the Wright Brothers flight, aviation took off because aviation is genuinely useful. First it was mostly for delivering mail, but that was an incredible change. Instead of a letter taking weeks to get somewhere it would take days. Places that used to be completely isolated from communication now had an easy way to keep in touch. Then with passengers aviation you had something that changes the world in a positive and measurable way.
Humans in space is extremely expensive and there really isn't much worthwhile to do up there. Sure, you can do some science experiments about how zero gravity affects something, and learning things is useful, but there's no obvious immediate payoff. If going into space made your bones stronger and not weaker, space travel would have developed massively because there would be a reason for millions of people to go to space for the health benefits. Or, if ballistic travel made sense economically, there might be rockets that cut the travel time from New York to Melbourne down to a couple of hours. But, having to get all that mass above the atmosphere means that it's far too costly to make economic sense.
People talk about mining asteroids or the moon, but there really isn't much that's valuable up there. The moon is mostly made of
cheese[wait, my sources need updating] lunar regolith, which is composed of elements that are just as common on earth: silicon, aluminum, calcium, magnesium, iron, etc. But, on earth you don't have to deal with the difficulty of processing it on another celestial body, nor do you have to deal with the spiky, unweathered nature of regolith that means it destroys space suits and machines.The only reason the US landed on the moon with humans in the first place is that it was in a dick measuring contest with the USSR. Now that the cold war is over, nobody's willing to pay for something that useless.
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The problem is time.
You're just considering human spaceflight. Keeping humans alive and equally importantly sane for years is very different to sending a probe somewhere, and we've been getting better at the latter
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Thats because the only good progress now is up or positive on the stock markets.
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Yeah you're right, there was no such thing as stock markets until 2010 I heard
Before capitalism was invented in 2010 we were just guided by happiness and the pursuit of science and art and improving our livelihoods 🥰
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Since the USSR fell
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What are you talking about? Everyone was a capitalist back then as they are now. The space race was as much a capitalist conquest for glory as it was beneficial for technology/science.
In the USA we wasted time, money, and media resources going to the moon while black people were treated as less than citizens and millions were living in abject poverty. Not much has changed on that front for the countries entire history. What good did the moon landing do for the average man?
Same with the USSR. As people starved and lived under a dictatorship, the ruling class wasted the countries money by getting into a dick measuring contest.
The billionaires have taken over since colonialism became the status quo in the 15th century. Most of the technological progress since then is guided by capital and not something noble.
— I forgot to add that most of the technological progress in the 20th century happened because we were so hellbent on murdering one another that we had to come up with new and efficient methods. Your concept of “progress” is skewed in favor of the same systems that you want to dismantle.
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In the USA we wasted time, money, and media resources going to the moon while black people were treated as less than citizens and millions were living in abject poverty. Not much has changed on that front for the countries entire history. What good did the moon landing do for the average man?
I'm sincerely wondering if you'd like an answer to your question. I can provide you the science perspective, if you like, not to mention a political one. Not interested in an emotional debate here, you're entitled to your point of view and your polemic, if that's all you prefer.
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And since then - We have found ways to make all travel worse for comfort, more expensive, and more necessary.
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With internet, mobile phones, computers, travel seems to be way less necessary than before
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I was referring to the city planners as @EtherWhack@lemmy.world correctly surmised.
I also have worked from home* for almost two decades. But the non-work travel is still stained by the horrible planning in most urban sprawls.
For various strange definitions of "home". From a campground to an RV on a lake, and apartments in Switzerland to rotting farms in Alberta.
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Gotta love capitalism breeded innovation.
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Travel is much, much cheaper than it used to be.
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more necessary
I haven’t had a commute in over a decade
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Ditto. But the rest of the travel we do need to do to interact with people, amenities, and services, is still worse than it should be due to poor inter-city and city-rural transit. At least here in Canada. My time in Europe showed me how bad we really have it. Even with the unavoidable foibles that happen in the best of cases/countries.
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It’s easy to see why people thought we would be a lot more futuristic by now.
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i have a little tablet in my pocket that gives me access to the sum total of all human knowledge and can contact anyone else more or less anywhere on/around the planet for instant voice communication.
We can take organs out of dead people and put them in living people and have them survive.
I can be anywhere on the planet within 48 hours
We have cars that can drive themselves
We have robots being controlled live(ish) on mars
We have planes that can stay airbourne indefinately
And there's many more examples
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We killed our trajectory by shutting down nuclear investment.
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We killed our trajectory because the cold war ended and we were no longer engaged in an arms race involving rockets. Once capitalism figures out how to exploit space for infinite growth we'll get back on track assuming we don't great filter ourselves first.
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Forget the moon. We're all within a few generations of the first people who had access to indoor toilets on a mass scale.
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India basically introduced toilets in a single generation.
According to this article, in 1993, 70.3% of the Indian population did not have access to toilets. By 2021, the number dropped to 17.8%. So literally more than half the population of India got access to toilets within 30 years.
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Just a nitpick, the fastest transportation for thousands of years were boats.
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And before that, feet.
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Just a nit pick, but you could run faster than sail boats, so they're only faster for long distance
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even sailboats have their own history of getting faster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_sailing_record
Sure you could run faster than average but best speed as of 2012: 121.1kmph 75.2mph
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The top speed of Columbus' ships was about 8 knots, and the average speed was about 4 knots, or 7.5 km/h to 15 km/h. Typical jogging speed is about 6 km/h to 10 km/h. So, they were a bit faster than typical running speed. But, those were the cargo ships.
Ships designed for speed were much faster. In 1852 the fastest ship was the Sovereign of the Seas which topped out at 41 km/h.
Probably for a long time the fastest transportation would have been a horse. Or, if you want a "vehicle" or some kind, a chariot. But, for at least a century a fast sailboat was probably the fastest thing around.
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It's actually falling
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Orville Wright (of the Wright brothers) also only died 21 year prior and was able to fly on a jet before his death.
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Imagine how much pressure that jet pilot was under. The guy who literally invented flying is your passenger
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One of the Wright brothers managed to live to see the end of WWII. Imagine the weird janky flying machine you and your dead brother designed in a bicycle shop in Dayton is being used to decimate Europe while boats full of the things are redefining naval warfare across the whole of the pacific before one drops a weapon so powerful that it becomes the basis of mutually assured destruction
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That looks like the 14-bis from Santos Dumont in the picture. He did not live enough to see WW2, but he ended up helping design planes for WW1 and got terribly depressed about it, commiting suicide later.
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Feels like we're going backwards now with like anti-vax stuff. A lot of tech seems to be getting worse for users, too, like IoT gadgets that stop working for remote reasons
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We create tech these days to extract maximum value from the populace, not so much to make lives better
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A man named Peter, who had escaped slavery, reveals his scarred back at a medical examination in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, while joining the Union Army in 1863.
Yup, that's far alright:
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And now we have self-driving cars that are able to kill people without human intervention 👍
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we made climate change which is even more effective
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Truly the pinnacle of efficiency
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We invented, and rejected, life-saving vaccines.
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And destroyers.
Just a few months into its reign, the US regime intends to ruin decades of progress in science and space exploration:
On May 30, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced a plan to cancel no less than 41 space missions — including spacecraft already paid for, launched, and making discoveries — as part of a devastating 47% cut to the agency’s science program. If enacted, this plan would decimate NASA. It would fire a third of the agency’s staff, waste billions of taxpayer dollars, and turn off spacecraft that have been journeying through the Solar System for decades.
Shutting down a working, completely functional mission like New Horizons, in particular, that may just be on the cusp of a huge discovery - it has seen signs of a new, second "ring" to the Kuiper Belt - is the ultimate repudiation of the American self-image as explorers of the frontier. And all of this at a time when the Chinese are just about catching up to "the West" in space science prowess.
As a kid, I never understood what the Romans were trying to say with their Janus myth. Turns out that Orange Janus is simply the god of endings.
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My grandmother was an adult through that 66-year period. Lived to be 99. She rode to town on a horse as a kid and took trips on jets before she died.
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In 1861 Russia abolished serfdom.
In 1961 Gagarin reached space.
It's just barely implausible a person born a serf could have seen their descendant explore space.
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Say what you will about the USSR (and I certainly will) but they did develop and industrialize incredibly quickly.
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A sense of urgency accomplishes great things.
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They got nothin' on Japan, though.
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Also the atomic bomb.
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Don't forget the weird rocks that, when refined and enriched, it gets a bit of... well you know...
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Spicy.
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Fossil fuels are a hell of a drug.
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Refined iron is a helluva drug
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The problem with materials like oil, lead, asbestos, etc. is that they’re really fucking good at what they do.
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Lead is still cool AF from a utility and recycling standpoint, we just have to make sure we don't touch, breathe or eat it.
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It’s why a lot of sci-fi written in the 1900’s takes place in like the 90’s and 2000’s. Writers thought that we would keep on exponentially advancing and have Mars colonies and flying cars by now. They could have never predicted that interest in space exploration would have waned, like people stopped caring about the space shuttle, and that the actual technological revolution took place in the computing space.
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i think a lot of people simply couldn't have imagined computers back in 1900. that is simply because computers are a rapid qualitative progress instead of just a quantitative one.
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This is because of the socio-political dimension of things. It’s not just that people just randomly changed their minds, so much technological innovation is driven by war or the threat of war.
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Then the inherent contradictions of capitalism really started to hit, quantitative change passed to qualitative change and progress grinded to a halt and science and technology are regressing now in the imperial core.
- Quality into Quantity Time
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And only 30 years after that, we're surfing the interwebz, sailing down the data highway at the speed of light. I'm running out of metaphors to chain together...
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And just 20 years later we have destroyed the concept of truth. What a time to be alive.
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Do you mean the actual philosophy of truth or do you just mean that we currently have a cult of personality spewing lies and people en masse accept it as truth?
Because I've heard arguments for both.
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otoh, people in both eras used gas powered cars, telephones, telegraphs, and manual typewriters. They could both go to movies, ride trains, and take ocean voyages.
A person from 1903 would need a few days to adapt themselves to 1969 technology.
But someone from 1969 coming into 2025 would be lost. Most people in 1969 didn't use credit cards, and had never seen an ATM. They used rotary phones and antenna TV.
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No, most people in 1903 lived not that much differently from the Medieval times. Urbanization was still low then. An average person from 1969 would adapt to 2025 much faster then an average person from 1903 to 1969.
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Tbh I think the person coming to 2025 would probably have an easier time to adapt culturally, than the one coming to 69
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The Stonewall Riots occurred in 1969. Star Trek's controversial interracial kiss was a big scandal a few years before. The movie "The Legend of Nxxxxr Charlie" was shown and advertised all over the country. The movie "Midnight Cowboy" got an X-rating with zero nudity and one off screen man on man blowjob.
Sorry, I think you've got it backwards.
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I've thought from time to time about how being able to see significant societal change in a person's lifetime is a very recent phenomenon. For many thousands of years, things stayed pretty much the same from birth to death unless you happened to live though a significant event. It's neat that I've gotten to witness change in a way that one would have to time travel to experience in the past, but monkey's paw, the change isn't always good...
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And look at how much life has changed in America from 2015-2025! We went from an imperfect democracy where civil discourse was still possible to an authoritarian shithole filled with millions and millions of fascist thugs who are somehow still functioning in daily life despite very clearly being psychotic beyond the help of even the best psychiatrists. Oh, and the rich pay less in taxes, facts no longer exist apparently, people are having psychotic meltdowns caused by hallucinating AIs that will eventually replace half of all entry level jobs, and science and education and environmental destruction are going back to the 1800s! Soon RFK Jr will legalize lobotomies again because his brain worm made him do it. Oh and then there's the mass suffering being inflicted on legal, law abiding migrants the likes of which the world has never seen (in the U.S), medicaid and food stamps and obamacare subsidies being ripped away, the pell grant being gutted...
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Shit is happening so fast that shows like The Boys feel dated the moment the new season comes out.
Pre covid actually feels like another era entirely.
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it's the vehicle of nostalgia hitting the wall between the past and the future
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And now everything feels stuck again
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Right? The last 25 years we have reached almost nothing, i mean we had evolve in medicine, batteries, electric cars and so on... But noone of it change your life, the last humanity great achivment was internet
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There was this graph about the time between major inventions, going back to agricultural stuff 10.000 years ago, and it like halvened each X years quite reliably, we are in the part where in some years it might touch like minutes. Interesting.
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Just as LLMs become better every year or less. Lots of money expects a lot from AI soon
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The Brooklyn Bridge and the battle of Little Bighorn happened the same year. And there were Native Americans who fought in the battle that were still alive to see man walk on the moon. So in the span of one lifetime we went from Custard’s last stand, to one giant leap for all mankind.
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Custard’s last stand
Doubtlessly took place in a cath lab.
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Good point, but it's "Custer", not " Custard".
Although I kinda like the idea of a trembling, gelatious shape being the asshole that led the charge at Little Bighorn...
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I don't know if it was a chain or a one-off, but a strip mall not far from where I grew up opened a frozen custard stall called Custard's Last Stand. I went in there exactly once. They served me a waffle cone full of a grey substance that resembled drywall plaster. It tasted alright but it needed some sprinkles or something.
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We also created nukes and religion. So there's that too.
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Praise atom
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Bunch of real hoopy froods there
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Check out those prosperity churches. They are like nukes for grifters. They are like gambling on getting free shit with god while the priest gets filthy rich in gods place.
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When I was in my late teens I was visiting family about 1000 miles away. My aunt insisted we go to christmas service at her mega church. Apparently the place was like a massive stadium-esque concert and performance hall with like a recreational and shopping area. My parents paid me to just go along and not alienate our family. So, as we are going up the stairs to the entrance of the chapel, I see, in the lobby, they had a line of ATMs from different banks, they had a kiosk for foreign currency, and a cash register set-up, for tithing. I looked at my dad and said "they invited the money changers into the temple". My aunt asked what I meant by that, and I recounted a reduction of the Jesus flipping tables stories. Then I pointed to the ATMs, kiosk, and register, and said "money changers, they literally have money changers in the temple".
I was then admonished and told it was only an hour, I can keep my thoughts to myself.
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It's been 53 years since we stopped sending humans to the moon. Now we have the world wide web, touch-screens, voice recognition, human simulcra, and CRISPR.
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Time wise, the moon landing is located roughly in the middle between the first image, and now. It happened almost 60 years ago (59).
We have since invented the internet, and a lot of great ways to waste our time
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The Babylonians knew a * b = 1/4 * ( (a+b)2 - (a-b)2 ), and used tables of 1/4 * x\2 to do multiplication by addition. It took three thousand years for Napier to discover modern logarithms. The slide rule was invented eight years later.
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Now picture it without fossil fuels giving us a 100:1 EROEI
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Yep. Energy is what we need to accomplish all of this.
Happy to be working on alternatives to fossil fuels.
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MFW I’m in a technology singularity racing full bore toward its conclusion.
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There is no individual. There is only network. System. Systems create. They output. They produce. They produce well and tremendously when the system is healthy. Make the system healthy for once. I mean again.
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We had flight before airplanes! Why do people just ignore lighter than air travel lmao. Yes, planes are more impressive, but it wasn't like BAM plane BAM rockets.
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I don't consider anything true aviation before the squirrel suit.
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Honestly the first aviation was a human jumping. It didn't happen until about 3000 BCE. Much later than you'd think. Until then we always kept one foot on the ground. Those ancient humans that did persistence hunting? Yeah, turns out it was technically power walking.
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My grandfather lived from 1871 to 1971; from Kitty Hawk to one small step on the moon.
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And now there are flat earthers and anti vaxxers. Everything going backwards.
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This humanity fuck yeah stuff really rings hollow when you look at the trajectory of the world. What does any of this matter if we just kill ourselves by ransacking the planet or blowing ourselves up?
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The creation of the airplane and the creation of the movie studio.
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Sorry if it's already been pointed out but they just kind of skipped over boats
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The chariot lasting as high tech for 3800 years has some part to do with the dark ages.....
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The dark ages weren't dark. Humanity didn't just stop for 1000 years, you know?
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Western history classes gracefully ignore things like the chinese empires, the golden ages in the arabic world (which oh so happened to be to be during the "dark ages" of Europe and saw science flourish there) and anything that happened on the american continent prior to colonialization (not like we know too much about it given the colonizers' rampages and targeted cultural destruction). Let alone African history, Indian, South-East Asia, Australia…
Same of course with religions. But watching that Martin Luther movie three times was definitely important I guess, cause it "changed the whole (!) world". I fucking hate all of this bullshit.
Sorry for the rant.
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Most modern historians consider "The Dark Ages" to be a myth.
Even if that weren't the case you are talking about 500 years out of nearly 4 centuries.
This is also an extremely 'Western' centered POV. While Europe was in the "Early Middle Ages", cultures around the world were thriving. The 'Byzantine Empire', The Tang dynasty in China, The Maya Civilization etc. Innovation happened all over the world, not just in Western Europe.
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also i consider the dark ages were as important for european development, as you leave a good wine in the cellar or a dough in the fridge for a long time for it to mature and develop a special flavor.
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Chariots wasn't really high tech unless for a relatively brief period of time a couple of millenia ago. They are not very suitable for combat. They can be fast though.
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Chariots were an extremely effective weapon, they lasted so long for a reason?
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All supported by the giant shoulders of some tiny apes that jogged behind fauna for 4 million years, and ate some berries along the way.
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I feel like the pictures over-exaggerate the difference a bit. The wright flyer was literally made by two people in their spare time while the space program was around 4% of all federal spending and had almost half a million people working on it in some capacity.
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where are my rocket socks?
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But what if...
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we are creatorsWe enjoyed a short period of exponentially increasing complexity due to a massive amount of 'immediately free' energy afforded us through the burning of fossil fuels.
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My great-grandfather grew up with horses and carriages and saw man set foot on the moon and the early days of the internet. He saw the rise and fall of the USSR. What will I see?
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What will I see?
The fall of all the rest of us.
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Dude i'm fucking genx, i grew up under the threat of thermonuclear annihilation, a destroyed ozone layer, AIDS and more.
We only fall if you fucking roll onto your back and let it happen
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There are people who have seen Russia collapse twice, and if we're lucky, there will be people who see it three times.
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Science!
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And yet I watched a crap film the other week where somebody went back in time 20 years, and the only difference was everyone had flip phones instead of smartphones.
So the era of progress is over.
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I'm certainly not.
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100 years from now we will have unlearned all of that.
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My Great Grandfather lived that change. He went from walking, horses and buggies, steam engines, with no telephones or electricity, to sitting on a couch next to me and watching the first Apollo moon landing. He saw more insane changes to this world than we will ever probably see. But.....
It took 2 world wars and millions of dead to drive all that change in that time period of one life. War is the great driver of technological leaps. I'm not sure I feel the need to drive tech advances that fast at the cost of all those lives. Slow and steady might be a better path to travel.
Still, within my lifetime, which much like my Great Grandfather I'm nearing the end of, there have been great changes that everyone just takes for granted. The internet has caused a great disruption in the world. You have access to nearly all the information this world has in an instant. No matter where you are. No more going to a library to look up outdated information in a card catalogue. You can talk to nearly anyone on this planet at any time. When I grew up, we had a party line we shared with 5 other families. And using that phone was expensive. You got billed for each phone call for the duration of that call. You can do business with almost every business on this planet directly. Or Amazon/Walmart/Temu yourself to death if you want. All we had as the Sears or Wards catalogue to mail order from. And then you waited a month to get your order.
You can affordably travel to London, Paris, Tokyo, and nearly everywhere else in a matter of hours. There are re-usable space rockets now. And while the stars might still be just out of reach, there is nowhere in the solar system we can't go if we really want to. The planets are ours for the taking as soon as we want them. Even true self driving cars are a solid possibility now.
Those are just a few of the things I've seen change. And there are many more. But we seldom notice and just take them for granted.
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War is the great driver of technological leaps
Maybe for capitalist countries because an external threat is the only motive that will get the bourgeois to fund science instead of consolidating power, but the USSR and Chinas rise were during peaceful times.
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Still find it absolutely amazing the moon landing happened in the 1960s, back when the Boeing 707 was popular. just amazing what humanity can achieve with the right priorities
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Let’s say we went to space. No need to bring landing on the moon in it. That thing with Kubrik still bugs me, and the Cold War was pretty intense.
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We went to the moon.
If we hadn’t, the Soviet’s would have been screaming it from the rooftops. The soviets tracked all the Apollo missions themselves, and even had robotic missions going on at the same time as several of the manned US landings.
The Cold War was intense. You think if the US hadn’t made, the soviets would have just let it slide?
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I don’t think you know much about Russian culture or history.
They have long hard winters and they plan years ahead.
Also, your president is a Russian asset now, and they have successfully blackmailed to many members of both parties possibly even Supreme Court justices.
Just to get a little bit of a sense of what the USSR was around the time of the moon landing this is a pretty good start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Brezhnev
Anyway, my experience here on Lemmy is that very few people are capable of looking into so-called conspiracies with a fresh pair of eyes. If the actual version of the events wasn’t reported on BBC and CNN at the time of happening some people will never accept another version of history.
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Have you not seen 2001 A Space Oddysee? Kubrick couldn't have made a fake moon video as realistic as the film from the crews of the six landers that landed and filmed on the moon
How would Kubrick's film have fake livestreamed to the different downlink sites? Low orbits are much much faster than orbits at lunar altitude (90 minutes versus a month). How could a LEO broadcast satellite pretend to livestream from the moon?
How could they fake it so well Russia couldn't tell? Russia could pick up and decode the signal from the moon when the moon was up. Radio direction finders were a thing back then
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Probably because it was live streaming from the moon. That doesn’t mean that is where the footage was taking place.
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Didn't they leave a retro-reflector on the surface of the moon after the first mission? This seems pretty definitive to me.
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That's cute. But let the grown ups talk.
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