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…
it’s the vehicle of nostalgia hitting the wall between the past and the future
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.
I don’t consider anything true aviation before the squirrel suit.
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.
No one predicted phone addiction
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.
To be fait, a lot of sci fi does involve very advanced computing, like HAL in 2001.
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.
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.
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.
Even their technology was driven by war. No human civilization has been immune that. Maybe in story books, but never in the real world.
And now everything feels stuck again
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
I’m almost there with you, the advent of the smart phone and social media are pretty big game changers. Maybe not for the better, but they do change the game.
Yeah, I find it really foolish to say 2025 is not distinctly different from 2000. The ubiquity of smart phones has been fucking crazy.
Hell, in 2000 I had teachers that wouldn’t take printed reports because not everybody had access to a computer for their work even though I did. Kids these days will never know the finger cramping pain of doing 20 page, college ruled, hand written papers.
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?
What will I see?
The fall of all the rest of us.
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
I’m certainly not.
But what if…
The chariot lasting as high tech for 3800 years has some part to do with the dark ages…
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.
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.
The dark ages weren’t dark. Humanity didn’t just stop for 1000 years, you know?
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.
Even within Europe, there was significant scientific progress during said dark ages. It’s extremely obvious by just looking at a 9th century building to those from the 14th century (especially churches). The latter require profund knowledge of mathematics/civil engineering. We went from tiny windows in 2m thick brick walls to vast, airy Gothic cathedrals (although those did take a couple of centuries to actually finish).
Although to be fair, that knowledge did largely come to Europe from the scholars of the Arabic world.
To add to it. A lot of the European antique that the West loves to pride itself in, such as the work of Roman and Greek philosophers and scientists were only preserved by the Muslims in the Middle East and subsequently rediscovered from Arabic and Persian works. So a lot of European culture and history was preserved by outsiders as the white barbarians couldn’t hack it. Unlike the imperial museums in the UK, France, Germany or other countries, that preservation was achieved largely without pillaging.
The amount of ancient Hellenistic texts rediscovered from Arab and Persian texts is neglible, compared to the texts which were preserved in other ways.
Your rant about museums is completely unrelated to that particular subject as well.
Your rant about museums is completely unrelated to that particular subject as well.
Sure, let’s ask the Greek what they think about the parts of the Acropolis that are stashed away in London. They will surely find it unrelated.
Only thing I, as a European, know about MLK is that “I have a dream” speech and that he has something to do with rights for black people in America. My memory stops there.
Funny enough, in Catholic religion class I learned more interesting things about history than in history class itself. My teacher made sure we knew about other religions, how all of them are connected, how they developed, what some did while others went crusading, etc. Best teacher I’ve ever had.
Only thing I, as a European, know about MLK is that “I have a dream” speech and that he has something to do with rights for black people in America. My memory stops there.
Unless this is a joke and I’m just being dense, I believe Natanox was talking about Martin Luther, and not Dr. Martin Luther King Jr (MLK).
I asked my teacher why we were so christianity-centric in the class, we literally never talked about things like Shintoism, Islam and more. She then loudly proclaimed to the class that I “wanted to have an extra (!) block about FOREIGN religions” (of course causing 90% of the class to scream at me - bullying was rampant there anyway). She then smiled at me in the most fucking dense way possible to basically say “see, nobody wants that” and from then on ignored all my protests and just left, ignorantly smiling like the idiot she was.
We proceeded to not learn anything about them, therefore the only influence we had (since it was the countryside) were the news talking about islamic terrorists.
Also same about MLK of course. He existed and he had a dream, end of history.
Dark ages didn’t happen is the issue with your point. There were many new technologies developed and progress being made.
Chariots were an extremely effective weapon, they lasted so long for a reason?
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.
Don’t forget the weird rocks that, when refined and enriched, it gets a bit of… well you know…
Spicy.
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.
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:
Side note: ICE now has a bigger budget than the FBI, DEA and Bureau of Prisons put together.
What was the justification for that budget?
No idea, the justifications would have been discussed in Congress. The “Big Beautiful Bill Act” (HR1) section 100052 just says $29,850,000,000 is allocated for Immmigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
That immigrants are literally an invasive military force that is destroying the US
They’re gonna be working hard to justify that budget. Things are going to get a whole lot worse for our American friends. :(
Unfortunately we’re just getting started on building the sanctuary districts, sure would be nice if we could just skip WW3
Skipping it is exactly what should be done when it is started. Refuse to fight under any circumstances.
Sorry with all due respect I am curious how this ties to the topic of the post? I feel like I’m missing something.
We’re bringing slavery back. Edit: not that it ever went away. You’re allowed to enslave people as punishment under the 13th amendment. Hence the prison industrial complex.
Right and I agree with that, but unless my client is bugged this post is about technological innovation boom in the 1900s?
This person is physically incapable of discussing anything else.
Do just technological innovation? Don’t Google this but rockets and turbines and basically whole branches of propulsion, thermodynamics, encryption, flight dynamics, fluid dynamics, computing all had a start in this time frame all related to the old baddy Germany and all might have a rebirth? Not LOL but having all sorts of science groups ignored, refunded and marginalized along with the more personal gender identity, migration status and such, all of that is repeating history.
Oh well when you put it like that
Yes exactly. Maybe soon we’ll be inventing the airplane and the dirigible?
We also created nukes and religion. So there’s that too.
Praise atom
Bunch of real hoopy froods there
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.
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.
And fifty years later we still mope around in low earth orbit. Progress has slowed down a lot since the billionaires took over.
Fifty years later we have reached mars with drones and created space probes to expand our knowledge of space.
Actually, we first landed on Mars with the Viking series of probes in 1976. Then there was a whole lot of time where we didn’t do anything before we started again with Mars in the late 90s.
We have even figured out aviation on mars so thats kinda cool :D
No no, it’s cooler than that. We tried out aviation on Mars to make sure we figured out how to do aviation on Titan.
Ngl I’m fucking stoked about the potential exploration of the Jovian moons
Goddamn that’s so fucking cool
Incidentally, that mission was one of those surprising successes. The drone they sent was really barebones so it could tag along on another mission. Lots of people thought even doing that was a waste of launch mass. Nobody expected it to work all that well. It ended up working incredibly well and got used far beyond its planned mission until its rotor blades broke.
Now the team gets to build a real one.
Yeah its a great story. I watched the Veritasium vid about it and its so much cooler when you hear the backstory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20vUNgRdB4o
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).
We reached Mars with probes 50 years ago. I’m not in any way trying to denigrate the amazing achievements of the Mars rovers. But the fact remains that a human crew could have done all that and more (like drill a hole) in a few weeks at best.
And 59 years after landing on the moon we’ve just been watching Space X rockets explode instead of going back on rockets NASA proved it could engineer with slide rules and drafting tables.
Relying on Starship as a moon lander is one of the most hare brained decisions of NASA in recent years. OTOH, it would be perfectly feasible to get a moon mission going using Falcon 9 as the launch vehicle.
SpaceX had a brilliant track record for safety with their novel reusable rocket boosters. Even the first couple of Starship prototypes were incredibly successful, massively exceeding mission goals.
Unfortunately Musk seems to have entirely lost the sauce and is killing all of his companies, diving into conspiracy nonsense while funding an incredibly unpopular election campaign, gutting the federal government and tanking the economy by single-handedly raising the national unemployment rate through expensive and unnecessary layoffs. And during that same time Starship has become incredibly unreliable with prototypes not only failing to reach orbit but even exploding on the pad before attempting liftoff.
Meanwhile competitors are popping up around the world trying to recreate SpaceX’s falcon rocket boosters, and many are starting to achieve success. Musk could have owned space but instead gestures wildly at everything and nothing in particular
Musk should have stepped down from all of his companies about 5-10 years ago and let them continue on without him. Maybe he’d run a funky tiny/manufactured home startup to try to “disrupt housing” or an online healthcare startup to try to “disrupt healthcare” or maybe he’d be running a drone startup to “disrupt warfare” or maybe he’d just sail off into the sunset impregnating as many women as he can convince to carry his kids while shitposting away on twitter. We can only dream only such an alternate reality
He got a taste for power and got addicted.
Weak.
The Falcon series would be very limited for a moon mission. The Saturn V could get 47 metric tons into a trans lunar injection. Falcon 9 can get about 27 metric tons into GTO–not even to TLI (which isn’t even listed in public information I could find, though one random Reddit post claims 3 metric tons). The Apollo lander was 17 metric tons, and it could take two people and a rover for a little tour on the surface. We can maybe shave some of that weight off with a new design, but probably not by half or anything really significant like that.
If we want to go back to the moon, it should be for more than taking pictures and picking up some rocks. You may not even be able to do that with a Falcon rocket.
NASA doesn’t exactly rely on Starship for this, though. SLS does technically exist. It’s just expensive, took far too long to build, and should probably be written off. Bezos might have something coming up, but who knows. Still relying on another space billionaire either way.
We should be shipping construction materials.
Of course,we’d need the whole world to be working together not to steal eachother’s goods…
It wouldn’t be a one shot mission, of course. SpaceX have proven that they can launch a bunch of those in quick succession. That would still be a fraction of the cost of the idiotic SLS.
Maybe if they could get in-orbit refueling to work on the Falcon? IIRC, Starship would require that for trips out of LEO, anyway. Nobody has done it before with a crewed rocket, and there’s been some criticism that Starship’s plan relies on this thing that hasn’t been proven.
The Lunar Gateway is supposed to have a final assembled mass of 63 metric tons. May or may not be able to make that work at all with Falcon.
We need some kind of automated workshop on Mars. Send a boatload of refined materials up there and a small autofactory that can craft marginally useful gear and replacement parts.
First, we need an autofactory. This is not a minor step.
We need a hardened autofactory, capable of self-repair and or serious fault tolerance.
Power, protection, temperature stability, something capable of 3d printing without a lot of finish work. How cool would it be to print a new wheel for a rover and install it? Imagine rovers being delivered batteries and solar panels by mini helis…
It’s sci-fi for now, but not impossible.
It’s absolutely possible, quite likely now. It would probably be too big a project to do anywhere but earth and maybe the moon right now. But the doors it would open if completed…
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.
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.
All the smart people went to build computers instead of rockets, and now we have smartphones and the internet.
I work in software, most of my peers are not spacefaring material. The issue is budget and ability/desire to do things that are bold instead of sending robots up there.
Sure, but is bet some of them would be pretty useful for programming fuel pump controllers or navigation systems. Neil Armstrong flew Apollo 11, he didn’t design or build it.
No, they would not. The kind of software development done in aerospace is very, very different from the commercial industry at large. Writing 20 lines per week might be considered a breakneck pace because of all the formal verification that needs to be done on every single line.
Eh, some parts are that critical but also someone has to write the logic for the bathroom occupancy light.
How many people is that going to employ?
Remember, this thread started by saying “smart people” got sidetracked into IT rather than building rockets. There are a lot of problems with that claim, but at the very least, it has to assume that these less important items would be able to employ lots and lots of programmers.
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.
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
That’s why getting to the moon permanently is so important. Once we get in situ resource utilisation going, the rest of the solar system becomes much more accessible.
KSP taught me that, shame we don’t have a lower mass minty moon.
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.
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.
I would. The literature the other commenter provided really did not help me understand the benefits of it. Both articles they listed focused on how much of a cultural and political achievement it was. However, as I pointed out, that perspective leaves out a large portion of our population.
The science achievements sound good. We learned the origin of the earth and moon and NASA invented a few good gadgets like wireless headsets- obviously good contributions. But I don’t see how those outweigh the cons of the Apollo program.
It cost so much money and distracted the populace from the very real issues going on at the time. It was a great propaganda victory.
My comment was trying to point out how the early space exploration was not any better/more noble/less capital focused than our current relationship with scientific exploration. It is foolish to act like everyone was perfect back then and all happy to go and colonize the moon.
When we watched the blue origin flight we didn’t get excited by the science and its possible cultural impact. We got mad because it was a bunch of billionaires fucking around. I would hope that if we were alive for the space race, we would recognize how similar of a situation it was. The USA didn’t invest billions of dollars in scientific research. They invested billions in creating an image of the USA as the center of the scientific world and the leader of western nations.
Science reply:
We learned the origin of the earth and moon and NASA invented a few good gadgets … But I don’t see how those outweigh the cons of the Apollo program.
It’s a lot broader and more subtle than just the origin of the Earth and Moon. Apollo rewrote your geology textbook. Not the lunar geology text - the one for Earth. And not just the chapter about origins. This tends to get obscured because there was another revolution going on in Earth science at the very same time - a little thing called plate tectonics.
Direct results from Apollo, corroborated by old Soviet and modern Chinese automated landers:
- Planets are born hot, and their insides stay hot, for a very long time
- The threat from impacts (asteroids/comets) is real, pervasive and ongoing
- Planets don’t stop evolving (their surfaces change, sometimes dramatically, and rather suddenly in geologic terms) for a very long time after they’re born
Indirect result from Apollo:
- Earth is part of a larger natural system that affects it every single day - larger even than the solar system; let’s call it the local Galactic environment
Of the three direct results, two sound obvious. Naturally Earth is hot inside; where does lava come from? Of course space rocks can bang into us; what would stop them? None of this, however, was evident certain to a huge number of geologists, physicists, or chemists in the 1960s (or '70s, or even '80s… some people never change their minds. They just die). And when most workers in a given field are against you, progress tends to be rather slow. Walter and Luis Alvarez had a hell of a time convincing people that an asteroid strike could have ended the Cretaceous, not to mention the dinosaurs - I mean, there isn’t even a crater in the Yucatan, it’s flat down there! (LOL That debate still isn’t over, even today…)
As far as I can see, direct result #3 (about planetary evolution) hasn’t entered the zeitgeist yet. Yes, people are (wisely) alerted to climate change, but that’s just a little tweak compared to the immense environmental changes that we know took place on Venus, Mars and Earth - and I’m just talking about the ones that have occurred since complex life emerged here, not the ones from billions of years ago.
And that indirect result? I still know a number of scientists who hem and haw and won’t quite agree that Earth’s environment doesn’t suddenly end 100 km up. The Voyager probes show us how bad the radiation is when you get far enough away from the Sun, and I don’t know if you even do Voyager without Apollo. But Apollo, uniquely, shows you something else - the Sun hasn’t always protected us from that bigger dose of cosmic radiation that the Voyagers see. Sometimes that heliospheric shield shrinks, and the planets get a lot more radiation than we do today. And that’s just one of the synergistic results, there are more.
IMO the primary lesson we learn from geology is that environments change in time. Please note my use of the PRESENT TENSE in this reply, because none of what I am discussing is forever confined to a remote past - all of the planetary evolution processes I’m talking about can still occur today, and are certain to recur in the future. Geology left the silo to become a much more interconnected science partly because of Apollo - and the thing is, it became a science about THE FUTURE as well as the past.
Apologies for the overly long reply. Apologies to my science people for oversimplifying here.
Nah I get what you’re saying. Those are all good things and I agree with pretty much everything in your other comment. I just think that the Apollo missions and other space missions, despite bringing about good, did not occur because of good intentions.
But yeah you’re right that by learning about other planets we learn a lot about our own and how to move forward. A part of my brain just refuses to recognize most of the good in space exploration because the common attitude towards space exploration is similar to our attitude toward colonization.
Why when people describe living on the Moon or Mars do they use the word colonize? To me it implies that these spaces are only useful if we can extract profit. And now there’s talk of exploring other space rocks (sorry for broad term) because they contain precious metals we’re running out of on earth. It’s just gross to think that the only way space can be explored or properly funded is if it makes more money and ends up exploiting someone.
Politics reply:
What good did the moon landing do for the average man?
Directly, immediately? In the 1960s? Aside from the people employed working directly or indirectly on space efforts? Almost none. Is that really the answer you’re looking for, though? Scientific knowledge can take decades or even centuries before it improves our lives tangibly. But I think you know that, so I won’t argue with you about it.
Concerning the waste of time, money and attention - LOL there was the Vietnam war, too. I’d argue was less beneficial to humanity than Apollo. I am only raising this point because I think it’s unfair to place blame for lack of social progress at the feet of scientists, or a sub-set of scientists. We’re collectively responsible.
Otherwise, I generally agree with you. The Apollo program was not conceived or executed to benefit science. But Apollo did mobilize science irrevocably. “Planetary science” as a discipline, community and way of thinking didn’t exist before Apollo. Very few people, even in the science community, were comparing planets and learning something from that before about 1970. Ditto for environmental science - and that community, too, barely existed before Apollo. Even though that field got a headstart due to people like Rachel Carson.
Would you have improved social conditions for anyone by cancelling Apollo/Gemini in, say, 1964? I’m not so sure about that. 1968 certainly implies otherwise. I’m here to tell you that exploring neighboring worlds is a social good because you learn the parameters of your own environment, parameters you MUST keep an eye on to keep Earth habitable. But that social good is a joke if people can’t walk down the street without worrying about ICE raids. So yeah, you’re right, racial hatred obviates this beautiful and essential realization that we’re connected to a bigger universe. Would you have the scientists of the world hide their knowledge away because we live surrounded by ugliness? All I can say to you is that we live here too, and this fight is ours as much as yours.
Both of those focus on political and cultural achievements, which in my opinion, do not help the average man. They were achievements in propaganda and leave out a large part of our population.
I also struggle to see how the scientific achievements required going to the moon (Besides learning about earth/moon origin). The other achievements like wireless tools and head seats did not require a moon landing.
Both of those focus on political and cultural achievements, which in my opinion, do not help the average man. They were achievements in propaganda and leave out a large part of our population.
Might want to work on your reading comprehension.
Technology developed during the Apollo Mission has made everyday life easier – and safer.
That’s the first paragraph from a section on one of those links that’s about technological advances.
I also struggle to see how the scientific achievements required going to the moon (Besides learning about earth/moon origin). The other achievements like wireless tools and head seats did not require a moon landing.
Maybe not, but that wasn’t the question you posed, it’s where you moved the goalpost to. The US went to the moon, that happened already; but there were any number of achievements that resulted in life improvements for everyone while it happened.
What you seem to want to debate is whether it should have happened and your about 60 years late for that discussion.
So funnily enough the introductory paragraph to part of an article isn’t the evidence portion, it’s just the intro. Yknow you could’ve just quoted from the part where they describe said technological advances or that author’s thesis.
I don’t see how I could’ve “moved the goalpost” any more than you are doing right now. To be more specific
I struggle to see how the scientific advancements required going to the moon
is more of a statement than an answer to the question of “how did the moon landing help the average man?.” Who’s to say the technology would’ve been made w/out the moon landing? See how this is a pointless argument we’re both making?
And btw the first question isn’t an argument or my main idea. It’s a question added for emphasis. What I’m trying to say is that we should not pretend that the moon landing and all early space exploration was a noble non-capitalist venture focused on the benefit of man (as the original commenter implied). Our current relationship with space is not stagnant because of billionaires for the same reason that our relationship with space post-war was so accelerated.
I don’t see how I could’ve “moved the goalpost” any more than you are doing right now.
This right here is moving the goalpost:
I also struggle to see how the scientific achievements required going to the moon (Besides learning about earth/moon origin). The other achievements like wireless tools and head seats did not require a moon landing.
Where in my comment that consisted of quoting your question and providing two links that answer that question did I address any of this?
Moving the goalposts is an informal fallacy in which evidence presented in response to a specific claim is dismissed (the links provided to address the specific quotation from you) and some other (often greater) evidence is demanded (“how the scientific achievements required going to the moon”).
Who’s to say the technology would’ve been made w/out the moon landing?
I assume you meant wouldn’t have been made without the moon landing? Either way, this is tacitly acknowledges the technological improvements made as a result which would be “good for the average man”.
See how this is a pointless argument we’re both making?
I’m not arguing with you. You asked the question and I provided links with answers to counter the allusion you were attempting to make that it didn’t do “the average man” any good.
As I already stated, what you seem to want to debate is whether it should have happened and your about 60 years late for that discussion. I have no interest in arguing that with you or anyone because it happened and that’s not going to change.
And btw the first question isn’t an argument or my main idea. It’s a question added for emphasis.
Yea, and it’s a poor question, which is why I addressed it specifically. The moon landing and the space race leading up to it led to numerous advances and improvements for everyone, including “the average man” (sexist language by the way).
Using that question for emphasis is disingenuous and attempts to minimize all of the advancement that occurred as a byproduct.
Bro it doesn’t make you sound smart to use words like “fallacy” and “tacitly” 💔 I don’t need “moving the goalpost” defined to me.
Tbh we operating on two different wavelengths. Let’s end it with this
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My original question was poorly worded, not fully thought out, and in the most literal sense was wrong. And yeah it does minimize all advancement made as a byproduct, that was the point of such a question.
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The argument that I am trying to tell you is not related to just the moon landing. It is a response to the original commenter who, in my opinion, implied that there was something greater about space exploration post-war. I think that it was a result of the USA’s imperialist and capitalist goals. Those goals (as they always do) lined up with the goals of the wealthiest and most powerful (non-politician) people of the time. Space exploration today isnt less exciting because billionaires have too much power. They still had a shit ton of power post-war and still ran the country.
I believe that the space exploration boom was because it was an opportunity to gain capital and win an ideological battle. In 2025 space does not fill that role.
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Thats because the only good progress now is up or positive on the stock markets.
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 🥰
Since the USSR fell
