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.
Damn those Vikings, they’re always first
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.
Goddamn that’s so fucking cool
Ngl I’m fucking stoked about the potential exploration of the Jovian moons
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
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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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…
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.
it’s the vehicle of nostalgia hitting the wall between the past and the future
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.
To be fait, a lot of sci fi does involve very advanced computing, like HAL in 2001.
And some even got the cyberpunkiness almost right (Johnny Nmemonic swung so hard!). I think for every visionary piece, we have 100 lost contemporary ‘trash’ (not trash, more like a picture of the spirit of the time) that has already been lost.
I mean Star Trek was pretty wickedly ahead of it’s time for all of the creator’s shortcomings. Still can’t believe that teleporting doesn’t kill you every time.
Has it ever been proven in any of the shows that the transporter didn’t kill everyone that used it and just made such prefect copies that no one realized?
Like it created an extra copy of Riker and there was the tragedy of Tuvix. Though I’d say the former is evidence that it is new copies but the latter might be evidence against it, since they each had memories of their time merged when they separated. Actually, that whole incident kinda brings into question what’s going on for a transporter to accidentally merge two people and not in a “horrible teleportation into a wall accident” way and then somehow de-merge them.
it’s just the ship of theseus, at what point do you consider it a new ship?
like think about it, people only start questioning if it’s the same person after they learn how transporters work, doesn’t that indicate that it really doesn’t matter? if people can go their entire lives with neither them nor anyone around them noticing a difference, how could they somehow be a different person?
Yeah, there definitely are some waved away elements that are basically magic. I’m just binging TNG now, but I saw the Lower Decks tribute to many-a transporter incidents.
I mean if you can transport and not at the same time (the copy version), it is not hard to think that once that buffer is cleared on the one side, it’s game over man.
it’s only a problem if you think the sole thing defining “you” is an intangible soul that for some reason wouldn’t just transfer between or get copied alongside instances of yourself
the line of reasoning you talk about has always been so strange to me, you’d be talking to a person walking out of a transporter and insist they’re dead, as they look you in the eye and ask if that’s an insult
I had a similar argument with a friend, and I think he won that time. It came out of left field and rephrases the whole thought experiment.
Instead of me defending the argument, how would you interpret a clone incident? Would you get ‘the other feed’ as well? We have the sleep cycle where we don’t actively get input (even though our conciousness is present during dreams to a certain extent). So if a transporter clone incident rebuilds the person on the other side, but an original instant could go on experiencing a life that wouldn’t be if the transporter functioned correctly.
Hopefully that took the soul out of your argument!
cloning is pretty simple: you end up in both places. there’s no magical continuity of experience, both clones are equal and will 100% feel like the original and have equally valid claims to such, and to a third observer it would basically just look like two very confused identical twins who share their memories before the cloning.
You obviously wouldn’t end up with a single conscience experiencing both points of view at once, lmao.it’s just like copying data on a computer, it’s all the same data so it’s nonsensical to call any copy the “original”.
No one predicted phone addiction
It’s weird reading work by authors like Asimov, where people travel between planets as a matter of routine, and we have sentient robots, but not mobile phones.
but then on the flipside there’s stuff like star trek, which since it’s literally the inspiration for cellphones is remarkably normal
even the fucking tricorders aren’t that far off these days, just today i used an app on my phone to identify plants automatically for fuck’s sake, that’s insane!
Or there are phones or cybernetic radio implants but they’re just a way to make phone calls.
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.
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.
It’s easy to see why people thought we would be a lot more futuristic by now.
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
Phones can also video call, lead you to just about anywhere you want to go on the planet, and store millions of pictures/videos/writings of a person’s personal history. Unprecedented.
Yup, i was in three completely unfamiliar cities in the last month that speak languages i do not speak.
I was never lost once, i was able to learn how to take public transport, and i was able to effectively communicate with people who do not speak english
And you can store a complete offline copy of Wikipedia on your phone
Gene editing we did NOT see coming this soon.
I can be anywhere on the planet within 48 hours
Challenge accepted.
We’re futuristic as shit.
It’s just the future sucks
I always thought those scifi stories where companies basically rule everything were overblown, but you just see it changing to that in real time.
It happened before, it could and is happening again. The East India Trading Company was the most profitable company in the world after looting and conquering India for a while before the British government formally took over.
God I hope I get accepted into the Apple burbclave
With the exception of smart phones, most of the things that make the now bad were unrelated to the tech
Climate change is happening because changing the way the world gets its energy is slow. Fossil fuels way predate flight
Lack of social cohesion is due to the car allowing us to isolate ourselves in sparse suburbia rather than to live in neighbourhoods
Wars are older than humanity but are affecting fewer of us now than in the past, though things were even more peaceful a couple of decades ago
The capture of almost all the value of labour by the owner class could probably have happened anyway, it started before computers, perhaps it was accelerated by computers
We’ve had a lack of social cohesion way less time than we’ve had suburbia.
I think the lack of social cohesion is due to the fragmentation of our media. Before the turn of the century everyone watched the same TV, heard the same music, and got their news from the same places.
Now we’re all so siloed that we don’t have shared cultural base so even people in cities aren’t cohesive.
And the group today with the most social cohesion are the folks who all watch Fox News religiously.
Unfortunately, we’re cyberpunk futuristic instead of whatever futuristic flavor the Jetsons were doing.
Families taking vacations to Venus and swimming in the seas of Europa futuristic?
We still have ways to go
We killed our trajectory by shutting down nuclear investment.
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.
And since then - We have found ways to make all travel worse for comfort, more expensive, and more necessary.
With internet, mobile phones, computers, travel seems to be way less necessary than before
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.
I dunno for some years now city planners and their education has had increased focus on public transit, walkability, 15 minute cities and whatnot.
I’d say combined with the car centric design being worse in the say 50’s, 60’s and so on and those times having no real means for remote work and less opportunities for communication remotely, I don’t think we’re at the worst point.
Not in Canada. Not in the US.
Over here we are actively gutting existing bicycle infrastructure to please the right wing morons
I mean weren’t we all talking about our own areas?
I don’t think I understand your point here.
I was talking about my experience which is 80% in North America. Your points do not apply in North America as we have actually been getting worse for non-car travel in most cities since the 90s.
And that’s without even mentioning the atrocities that are considered inter-city or city-rural travel.
I was just saying that the developments aren’t true for my area. The area wasn’t specified in the start so that’s why I mentioned it
Travel is much, much cheaper than it used to be.
more necessary
I haven’t had a commute in over a decade
I think they’re referring to how vehicle-centric planning for cities is more common (as opposed to walking or human-powered locomotion, like biking or skating)
That’s mainly the US though. Here in the Netherlands they are planning cities with the intent to discourage car use as much as possible.
Also Canada where the majority of my experience comes from. If I could see some my taxes going towards a Euro-style infra for moving people and things I would be a much happier person overall.
Move to Europe and you will get that change immediately
We actually did live in switzerland back in 2020 (I know, schengen is not EU) and were about to lease a home in France, but someone in my family fell ill and I had to come back to Canada.
The transit, grocery , pharmacy, and cultural access was amazing to us, even in times when locals were complaining of severely limited services.
But it’s also become less necessary as we have much improved telecommunications. I regularly work with people halfway around the world from my house.
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.
Yeah. The small town I used to live in had trolley service to the nearest city about 20 miles away before they tore it up for a highway.
I solve this problem by rarely leaving my home.
Forget the moon. We’re all within a few generations of the first people who had access to indoor toilets on a mass scale.
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.
the flushing kind or the hole in he ground kind?
the there’s a sink kind. or there’s a communal soap bar to wash your asshole with and the other hand to eat with kind?
wonder how many Indians are left-handed, or if that’s even culturally acceptedthe flushing kind or the hole in he ground kind?
Any kind. There’s further breakdowns in access to flushing toilets, dry latrines, composting toilets, etc., but this is part of a long standing project to get people to stop open defecation in places where untreated human waste will mix into drinking water, food supply, etc.
I want to know about this shared soapy ass bar and also I don’t.
The ancient Romans had a communal toilet which used a communal sponge for wiping
A good read
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.
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.
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
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?
Just a nitpick, the fastest transportation for thousands of years were boats.
Just a nit pick, but you could run faster than sail boats, so they’re only faster for long distance
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
Sure, a new boat can go much faster, but OP es referring to older ships from before the train & plane were invented.
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.
And before that, feet.
It’s actually falling
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
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.
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.
Smartphones are basically magic at this point, especially the system on chip type devices.
Computers had, and mostly still have, a bunch of discrete components you could identify, smartphones are a tiny magic box on a board, with everything else connected to it. The photos they take are amazing, too.
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.
And now we have self-driving cars that are able to kill people without human intervention 👍
we made climate change which is even more effective
Truly the pinnacle of efficiency
We invented, and rejected, life-saving vaccines.
And now there are flat earthers and anti vaxxers. Everything going backwards.
Don’t forget the weird rocks that, when refined and enriched, it gets a bit of… well you know…
Spicy.
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
We create tech these days to extract maximum value from the populace, not so much to make lives better
