dawg wrote: ↑Sun Nov 14, 2021 4:14 pm
Hey Wibbs, lighten up
No!!
Understand that its not just OK to fail, its part of the development process
Think of things that we take for granted today and how they would have been thought of 50 years prior to their realization
Ok...
- flexible endoscopy ( 1970s ? ) - imagine telling a doctor practicing in the 1920s about that
Actually medical types used glass rods to look inside people in the early part of the 20th century. Internal refraction was known from the 19th.
- internet ( 1970s - 1980s ) - explain that to people of the 20's & 30's
It would be fairy easy to do so. They were already used to moving pictures, the telephone, indexing and libraries and in larger countries in the world like America they were very used to buying stuff from catalogues via the post. Basically tell them imagine doing all that across your phoneline.
- smartphones ( late 1990s ? ) - tell someone in the 1940-50s that they would be walking around with a phone/computer/camera combo in their pocket with access to something called 'internet'
Similar to the above. For me the biggest shock of the smartphone wasn't the phone itself, nor the interwebs connectivity, but the camera and the explosion in its use of all things.
The thing is those ideas would sound strange, but not
so strange. I mean in the early part of the 20th century people were convinced we'd be flying around high rise cities in wee autogyros with huge solar collectors in deserts heating oil to drive generators to power the cities. Secondly all of those ideas have existing ideas and tech within them. The indexing system on the interwebs comes from the invention of moveable type printing and the explosion of books that followed in short order. Previous to that hand written manuscripts didn't have contents pages or indexing, rarely enough even cohesive titles or one subject matter. Printed books required that, as did the libraries that sprang up to store them. Thirdly and probably most importantly such inventions followed the basic laws of physics, it was the ideas and engineering that had to catch up. For example if you grabbed Isaac Newton in a time machine and brought him to mission control to watch the first moon landing he would understand the physics. Hell, he invented much of it.
Wasnt the Apollo program 50 years ago ?
It was, but the physics haven't changed. You need a shít tonne of grunt to get out of Earth orbit to get to another heavenly body in a short enough time to allow for humans to travel there safely. And get back. It's heavy lifting as much as finesse in many ways. The Saturn V threw around 140 tonnes of gear into orbit, then fecked 60 tonnes at the moon, a record that still hasn't been broken and that was to get just three blokes and two craft with the internal living space the size of a couple of SUV's to the moon(with a cool ickle car).
The fact that they could do it in the 1960's, with boffins using slide rules, pen and paper, a minumum of integrated circuitry and onboard computers that ran to around 40K of ram and rom in such a short time demonstrates this. Indeed that's the big problem with the nutters who think we never went and it was all a hoax. With 1960's flim, video and special effects technology it would have been
harder to fake it than to actually go. Even today with the very cool CGI stuff we have space still looks "wrong" in many ways. The First Man flic looks good with the scenes of the spacecraft in space, but the landing sequence looks way off and the scenes on the moon are clearly not real.
Another thing about tech. Newer isn't always better, or rather not always as robust. In spaceflight the KISS principle is primary. Take Apollo 11. When they climbed back in and took off their suits Aldrin hit and broke off a circuit breaker that was part of the ascent engine circuit. To stop it tripping and causing the engine to misfire, he jammed a pen into the socket completed the circuit and sorted it. Now imagine a line of code or a teeny tiny microscopic circuit failing in a touchscreen panel or chip buried in the gubbins. Not nearly so easy to bypass. When the Soviet Foxbat plane landed in Japan in the 70's with a Russian asylum seeker on board the Americans were shocked and sniggered at the fact they used vaccum valve tubes like an old radio set rather than transisters and the like. Only thing was the Russians were quite aware why they were doing it. In the event of a nuclear war and EMF bursts the valves would be far more resistant to the pulses than the newer tech transisters. If we get a big solar flare hitting us like the Carrington event of the 19th century, your iphone and PC will be fooked, but your grandparents valve radio will likely still work.
So yes we will have better materials and better tech, but the physics of spaceflight remain the same and those physics, especially deep spaceflight aren't easy at all.
Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
in the next few days.