Not to say there aren't tons of examples of astronauts throughout the decades waxing poetic about their experience. But it feels like the first real hint that as this tech gets commercialized that we'll see a broader range of lived experience, which is interesting.
— zeddy (@Zeddary) October 13, 2021
Hand to goddess, I originally started this morning’s Open Thread Friday the 13th falls on a Wednesday this month… but I was afraid Murphy the Trickster God would jinx things…
Blue Origin video from inside the New Shepard capsule at the peak of today's spaceflight, with the crew floating in weightlessness.@WilliamShatner: "No description to equal this."@AudreyKPowers: "This is nuts!"pic.twitter.com/OyRTI8Yqaj
— Michael Sheetz (@thesheetztweetz) October 13, 2021
As an aside, one of the underrated moments in Galaxy Quest, IMO, is Alan Rickman’s eternally-grousing-highly-trained-Shakesperian’s heartbroken realization, while interacting with an actual alien, that the pop-cult action hero he despised himself for playing turned out to be more important than any Hamlet or MacBeth he might’ve done. Maybe that wasn’t an affectionate jibe at the Shatner we Trekkies remember from back in the 1970s, but then…
Hey, bucket list accomplished!
William Shatner became the oldest person to go into space. YOUR grandpa could never! pic.twitter.com/CScql370Ov
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) October 14, 2021
Jerzy Russian
I would hardly call ~68 miles up “space”, but at least it was higher than that Red Bull dude went to when he jumped down to Earth from “space”.
Burnspbesq
Night six of CONCACAF World Cup Qualitying.
USA 2-1 Costa Rica
Canada 4-1 Panama
Honduras 0-2 Jamaica
2nd half, El Salvador 0-1 Mexico
If the Mexico result holds, they will lead the group by three points over USA. USA and Mexico play in Cincinnati on November 12.
JoyceH
It struck me today that the moon landing happened after the last episode of original Trek aired. For those of us who watched Trek in first run, did you even imagine that in 2021 we wouldn’t even have reached Mars yet? I hope we’ve finished the hiatus and heading back to space again. Because I’ve decided I want to go into space when I’m 90, too.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jerzy Russian:
I remember him. He turned out to be an asshole I think
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@JoyceH:
Apparently, we are. We’re heading back to the moon, possibly as early as 2024
Jerzy Russian
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): You mean Shatner or the Red Bull dude?
When I show a graph of the temperature structure of the atmosphere in class, I often point out where Red Bull Dude jumped from. It is at the lower end of the y-axis.
Poe Larity
Wake Up! Say no to smoke detectors!
Another Scott
@Jerzy Russian: Felix’s jump actually provided useful information even if it wasn’t from “space”. Bezos’s joyride was great for Bill, but doesn’t really teach us anything.
SpaceSafetyMagazine:
Spacecraft, of course, go much, much faster than balloons, so re-entry is a huge problem not addressed by Felix’s jump…
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jerzy Russian:
LOL, both honestly. I lost a ton of respect for Shatner (well, what little I had) when he started hosting a show for RT. As for the Red Bull guy, well:
Poe Larity
@JoyceH: Everyone was gloating about the landing and I was playing on the lawn looking at the moon wondering what the fuss was about. The Enterprise was out visiting planets. Earth seemed primative even then.
We can’t even make good Star Trek shows now, how would we get to Mars?
Hungry Joe
@JoyceH: I don’t think any of us are going much of anywhere. It’ll take too damn long, and be too expensive (and too dangerous) to pull off more than a few small-scale trips to Mars. People all but went nuts in their own homes during the worst of the pandemic; romantic and cool as it seems on paper, a voyage to Mars means months in a very small vessel with just a handful of people, followed by many months in small-ish Martian pods. They’ll be climbing the Martian walls. Want to go for a walk to take a breather from your (by now) annoying fellow adventurers? Suit up, wait for the airlock to equalize … and stroll out into a mostly featureless desert. Gets old fast. Then, having seen everything on Netflix twice, a months-long return trip.
Faster-than-light to the stars? Yeah, I like science fiction, too.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Poe Larity:
What about the new Trek shows don’t you like?
hitless
@JoyceH: have you seen the apple tv show For All Mankind? It’s an alternate history of the space race and it appears that in the upcoming season people get to Mars in the 90s. It’s a good show imo.
Mai Naem mobile
I guess I am the only person who doesn’t care about space. I am not one of those people who thinks it’s a waste of money – I just don’t get excited about it. I don’t see human colonization of another planet anytime in the next hundred years. Finding intelligent life on another planet would be very cool.
Another Scott
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Daredevils are kooks – film at 11.
Cheers,
Scott.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Hungry Joe:
TBF, the Alcubierre Drive (similar to ST’s warp drive) is actually theoretically possible according to our current understanding of physics
rikyrah
He was THE Historian for Black Chicago.
An amazing man.
RIP???
Chicago Sun-Times (@Suntimes) tweeted at 1:27 PM on Wed, Oct 13, 2021:
#BREAKING: Timuel Black, a political and civil rights activist, educator, historian, prolific author and revered elder statesman and griot of Chicago’s Black community, died Wednesday. He was 102. https://t.co/Xxl7626HL6
(https://twitter.com/Suntimes/status/1448354773930061830?s=02)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mai Naem mobile:
Nope. I wish people could get as excited about carbon capture, or putting in solar panels.
JWR
Liz Warren was on with Seth Meyers last night, and she used these civilian launches as a way to underscore the inequities in our society. Great for William Shatner, but I tend to agree with Senator Perfessor Warren’s take on the whole affair. I also really hope Bezos and company don’t push too hard against the issue of safety just for bragging rights.
Another Scott
@Hungry Joe: Radiation, also too.
But they’ll be able to build pillow forts to protect themselves! (1:06)
:-/
Seriously, for some types of radiation you don’t want to use lead, so that’s good. But it seems far from an ideal solution, especially weightless, and especially when space is at a premium…
It makes much, much more sense to send robots than people outside the magnetosphere.
(Much more here.)
Cheers,
Scott.
JWR
And the hits keep on coming:
(Forgive me if already mentioned.)
Hungry Joe
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): That’s a capital-M Maybe at best. A lot of things that we once thought were impossible turned out to be not only possible, but actually have actually been done … which leads us to suspect that EVERYTHING we think is impossible will someday be done. Nope. Some things really are impossible.
I suspect that FTL is one of them. As an aside, it goes a long way toward explaining why nobody has come to visit: No matter how smart and advanced they are, they live in the same universe we do, and are governed by the same laws. In short, they simply can’t get here.
Chetan Murthy
@Hungry Joe: The idea of somehow constructing a space with negative mass ….. yeah, that’ll happen. Sure. Sure.
Major Major Major Major
I was expecting to be sort of annoyed by this but you know what? Good for him!
It won’t feel like the real future until we have recreational orbiting though.
Major Major Major Major
@Hungry Joe: “theoretically possible according to our current understanding of physics” also covers such a huge range of outlandish shit that it doesn’t really matter too much…
The nice thing about relativity, though, is that you can travel vast distances in what feels like a relatively short amount of time, at more easily achieved speeds.
I might try to set a story in a universe with just below-light speed traversable wormholes.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Hungry Joe:
That’s a (depressing) possibility. Another one, a favorite of mine, is that humanity is early to the party; that we’re the most advanced civilization in the known universe at this time and that because of this we’ll have a head start in colonizing the galaxy
And tbh, you don’t necessarily need FTL, just generational ships
HumboldtBlue
Sea otters have pockets.
Amir Khalid
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
The Alcubierre drive might work if it catches a lucky break as far as the laws of physics are concerned, but it doesn’t seem that likely to me.
Dopey-o
Churchy LaFemme pointed this out to Pogo, sometime back in my distant youth. “Friday the 13th comes on Wednesday so there’s a giant hole between Thursday and Saturday!”
Life today would be ever the more bearable had Walt Kelly not abandoned us for the company of Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde.
Anoniminous
@JoyceH:
Between Spaceflight radiation carcinogenesis and Space–brain: The negative effects of space exposure on the central nervous system long term space exploration – never mind living in no-to-low gravity – is a non-starter.
joel hanes
@Hungry Joe:
Suit up, wait for the airlock to equalize … and stroll out into a mostly featureless desert.
… where you absorb a medically-significant dose of radiation
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
That’s a good point, actually. Combining near-light speeds and generational spaceships, and space colonization becomes achievable, if not quite as convenient as science fiction makes it seem.
Chetan Murthy
@joel hanes:
As (IIRC) Charlie Stross said, if you believe in colonizing Mars, then you already believe in colonizing Antarctica. B/c anything you can do on Mars (which is: “dig massive underground tunnel networks to live in”) you can do on Antarctica, and the latter is
It’s so bloody obvious that before we go to the moon or Mars, we ought to have already dug significant underground living spaces and practiced living in them for years and years …..
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Chetan Murthy:
Ah, but Earth won’t always remain habitable and expanding out into the universe will ensure humanity’s long-term survival
Jerzy Russian
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Red Bull Dude sounds like kind of an asshole.
HumboldtBlue
Hooker ‘N Heat debuted 50 years ago in 1971.
What a fucking year for music.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Another Scott:
Hah. I think you’re on to to something there. You need to be a little bit of a kook to do what he did I guess
mrmoshpotato
@HumboldtBlue: Glad they designed functional pants. Good on them!
Alison Rose
@Burnspbesq: I’m already chanting Dos a Cero in my head…
HumboldtBlue
1971 Janis Joplin dropped the album Pearl.
Youse know it.
Chetan Murthy
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Just because we must do a thing doesn’t mean we can do that thing. Necessity is not always the mother of invention. Stross’ point is that if we could survive on Mars, then we could already easily survive in tunnel networks under Antarctica. And yet, we aren’t doing that and it seems pretty unimaginable that we would.
He’s also made the point that in order to construct a self-sustaining society capable of building an iPhone, you need about 100m people. And …. without such a technologically sophisticated society, you really can’t survive on Mars. There’s no way we’re getting that many people up there.
Generation ships are equally fanciful: you need massive, massive amounts of energy to build and fly them. And then just as much to slow them down on arrival. And massive materiel so that you can fly people down to planets. And on and on and on. It’s all completely fanciful, without that energy. Oh and if you’re flying along at near-light-speed, that means that all the random space dust is coming at you at near-light-speed. Gotta have some pretty magical materials to protect against all that. I mean,we’re not talking cosmic rays here: we’re talking about gravel coming in at light speed. Do the math on the energy involved …..
stinger
I suspect any aliens searching for intelligent life in the universe would pass right over us.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jerzy Russian:
Yup. I especially loved how he tried to play the “I guess my ideas were too dangerous for the political elites so they canceled me” card when his FB page was deleted
mrmoshpotato
@JWR:
Yup. Time to restructure the tax code, so cock launching isn’t possible.
Fuck these tax-avoiding cocks.
HumboldtBlue
1971, Yes released The Yes Album
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Chetan Murthy:
There’s no reason (that I can think of) thousands of years in the future we won’t be able to harness that energy by some as of now unknown means. Nobody can predict the future. I doubt anybody thousands of years ago could’ve imagined an iPhone or anything else we take for granted today.
As for the near-light thing, energy shielding might be possible. Or hell we wouldn’t need to travel so fast; that’s the advantage of generational ships
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@stinger:
Actually, they might not if life itself, especially intelligent life, is rare
HumboldtBlue
Carole King released Tapestry in 1971
Chetan Murthy
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): True, true. There might also be pink flying elephants, or Great Sky Fathers. All possible in the future.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Chetan Murthy:
Was the snark really necessary?
HumboldtBlue
In 1971 The Allman Brothers released their greatest album, Live at the Fillmore East.
Fair Economist
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): No. The fundamental problem with FTL travel is that it creates paradoxes. No drive can fix that
Chetan Murthy
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Maybe it wasn’t. I don’t know. But I feel like, when people talk about these things, they completely discount how *unrealistic* it all is. How much it relies on things that nobody knows how to do, but also, that nobody knows is even possible. Eventually the conversation always comes around to “you don’t know what the future holds; what we might achieve”. And at that point, I feel like it’s the same as “maybe magic will happen.” And yeah, then I respond with snark, b/c what else is there to say?
HumboldtBlue
@Chetan Murthy:
Jethro Tull released Aqualung in 1971.
Anoniminous
Some things are just plain wrong
All along the watchtower, if it was written by John Mayer
Dan B
@Another Scott: The current crop of teens is as comfortable with virtual reality as with meatspace. Robots in space and on other planets means more exploration. Putting our ungainly meatsacks in space uses monstrous levels of resources. And virtual exploration can be shared by and experienced by millions at the same moment.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Chetan Murthy:
Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. Modern technology would seem like magic to the ancients. And Arthur C Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology would seem like magic to us. Our understanding of physics is also changing. It was only a little over a century ago quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity didn’t exist and Newtonian physics ruled the day. There’s still more secrets that we could unlock that might upend our current understanding of reality
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Amir Khalid:
Hmm. Who knows? It would be cool if it were possible though : )
Steeplejack
@HumboldtBlue:
David Crosby, If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971). “Orleans.”
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Anoniminous:
I like it! Dude playing the guitar can really play
HumboldtBlue
@Amir Khalid:
Where the hell you been?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Fair Economist:
How so?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@HumboldtBlue:
What did you think of Yes’/Jon Anderson’s later work?
HumboldtBlue
@Steeplejack:
Carly Simon came out with Anticipation in 1971.
HumboldtBlue
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
How late is the question. Yes was imprinted on my very young brain by my older brothers and sisters when I was in grade school and by my teens they were doing “Owner of a lonely heart” which I found treacly and toe-tapping at the same time.
That early 70’s version of Yes dominates in my head to this day.
Steeplejack
Marvin Gaye, What’s Going On (1971). Monumental album. “Mercy, Mercy Me (the Ecology.”
prostratedragon
@rikyrah: I’m sorry to see this. Mr. Black moved in the same civil rights circle as my family, and I knew his son Tim when we were in high school.
A live well-lived.
Steeplejack
@HumboldtBlue:
Joni Mitchell, Blue.
HumboldtBlue
@Steeplejack:
Got-damn, Jack, that’s a dagger!
So in response, here’s Mick Jagger and the Stones, Sticky Fingers was released in 1971.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@HumboldtBlue:
Their 80s stuff, like “Owner of Lonely Heart”, is what what I was wondering about.
If you thought “Lonely Heart” was treacly, wait until you hear Jon Anderson’s Do You Wanna Be a Hero for the 1986 Biggles movie. I actually like it for what it is, but it’s pretty cheesy
HumboldtBlue
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
The Doobie Brothers dropped in 1971.
JWR
I was a 13yo Zepphead at the time, but damn, what a year!
HumboldtBlue
@JWR:
That’s just the half of it, and I was half as many as you!
Anoniminous
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
He can play but he flattens the song, taking away the anger and despair.
“All along the watchtower
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and went ….”
Reference to TS Eliot’s The Wasteland where “the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.” Dylan still had hope when he wrote the song in 1967
“So let us stop talkin’ falsely now
The hour’s getting late, hey ”
Which Eliot didn’t have and neither did Hendrix in 1968 when he did his cover given his ending solo. Or Hendrix wanted to emphasize the hopelessness given he started recording in January 1968, Martin Luther King was shot in April, and Bobby Kennedy was shot in June of 1968, and the cover was released in September. Hendrix worked on it all through that time and I find it impossible to believe the events didn’t impact the final cut.
JWR
@HumboldtBlue: Wow! A 6 year old Zepphead? Congratulations! But yeah, it really was a high point in the years of Rock-me-out music.
HumboldtBlue
@JWR:
Ha Ha! Wait until I tell you about Herb Alpert!
JWR
@HumboldtBlue:
Boy, you got some brass admitting that! ;)
Amir Khalid
@HumboldtBlue:
I’ve been right here all this while.
206inKY
@Steeplejack: I was rolling my eyes at all this boomer nostalgia until you dropped this bomb. Greatest album of all time.
HumboldtBlue
@206inKY:
This ain’t some boomer reminiscence, This is Gen X in the motherfucking house listening through the years.
The Who dropped one of the greatest albums of all time in 1971, Who’s Next.
Steeplejack
@206inKY:
Not Blue but cool: “Song for Sharon.”
HumboldtBlue
@Amir Khalid:
Hmm, if you say so.
Viva BrisVegas
@Fair Economist: As you say FTL is time travel. Time travel destroys cause and effect, which makes for a pretty difficult universe to live in.
Space travel involves time and distance. You can either go fast and quick or slow and tedious.
The fact is that it will be far easier in the far future to work out how to make sentient beings (hopefully us) live for 1,000 years and send them out 1% of light speed, than to make a space craft that can carry them at any significant fraction of the speed of light.
Either way is difficult and far, far off in the future.
Dan B
@Viva BrisVegas: By that time we will likely have rebuilt civilization after the massive famines and wars of the climate catastrophe.
If humans survive as a civilization capable of scientific achievement it’s likely we will be augmenting our bodies so we can function as well as mobile phones and the web. It will be an interesting decision if we will feel the need to send ourselves into space or an extension of ourselves that is very little removed from or dramatically distinct from what we become
The speculation is, will we become toxic warriors because of the wars of climate upheaval?
206inKY
@Steeplejack: Love Song for Sharon. But Blue is a masterpiece album from start to finish. Joni might have saved my life in the early 2000s.
lowtechcyclist
@Another Scott:
Agreed. Space is for robots.
Just think of all the mass it adds to any sort of space exploration mission to have one or more of us humans tagging along. Oxygen, food, and water for the duration of the flight, the layers of protection that must be added to the vehicle to protect our tender hides from radiation and other cosmic hazards, berths for sleeping, places to sit comfortably for long periods of time, the list goes on.
I’d be really surprised if any humans make it to Mars and back by mid-century. And anywhere else interesting is even further out of reach for us. But we’ve sent robots to all the planets and a number of their moons, and past the farthest reaches of the solar system.
Robots: in space, they get shit done.
Chris Johnson
Damn right. Here’s the Mothers of Invention… Zappa… live at the Fillmore East, 1971.
The Turtles on vocals
Aynsley Dunbar on drums
Possibly the greatest Mothers, or at least the most rocking Mothers, ever…
Chris T.
@Hungry Joe:
One of my favorite concepts is, we’re still too stupid to realize that the interesting part of the universe, where the smart aliens are, isn’t where we are and what we’re looking at. We’re like the drunk guy looking for his car keys under the light: “Are you sure you dropped them here?” “No, it was over there somewhere, but the light’s better here.”
(Future conversation snippet: “What, you guys were trying to communicate through normspace with EM radiation?! Ahahaha!”)
Steeplejack (phone)
@206inKY:
Herbie Hancock (with Corinne Bailey Rae), “River.”
“A Case of You.”
Death Panel Truck
Can’t believe no one mentioned There’s A Riot Goin’ On. IMO the best LP of 1971.
Yeah, I said LP. I’m an old.