It's hard to believe that it's been over 50 years since humans have been outside of low earth orbit. It's like we sprinted forward so fast, going from horse drawn carriage to space flight in a generation, only to get frightened and recede back from the highest point, never to go back.
Granted there has been an enormous amount of innovation in the last 50 years, but by some accounts we've been going backwards. Humans are no longer capable of mach 3 flight, or making Roman concrete.
I think we assume that technology will keep progressing. We assume Moore's law will continue into the future and we forget that there are people behind the progress. The technology that produced those pictures are gone, we might be able to take ones like them again, but never with the same rockets and never with the same photo-chemical processes. Progress is fragile, not inevitable and everything we have can be lost in a generation just as easily as it was made.
You really need to take the power and "reality distortion effect" of propaganda during the Cold War into account.
Massive projects were started without much rational sense just to beat the other side in an imaginary race (and a very concrete military race). What's the point of landing a man on the moon, if the technology to do so was so rushed and held together by duct tape that it wasn't useful for anything else? What's the point of the Space Shuttle if launches were more expensive than disposable rockets? What's the point of the Buran, if the Soviets didn't feel like they need an answer to the space shuttle "just in case", even though they couldn't see any point in the shuttle design (except as a nuke carrier)?
Etc... etc... the list goes on for both sides. I rather have slow and steady progress that actually makes economical and scientific sense in the long run.
PS: I thought the secret of Roman concrete had been cracked long ago (a certain type of volcanic ash)? But it's just not economical to produce large quantities since modern sky scrapers are not expected to "survive" for thousands of years anyway (and AFAIK the Romans didn't know much about the special properties of their concrete either, it more or less was a "happy little accident").
> What's the point of the Space Shuttle if launches were more expensive than disposable rockets? What's the point of the Buran, if the Soviets didn't feel like they need an answer to the space shuttle "just in case", even though they couldn't see any point in the shuttle design (except as a nuke carrier)?
Rather than nukes, I always thought the main advantage of the Shuttle was the ability to bring things back to Earth. Which it did, a few times:
When then Shuttle was proposed, this was one of the main selling points. Having used it just 4 times over 133 missions... Well, that's not what was envisioned.
> without much rational sense just to beat the other side
Assumes that just beating the other side was not a sufficient rational motive. Which, given that the threat both sides faced was "you and your way of life will be utterly obliterated", is a pretty irrational criticism.
What's the point of <X>, if <something we only learned by doing X>? There's tremendous hindsight bias in criticising even the Shuttle program on the basis of what we know now, while disregarding the value of everything we learned from doing it.
Even copying another country's technology on the basis of speculative military applications may not be irrational, unless you're somehow privy to all the knowledge that was available at the time when those decisions were made.
The remarkable MAD doctrine itself can be criticised as inhumane or insane, but hardly irrational. It's a triumph of rationality and a counter-intuitive application of game theory, the iron laws of mathematics elevated to places where we really would rather see common sense and humanity prevail.
For what it’s worth, the space race along with the desire to build up missile technology in general are the reason we have computers today as we know them. Not many people outside of the space and defense industries were willing to shell out buckets of cash for a single transistor.
"It is durable due to its incorporation of pozzolanic ash, which prevents cracks from spreading."
Third sentence in the Wikipedia article. Later:
"The strength and longevity of Roman marine concrete is understood to benefit from a reaction of seawater with a mixture of volcanic ash and quicklime to create a rare crystal called tobermorite, which may resist fracturing. As seawater percolated within the tiny cracks in the Roman concrete, it reacted with phillipsite naturally found in the volcanic rock and created aluminous tobermorite crystals."
such a nihilistic view has little ground in reality
> been outside of low earth orbit
we stopped pushing that frontier because we've been there and found it dull and empty, as a matter of fact, we decided zero g experiment were more important than playing with regolith, and build a freaking human habitat in the void to support that endeavor. beside, we've got regolith here on earth now, we can experiment on it in the commodity of our backyard if needed be.
> mach 3 flight
except the routine space launches that ship scientist back and forth from the space station, going through literal plasma on the descent leg.
> Roman concrete
this has just been widely romanticized, we don't use that because it's incompatible with fast building processes requirements, is too heavy for large structures and it's hard to dismantle when a structure is no longer needed or need renovation.
sure, some other stuff one can cite as having reached an apparent sub-optimal minima, like average speed of travel, but that's not because we're backward, it's because we're learning to take care of our own environment. slowly, but we're getting there. just because the tradeoff are different it doesn't mean that a golf id3 is just worse than a bugatti eb110 or a recess from peak technology.
Your last point resonated with me. An extremely boring electric car that makes some significant leap in affordability, efficiency or whatever can be the thing that brings our entire society forward and literally saves it.
If anything you can argue that the latest Bugatti with a slightly larger engine is moving us backwards by the waste of resources (in design, production and use).
Peak technology right now is not the big sexy machine, it's whatever makes the good stuff boring for the masses.
The primary purpose of ISS is to be a jobs program, not scientific experimentation. The Russians are involved specifically to keep their engineers from going to work for hostile states.
Humans are capable of Mach 3 flight. It's just a "latent" capability. Something we could do but is not currently cost-effective.
> The technology that produced those pictures are gone, we might be able to take ones like them again, but never with the same rockets and never with the same photo-chemical processes.
You can never step in the same river twice, and we are all mortal. This is just a statement about the passage of time.
> Progress is fragile, not inevitable and everything we have can be lost in a generation just as easily as it was made.
This, on the other hand, is important, and why it's important not to let people wreck it by lying about everything.
Worth questioning the "whig view of history" backwards as well; a lot of what we call progress had very large costs for certain groups of people at the time and made their lives worse. Or got them killed.
I think it’s a case of picking the low hanging fruits once the technology is unlocked, then moving on.
We have the same not only with space but with everything.
Steampunk is essentially the feature we never had with advanced enough mechanical machines. Somehow we sprinted towards harnessing the energy of the steam stoping short from coal powered AI robots but was that the case? IMHO what happened is, we exploited the feasible part and moved on.
The same with space. With the science and tech we harnessed so far, it’s simply not feasible to do more than what we have done already. With the advancements made in recent decades, some more stuff might have moved within the range of feasible but nothing revolutionary. We are not going to the nearest star anytime soon and that’s not simply because we lost interest in it. The best we probably can do in human travel is Mars.
Okay, I came here to talk about how the images are a bit soft and a quick, subtle pass of Richardson-Lucy deconvolution restores some detail (and enhances the film grain, that's a plus for me but some people may find it a bit too much -- it is still there in the pictures though).
And then I read your comment and you totally throw me into a Wikipedia rabbit hole with the Roman concrete... Speaking of which, what do you mean we can't make Roman concrete nowadays? Wikipedia even says that there are corporations and municipalities looking into it as a viable, environmental-friendly, long-lasting alternative to regular concrete[0] !
It's essentially an old meme; the exact details had been lost, since the technology was not in continuous use and no written record survived, but the footnote on Wikipedia details its reconstruction. This great paper: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/msa/ammin/article/98/10/166...
Essentially it relied on volcanic ash from specific locations, and they forensically traced those locations.
> Humans are no longer capable of mach 3 flight, or making Roman concrete
We have plenty of aircraft capable of mach 3 or faster just not for commercial purposes, and most modern concrete is superior to Roman concrete in most dimensions specifically cost (not to mention its modern mythos is completely based on a single study published in American Mineralogist).
The supersonic passenger flight thing is the one I have to really chuckle at. Nothing against the work being done in this area--hey, not my money. But effectively you have lots of folks, who probably mostly fly coach, super-excited that maybe one day CEOs and high-end lawyers will once again be able to fly from NY to London to have lunch, shake hands on a deal, and be home in time for dinner.
Technology has not regressed since the 1970s though. We have the latent capability to go any time we want, it’s just very expensive and there’s no point.
> I think we assume that technology will keep progressing. We assume Moore's law will continue into the future and we forget that there are people behind the progress. The technology that produced those pictures are gone, we might be able to take ones like them again, but never with the same rockets and never with the same photo-chemical processes. Progress is fragile, not inevitable and everything we have can be lost in a generation just as easily as it was made.
It's good to be aware of our blindspots. The idea of progress as a monotonically increasing upward trend is a very modern and Western perspective. It's not inevitable.
People have been hiking to the top of mount Everest for a while now, but you still can't ask an Uber to take you there.
Because there isn't much worthwhile to do there, the interesting thing is going there, not being there. At the moment. When/if it can be done for cheap and on the regular, there might be stuff to do.
From the lengthy blog post under the images, it'd seem he used those archives. I have the impression that I've seen these pictures as TIF files instead of JPGs somewhere (the Internet Archive perhaps?), but I can't remember precisely now. Maybe the author used those, as I imagine they'd give a bit more leeway and flexibility in a restoration effort.
I was going to post exactly the same thing. It's such an understated way of phrasing it and a really beautiful photo. I wonder how Collins felt? There's a quote from him on the page, but it's more about the photo rather than himself. Surely that's been discussed...
I love this quote from Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14) on seeing Earth from the Moon:
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."
I wonder how we could get more people to experience this effect... Something like what Stewart Brand did by pushing for and publicising the first whole earth picture (in part via the Whole Earth Catalog) but more for the internet age.
I was toying with an idea of a site called "Get Some Perspective" where you'd start off with a FPS view and as you scroll you gradually zoom out, eventually to the whole observable universe. You could send this link to people if they're being short-sighted, callous, etc and hopefully instill a bit of the Overview effect in them...
I can get just a tiny grasp of the power of that sight just by looking at the photos, and can't imagine what would be like experiencing it in 1st person.
This brings the hope that one day when every human would be able to experience it, we'll create a utopistic Trek-ish reality in which people suddenly become less selfish and put the common good above idiocies such as nationalism or the pursuit of immense wealth at the expense of others.
Hopefully one day seeing the Earth from orbit will become sort of a rite of passage for kids.
I'm sure it's hyped up to the point that if you went up there, expecting a cosmic experience, having imagined and simulated it a million times, you'd be disappointed by the reality.
I used to think that about the Grand Canyon, then I went. Nope, it's just as impressive as they say being there experiencing it in person vs looking at all of the videos/images available. Seeing an image that required a special lens to take it all in looks nice. Standing in the same spot the camera was is a completely different experience when you have to turn your head left/right to see the same thing the image does. Anyone that says different has not actually taken the pepsi challenge
Missing is the Voyager 1 image looking back to Earth from 4 billion miles, the one referred to by Carl Sagan as "the pale blue dot, a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam". It doesn't have the resolution these images have but it's impact on our civilization is over-whelming.
I once saw a video (reenactment but original voices maybe?) of how one of these images was taken. How the earth appeared over the horizon and they scrambled to find a camera or so. Anyone knows which video I'm talking about and could help me find it?
- adjusting the black point until the background of space appears truly black"
These shots are beautiful, but is making the background completely black really doing reality justice? In our unfortunately light polluted night sky we can barely see the stars, but shouldn't the astronauts see the earth within a shimmer of billion stars? Or is the source material not showing stars due to a lack of exposure?
> In our unfortunately light polluted night sky we can barely see the stars, but shouldn't the astronauts see the earth within a shimmer of billion stars?
No, you have to be in the night side, or looking into the void (no Earth surface visible, definitely not the Sun in sight, not any part of your spacecraft being shined upon) for your eyes to adjust to the darkness and then you get to see the stars. Being near the Moon, I'd add "no moon surface" to that list.
> Or is the source material not showing stars due to a lack of exposure?
I'm not sure there... Film behaves differently than image sensors. Maybe if we had access to the negatives you could do some chemical magic to bring in detail. I don't know how hard/destructive that could be on the negatives, as film isn't a medium I've ever really used. Grew up in the 90's with a few film cameras, but digital took over before I had the chance to seriously get into photography and was also far cheaper (so, easier to pick up as a hobby for a teenager). Now I'm into digital image processing and that's a totally different beast on its own.
A bright moon surface and fully lit Earth hanging in the sky is also a sort of "light pollution" for the human eye ;) (at least it will cause the pupil to close and let less light through, tuning out the dim stars, same effect why there are no stars in the moon photos). Of course I haven't been to the moon so far and can't really know what the sky actually looks like during "moon day" :)
So stars are not visible from space? I'm assuming not because they're not in the pictures, but because there are no pictures of just stars from space, which I assume would be a point of interest for any astronaut. That is weird, and I wonder if almost every single sci-fi scene in space should have no stars as well.
Stars are visible in space but the Earth is so bright that if you expose it properly, the stars are underexposed. It’s basically the same reason we don’t see the stars in the daytime: the sun is much brighter.
Right but does that mean astronauts don't see stars because it's always "daytime" in space? If we can see the Milky Way in the night sky of remote places away from cities, then the atmosphere must be playing a huge role in allowing us to see stars. I'm just wondering if those night skies are also visible in space, perhaps from the dark side of the moon.
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Granted there has been an enormous amount of innovation in the last 50 years, but by some accounts we've been going backwards. Humans are no longer capable of mach 3 flight, or making Roman concrete.
I think we assume that technology will keep progressing. We assume Moore's law will continue into the future and we forget that there are people behind the progress. The technology that produced those pictures are gone, we might be able to take ones like them again, but never with the same rockets and never with the same photo-chemical processes. Progress is fragile, not inevitable and everything we have can be lost in a generation just as easily as it was made.
Massive projects were started without much rational sense just to beat the other side in an imaginary race (and a very concrete military race). What's the point of landing a man on the moon, if the technology to do so was so rushed and held together by duct tape that it wasn't useful for anything else? What's the point of the Space Shuttle if launches were more expensive than disposable rockets? What's the point of the Buran, if the Soviets didn't feel like they need an answer to the space shuttle "just in case", even though they couldn't see any point in the shuttle design (except as a nuke carrier)?
Etc... etc... the list goes on for both sides. I rather have slow and steady progress that actually makes economical and scientific sense in the long run.
PS: I thought the secret of Roman concrete had been cracked long ago (a certain type of volcanic ash)? But it's just not economical to produce large quantities since modern sky scrapers are not expected to "survive" for thousands of years anyway (and AFAIK the Romans didn't know much about the special properties of their concrete either, it more or less was a "happy little accident").
Rather than nukes, I always thought the main advantage of the Shuttle was the ability to bring things back to Earth. Which it did, a few times:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-32
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-A
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-57
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-72
When then Shuttle was proposed, this was one of the main selling points. Having used it just 4 times over 133 missions... Well, that's not what was envisioned.
Assumes that just beating the other side was not a sufficient rational motive. Which, given that the threat both sides faced was "you and your way of life will be utterly obliterated", is a pretty irrational criticism.
What's the point of <X>, if <something we only learned by doing X>? There's tremendous hindsight bias in criticising even the Shuttle program on the basis of what we know now, while disregarding the value of everything we learned from doing it.
Even copying another country's technology on the basis of speculative military applications may not be irrational, unless you're somehow privy to all the knowledge that was available at the time when those decisions were made.
The remarkable MAD doctrine itself can be criticised as inhumane or insane, but hardly irrational. It's a triumph of rationality and a counter-intuitive application of game theory, the iron laws of mathematics elevated to places where we really would rather see common sense and humanity prevail.
And maybe that’s a problem! Why exactly are we not building beautiful landmarks that will survive eons like the Romans did?
We have a throwaway culture, and nobody ever dares question it.
Third sentence in the Wikipedia article. Later:
"The strength and longevity of Roman marine concrete is understood to benefit from a reaction of seawater with a mixture of volcanic ash and quicklime to create a rare crystal called tobermorite, which may resist fracturing. As seawater percolated within the tiny cracks in the Roman concrete, it reacted with phillipsite naturally found in the volcanic rock and created aluminous tobermorite crystals."
Neither seems to have been 'lost data'.
> been outside of low earth orbit
we stopped pushing that frontier because we've been there and found it dull and empty, as a matter of fact, we decided zero g experiment were more important than playing with regolith, and build a freaking human habitat in the void to support that endeavor. beside, we've got regolith here on earth now, we can experiment on it in the commodity of our backyard if needed be.
> mach 3 flight
except the routine space launches that ship scientist back and forth from the space station, going through literal plasma on the descent leg.
> Roman concrete
this has just been widely romanticized, we don't use that because it's incompatible with fast building processes requirements, is too heavy for large structures and it's hard to dismantle when a structure is no longer needed or need renovation.
sure, some other stuff one can cite as having reached an apparent sub-optimal minima, like average speed of travel, but that's not because we're backward, it's because we're learning to take care of our own environment. slowly, but we're getting there. just because the tradeoff are different it doesn't mean that a golf id3 is just worse than a bugatti eb110 or a recess from peak technology.
If anything you can argue that the latest Bugatti with a slightly larger engine is moving us backwards by the waste of resources (in design, production and use).
Peak technology right now is not the big sexy machine, it's whatever makes the good stuff boring for the masses.
> The technology that produced those pictures are gone, we might be able to take ones like them again, but never with the same rockets and never with the same photo-chemical processes.
You can never step in the same river twice, and we are all mortal. This is just a statement about the passage of time.
> Progress is fragile, not inevitable and everything we have can be lost in a generation just as easily as it was made.
This, on the other hand, is important, and why it's important not to let people wreck it by lying about everything.
Worth questioning the "whig view of history" backwards as well; a lot of what we call progress had very large costs for certain groups of people at the time and made their lives worse. Or got them killed.
We have the same not only with space but with everything.
Steampunk is essentially the feature we never had with advanced enough mechanical machines. Somehow we sprinted towards harnessing the energy of the steam stoping short from coal powered AI robots but was that the case? IMHO what happened is, we exploited the feasible part and moved on.
The same with space. With the science and tech we harnessed so far, it’s simply not feasible to do more than what we have done already. With the advancements made in recent decades, some more stuff might have moved within the range of feasible but nothing revolutionary. We are not going to the nearest star anytime soon and that’s not simply because we lost interest in it. The best we probably can do in human travel is Mars.
And then I read your comment and you totally throw me into a Wikipedia rabbit hole with the Roman concrete... Speaking of which, what do you mean we can't make Roman concrete nowadays? Wikipedia even says that there are corporations and municipalities looking into it as a viable, environmental-friendly, long-lasting alternative to regular concrete[0] !
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete#Modern_use
Essentially it relied on volcanic ash from specific locations, and they forensically traced those locations.
We have plenty of aircraft capable of mach 3 or faster just not for commercial purposes, and most modern concrete is superior to Roman concrete in most dimensions specifically cost (not to mention its modern mythos is completely based on a single study published in American Mineralogist).
How do you know "there is no point"? Also, at what points in history was exploration pointless, exactly?
It's good to be aware of our blindspots. The idea of progress as a monotonically increasing upward trend is a very modern and Western perspective. It's not inevitable.
Because there isn't much worthwhile to do there, the interesting thing is going there, not being there. At the moment. When/if it can be done for cheap and on the regular, there might be stuff to do.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/albums
The link is from a hand full at the bottom of the article, where it also lists other archive overview pages and leads to ~15k scanned photos.
This caption is so powerful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_the_Fire
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Surely, once you've returned, nothing will be as it used to.
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."
I was toying with an idea of a site called "Get Some Perspective" where you'd start off with a FPS view and as you scroll you gradually zoom out, eventually to the whole observable universe. You could send this link to people if they're being short-sighted, callous, etc and hopefully instill a bit of the Overview effect in them...
Edit: finding out the picture in question had a name, Earthrise, made it easier to find. Here's the video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dE-vOscpiNc
- be true to the photographs
- be true to the Earth
[...]
The main changes I made were:
[...]
- adjusting the black point until the background of space appears truly black"
These shots are beautiful, but is making the background completely black really doing reality justice? In our unfortunately light polluted night sky we can barely see the stars, but shouldn't the astronauts see the earth within a shimmer of billion stars? Or is the source material not showing stars due to a lack of exposure?
No, you have to be in the night side, or looking into the void (no Earth surface visible, definitely not the Sun in sight, not any part of your spacecraft being shined upon) for your eyes to adjust to the darkness and then you get to see the stars. Being near the Moon, I'd add "no moon surface" to that list.
> Or is the source material not showing stars due to a lack of exposure?
I'm not sure there... Film behaves differently than image sensors. Maybe if we had access to the negatives you could do some chemical magic to bring in detail. I don't know how hard/destructive that could be on the negatives, as film isn't a medium I've ever really used. Grew up in the 90's with a few film cameras, but digital took over before I had the chance to seriously get into photography and was also far cheaper (so, easier to pick up as a hobby for a teenager). Now I'm into digital image processing and that's a totally different beast on its own.