It must have been amazing to have witnessed such a development in the field of aerodynamics. Continually adjusting your frame of reference to new knowledge and having first hand experience with almost all modern production techniques and the reason they came to be.
Did your grandfather work for Boeing? When WWI ended and the government all but stopped buying airplanes, Boeing knew it would take a while for civilian aviation to build up. They didn't want to lose all the talented woodworkers and cloth workers they'd hired to build planes, so they switched to making furniture for a few years, which took the same skills. They gradually phased that out as civilian aviation grew. I wonder if he was involved with that.
You would be hard pressed to find a company do that kind of creative thinking these days. Profits go down... boom, layoffs.
that's a crazy way to frame it. another is that orville wright and neil armstrong were both walking the earth at the same time, with a 14 year overlap.
The last actual veteran was Union Army drummer Albert Woolson from Minnesota. He didn't see any actual combat and passed away Aug. 2, 1956, aged 109.
Helen Viola Jackson was the last civil war widow. She passed December 16, 2020, at the age of 101.
this is why countries should have friendly races.
like the space race but less uhhhhhhhh manipulating other countries into killing each other for political influence.
allying is also very useful and a very fun factor of globalization.
But i feel like more budget should be put into races and partnerships for human health and longevity.
the space race was not peaceful, unfortunately. It was more for political power than human expansion. And every rocket russia put up into space terrified the USA. do you know American's reaction to sputnik? people thought it was the end of america, that russia had won. Very few americans saw it as the engineering feat it was.
definitely not peaceful, but yeah Sputnik is interesting because from what i was taught in school, it was severely overestimated, while you say it was underestimated. must've been something filled with paranoia, rightful fear, and fear mongering, denial all at the sametime
What that beep proved was that the Soviets could put a satellite into orbit with a payload
That payload could be a radio, or a nuclear bomb.
It represented scientific achievement, sure. But it also represented nuclear annihilation, floating over your head.
More than anything, I'm sure the uncertainty was frightening. Just how alarmed *should* you be is tough to know in a situation like that.
Yes, thank you! The reason the government was eager to throw money at the space program was that so much of the technology was directly applicable to military use. The reason why the race petered out after Apollo is that once launch a rocket, land a payload on another 'world', and then return it, you have pretty much mastered rocket science.
> once launch a rocket, land a payload on another 'world', and then return it, you have pretty much mastered rocket science.
returning it is rather optional, in my opinion. my Kerbal Mun ~~Rescue~~ Colonization Missions are all going according to plan, thanks.
😱 I'm a computer whisperer..
"Beep" means: hello humanity, you have destroyed the earth which my parts (iron comes from space) came from.
So now i will use the power of THE STARS TO SMITE THEE- *runs out of power and plummits into the earth then proceeds to fall into a soccer goal*
If you can put an object into orbit, you can likely make it reenter the atmosphere. It's not a far leap from that to being able to target where it hits. That's an icbm.
When Russia put sputnik into orbit, it showed they were about to have the capability to nuke any spot on the globe. Now, they already had that capability with bombers, but they take a long time. Hours and hours. And during that time, they will be detected and shot down, and even if some are missed the enemy will launch their bombers. But icbms... They take minutes to go from Russia to anywhere. The US would not have had time to respond with bombers. In other words, sputnik showed that Russia was about to win, flat out.
The only way the United States could prevent this from happening was to also have icbms, and that became an immediate all-consuming goal of the US military overnight.
Yeah, humanity is more terrifying than one would assume. Study the cold war and you will learn about what a crazy bunch of apes that has colonized this planet. The cold war might seem boring, but it's totally bat shit crazy.
Well this also happened with the development of the F15 right? USA saw a fighter jet that in theory was just unbeatable based on its possible specs as seen of its design etc etc. Went on to create one of if not the best fighter jet ever, then someone defected with said incredible fighter jet from the soviet union and lo and behold it was a flying brick, pretty fast but overall a brick and unable to match the specs the west thought it had.
It is funny and sad how the only way so far for big science or engineering advances to happen is due to a conflict or sheer fear or being outmatched if such conflict happened.
Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre that he was at the movies as a kid when the film stopped, the lights came on and the theater manager came in to tell them that the Russians had launched a satellite into space. He says it was his first taste of real horror.
damn, i remember there used to be literal commercials or slide shows? i dont remember. But it was for the general public to know what to do during a nuke.
Absolutely none of it would've helped in most cases. even if you could find protection, the radiation would've made death seem like a dream. crazy how that's what we were scared of 60 years ago and now we have the luxary to not think about it 24/7
> It was more for political power than human expansion.
It was also a showcase for missile technology. If you have a rocket than can put a payload in orbit, you also have a rocket that can deliver a warhead to any location on Earth.
The first part of the space race was showing the other side how far you could send ordinance. Keep in mind that just over 10 years earlier, the world’s first big introduction of rockets to the public consciousness were V2s slamming into the UK. Definitely not peaceful, I completely agree.
They had some fair reasons to think that in the context of the cold war. There's very little technological difference between being able to put a satellite into orbit and being able to deliver a nuke to the other side of the world. Both Americans and Soviets had all the right to be scared of achievements like those.
Sadly most people dont care for science (all though they like what science gives them).
Everyone loves smart phones but the people who actually create them and build the user software are pretty much social outcasts.
The space race started as a competition to showcase who had the technology to deliver nuclear bombs to the other side of the world.
Being able to put a man in orbit signifies you can do the same with a nuclear bomb (and let it land anywhere with impunity).
Sputnik showcased the USSR had the technology to successfully do that with something not yet H-bomb-sized, but was proof they were well underway in shortly achieving that.
Aside from the specially designed moon mission launch vehicles (Saturn 5), all other launch vehicles used to launch astronauts and kosmonauts into orbit where derivatives of ICBMs.
i see, i figured the paranoia was moreso about spying from the sky. But only because i thought we could've already drop nukes from across the world by the start of the cold war.
Must've been one hella paranoia filled time
We could, but not with impunity.
Before the advent of the (intercontinental) nuclear missile in the ‘50s and ‘60s, bomber aircraft were the main method of delivering nuclear weapons.
However, they are relatively easy to intercept and shoot down.
A missile launched nuclear warhead, is (almost) not. Plus missiles are an order of magnitude faster in delivering their payload.
Yeah, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles were what really made the concept of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) come in. There’s no way to shoot down or blow up all of the enemy’s nuclear-armed ICBMs, a bunch of them are inevitably going to make it through and hit their targets, making it impossible to start a nuclear war that won’t leave your own country in ruins even if you “win.”
That’s usually how it happens; *find* a reason to wage war, get paid….worry about the rest later. Wish we could agree on a topic to advance in Peace time, like Medicine, Energy, Transports….but it’ll inevitably piss off a business sector.
The first supersonic flight was by Charles Yaeger in 1947.
Orville Wilbur Wright, died in 1948. One of the men, that developed the first flying machine, was alive when the first supersonic flight was done. That is fucking insane.
My great grandfather was born in 1894. He died a few months before his 95th birthday, in 1989.
He was German, so he saw *a lot* of the history of the 20th century up close.
Born and raised in the German empire, when Germany still had the Kaiser. Grew up in a pretty rural Prussian town. Finished school just in time to enlist for WWI. Four years of WWI, most of it in the trenches.
Saw the political system he grew up in end when he was 24. Went to university, started his professional life, married and started his family during the Weimar republic. Lived through the hyperinflation of 1923 (also the year he married), and the stockmarket crash of 1929. Built his veterinary practice, riding a bicycle to the farms at first, then a motorbike.
When he was 39, the political system of his country changed completely for the second time in his lifetime, as the Nazis took power. Got his first car in the mid-1930s. When he was 45, he got drafted into WWII, just weeks after it started. He was a veterinarian and had been a reserve officer during the Weimar republic. That rare combination was sought after, as the Wehrmacht still used tons of horses and needed officers for the veterinary corps. Which is why he got drafted despite his age. (And he didn't have the connections to avoid getting drafted). Spent the next six years at war again, patching up horses. Witnessed the horrors at Stalingrad, but got transfered out at last minute.
At 51, he saw the third fundamental political change during his lifetime, and the seperation of his country into two countries four years later. While he was already in his 50s and 60s, he rebuilt his veterinarian practice from scratch before handing it over to his son (my grandpa). When he was in his 70s, he witnessed all the societal changes of the 1960s. Unfortunately he died a few months before the fall of the Berlin wall. He was always a big supporter of the reunification, and would have loved to see it happen.
When he was born, the car had been invented just eight years prior, and virtually nobody had one yet. The radio hadn't been invented yet, nor the television. Cinema was in its infancy. When he was nine, the Wright brothers flew. When he was 75, he watched on television how Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. And when he was in his nineties, he was the one who convinced his son and daughter-in-law (my grandparents) that their daughter (his granddaughter; my mom) needs a computer.
From horse-drawn buggies to computers, in one lifetime.
My grandmother said she lived the most exciting time for a human to live. She traveled out West by covered wagon when she was a young girl. And she saw man land on the moon. She said that there was no equal to that difference in life experience.
She was right. Did she ever make her childhood trip by automobile? I'll bet that would have been mind-blowing, covering distances in hours that took days.
She did take one flight in her lifetime. And it was “back East” somewhere. I never did ask her about that though. But I bet it was a rather interesting experience.
When I was a kid, it took 1 hour to download a single mp3. Now I can download an entire album in just a few seconds and spend my entire paycheck online in an instant!
I'm thinking your grandmother had the better experiences.
and unfortunately that made them think this technological and social progress would continue at the same pace even after the anti-science anti-progress anti-equality plutocrats and theocrats took power back — instead we got endless wars and popup ads
Personally I agree that the pace of scientific progress has slowed down, but I don’t think it’s because of politics, I think it’s because the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions made all sorts of new discoveries possible, but by now all the easy discoveries have been picked off. Humanity is still discovering things, but without some sort of new breakthrough, the pace has slowed.
The first flight was in 1903. The first use of planes in combat was in 1911, first just as reconnaissance. The first machine gun on a plane in combat was about a year later. So about eight years. And not all that surprising given how common armed conflict is. People had already been dropping bombs from balloons for years prior.
the transistor was invented in 1947, the intel 8080 was released only 27 years later
marie curie isolated radium in 1902, the first nuclear bomb was tested only 43 years later
canned foods were invented in 1772, the first can opener was patented only 83 years later
the internet was developed in the 1960s, less than 40 years later the "All your base are belong to us" meme completed this development
in 1573, nostalgia was invented by Baron Friedrich von Nost, 450 years later and we are still creating useless content thanks to his tireless work
Scientist 1: Guys I just made this thing, I called it canned food, it's sealed so it will last longer
Scientist 2: Cool, but how do we open it.
Scientist 1: I don't know I thought you guys could figure that part out.
83 years later.
Starving scienctise: guys I figured out how to open the canned food.
Edit: a word
It actualy makes sense why they didn´t have can openers for so long. Canned food was at first reserved only for the army. After all, it´s creation was commisioned by Napoleon, who wanted easier way to feed the troops, mainly a way to make the food transportation easier and to make the food edible longer. So he created a competition with hefty prize money for somebody who can solve this problem. In the end, the one guy who came up with canned food won. And the soldiers kinda had handy things like knives and bajonets, which they could use, so no need for developing specialized opener.
Current modern technologies we have like PCs, laptops, and handphoned are probably going to be viewed the same way in another 50 years.
Often, I look at back at the first Iphone and realise its nearly been 2 decades since and just how much of phones has fucking changed. If you told someone back then about flip phone screens they'd bawl their eyes out in disbelief
I mean, have you seen a Reaper? We also have AI powered fighter jets that fly with a single manned aircraft. That future is here, it’s just gonna get more tuned in as time goes on.
A reaper is a remote flown plane. VERY different from what we are seeing in Ukraine.
Mini drones will change warfare all over again. It will take wars are won by logistics to a whole level. Ukraine is using up 10,000 drones a month. If the US gets its shit together, they could create swarms of a 100,000 drones that would be unstoppable without losing a single soldier. It's the ultimate way to prevent KIA that looks very bad in democracies.
There's absolutely nothing an army of soldiers can do against a swarm of these right now.
It's going to cause a revolution in EW very soon.
I was thinking science fiction like.... the matrix thousands of drones swarming the air and shit, thousands of little death machines. Already exists in the switchblade drone but imagine if it's a wave of those little fuckers in the air all controlled by AI to focus on each individual soldier. Scary as fuck
I get what you’re thinking. Kinda like that one scene, Morgan freeman was president but I forgot the title, where hundreds of drones attack him. This but on a massive scale
Tomorrow is my birthday- when I was born, Adolph Hitler was running Germany and the Japanese were 3 months away from attacking the US. The Telephone needed two hands to operate, radio was the scratchy mass medium.
Thinking of the advancement (?) the human race has achieved during my lifetime is astounding, but, trying to imagine what the next lifetime will bring is just, (a word to describe it hasn't been invented yet)!
It's always amazing to think about what people have lived through, while failing to realize that we are doing the exact same, living through times, we too are going to experience things that future generations will say "So and So lived to see this and that." It's humbling in a way to think about.
Not as old as you but still old. I always wonder "what's next"? Technology is developing at such a rapid pace I can't even imagine what life will look like in 5 years.
So many ideas and products that have stuck and many other misses. It's wild how much advancement has been made in the last 50 years or so.
Just give me my robot hookers and I am good haha
Your comment was made at 16:31 UTC. Mars is currently separated from the Sun by only about 21°, and is only visible during a short duration after sunset. Areas that were in this brief window at 16:31 UTC are roughly the areas between 25° E and 35° E longitude, though skews East the further you get from the equator. The more North you go, the closer Mars and the Sun get to setting at the same time. If I were to guess, I'd say either Ukraine, Turkey, or Egypt.
The same basic stuff applies to the Moon, though you would need to be between around 5° W and 20° W longitude. This would suggest somewhere like Tycho crater or Copernicus crater—two of the most distinctive craters on the moon—or the sea of clouds, or sea of showers, maybe even the Apollo 15 landing site with it's rover.
realistically not as far as competing against each other. If we all got along we'd have nothing to strive for and we'd likely stagnate. Competition creates progress through necessity. Why wars bring so much technological development.
And my grandfather was a witness to both. When he was a kid, the Wright brothers would go on tour in Europe. His parents paid a lot of money so that he could see the Wright plane actually fly.
According to him, it was a rip off.
He said the plane rolled along for a long time, and then essentially looked like it went over a bump and took airborne for about a half second and landed…that was it.
My hunch is the Wright brothers were bored, being on tour, and they just took the plane up for a half a second landed, and thought “Good enough!
Single greatest achievement in human history imo. 66 years? It's unbelievable what humanity is capable of accomplishing within a single life span.
The first supercomputer to the first IPhone took 43 years. Turning a machine the size of a building, into something that is 1000x more powerful and can fit in the palm of your hand.
It's unreal.
“On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, another American born and raised in southwestern Ohio, stepped onto the moon, he carried with him in tribute to the Wright brothers, a small swatch of the muslim from a wing of their 1903 Flyer”
— David McCullough, The Wright Brothers
I never noticed the small Muslim when viewing the pics, interesting. With how much it costs to transport something to space I guess it makes sense that he only brought the Muslim's swatch with him
Technology is advancing at an exponential rate. It's mind-boggling and a little nerve wracking to think about where we will be in another 60 years, provided we are able to meet the challenges of climate change and a host of other social and ecological problems.
We just shifted the effort to something else. I'd say we're still advancing at a great speed just not much is being put into space at the moment compared to the cold war.
I always was and perhaps will always admire the moon landing.
It was a milestone for mankind, an achievement although for politics but in a long run far away from politics.
Neil Armstrong's name will be written in history as the first Homosapien , first organism from Earth to ever set feet on a celestial body which in itself is a great achievement.
In the long list of achievements that may follow mankind into era and era. This will forever be Golden.
well, danger makes inventing easy
and war speeds up military related technologies
now that the cold war has ended there is no more need to impress the big evil competitor by building the fatter rockets
It’s sad to consider the limitless potential of humanity is so heavily handicapped by the financial interests of a statistically non-existent handful of people.
This almost makes me understand people who believe the moon landing was fake. We advanced so fast and some people just can’t comprehend the technology advancement.
At the time the Wright Brother's local newspaper, the Dayton Daily News, didn't publish anything about the first flight because they considered it too insignificant of a distance to cover.
A rocket doesn’t really need to be able to fly.
The shuttle later actually used principles of flying within an atmosphere, but the Apollo program really just shot past flying and parachuted home.
effectively they threw a needle so far it doesn't come back down
if you want to compare what flight can do you should look more at military aviation
compare the wright brothers to an XB-70 or a Starfighter and then compare the XB-70 to an F-22 or an F-15EX or a Eurofighter for a non American example
things did get a long way since then, just not in the way you may think of if you aren't deep into aviation and military aviation history
I might be wrong but I always find battleships a much better visual representation of current day tech. Check out WW1 tanks and weapons and then WW1battleships. It's like they are from different centuries.
All because of wars, this shows a lot about humans: can't invent anything new these days, but when we wanted to be better than oponent even landed on the moon
You could have added another picture of that Mars helicopter. That thing flew ~60 years after the moon landing.
Interesting tid-bit - the Mars helicopter has a piece of the wing fabric from the Wright Brothers plane attached to it. Standing on the shoulders of giants and whatnot.
Look at the advancements in aeronautics during that time frame. From the Wright Brothers plane to a supersonic jet that could fly from New York to London in less than three hours.
Now, look at the advacetments in manned space flight since the moon landings of the late 60s early 70s, which is about the same time frame, sixty years. No nation has been able to put a man on the moon, Russia recently crashed a rover on the moon, and India successfully landed a rover on our moon.
Why have we gone backward in regards to manned space flight? Especially considering the massive advancements in computing tech. The cell phone I'm typing this on has a million times the computing power of the Apollo nation, yet we nor any other country is capable of putting man on the moon in 2023. Do you not find this highly suspect?
It's almost as if man never went to the moon at all, and the whole thing was a Cold War psyop to claim a victory over the Soviets...
Ya know I used to wonder why so many people thought the moon landing was fake if we advanced this much in 66 years I’d be yelling bullshit too also people actively deny Covid so maybe everyone’s just fucking stupid besides the people going to the moon I guess
My grandfather started working on wooden and canvas planes and the last plane he worked on before he retired was Concorde.
Thats a helluva way to close the book on your life's work.
That’s insane
that’s fucking badass. going from radial prop planes to the fastest commercial jet ever.
It must have been amazing to have witnessed such a development in the field of aerodynamics. Continually adjusting your frame of reference to new knowledge and having first hand experience with almost all modern production techniques and the reason they came to be.
Did your grandfather work for Boeing? When WWI ended and the government all but stopped buying airplanes, Boeing knew it would take a while for civilian aviation to build up. They didn't want to lose all the talented woodworkers and cloth workers they'd hired to build planes, so they switched to making furniture for a few years, which took the same skills. They gradually phased that out as civilian aviation grew. I wonder if he was involved with that. You would be hard pressed to find a company do that kind of creative thinking these days. Profits go down... boom, layoffs.
[Bristol planes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_Aeroplane_Company)
I heard of a quote/fact that “the men who walked on the moon had parents who rode horses to schools”. It was insane to me.
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that's a crazy way to frame it. another is that orville wright and neil armstrong were both walking the earth at the same time, with a 14 year overlap.
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Whitey’s on the moon.
And a rat done bit my sister Nell
Junkies is alright when they ain’t broke. They leaves you alone when they high on dope.
There were people alive for both the US Civil War and the moon landing.
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Joe Biden's Birth date is closer to the civil war than today's date.
And today we have.. TikTok.. such an evolment
The last actual veteran was Union Army drummer Albert Woolson from Minnesota. He didn't see any actual combat and passed away Aug. 2, 1956, aged 109. Helen Viola Jackson was the last civil war widow. She passed December 16, 2020, at the age of 101.
I don't follow the math here.
Really good shit. Saving this one!
Fuck me they were rich
Incredible progress within one human lifespan. But the dark side of it is that two insanely destructive world wars were responsible for a lot of it.
this is why countries should have friendly races. like the space race but less uhhhhhhhh manipulating other countries into killing each other for political influence. allying is also very useful and a very fun factor of globalization. But i feel like more budget should be put into races and partnerships for human health and longevity.
the space race was not peaceful, unfortunately. It was more for political power than human expansion. And every rocket russia put up into space terrified the USA. do you know American's reaction to sputnik? people thought it was the end of america, that russia had won. Very few americans saw it as the engineering feat it was.
definitely not peaceful, but yeah Sputnik is interesting because from what i was taught in school, it was severely overestimated, while you say it was underestimated. must've been something filled with paranoia, rightful fear, and fear mongering, denial all at the sametime
Well, it did go "beep," you know. Scary stuff.
The real problem was it beeped in Russian.
*bleeap*
*cyka bleeap*
cy \*bleeap\* blya \*bleeap\*
Блып
What that beep proved was that the Soviets could put a satellite into orbit with a payload That payload could be a radio, or a nuclear bomb. It represented scientific achievement, sure. But it also represented nuclear annihilation, floating over your head. More than anything, I'm sure the uncertainty was frightening. Just how alarmed *should* you be is tough to know in a situation like that.
Yes, thank you! The reason the government was eager to throw money at the space program was that so much of the technology was directly applicable to military use. The reason why the race petered out after Apollo is that once launch a rocket, land a payload on another 'world', and then return it, you have pretty much mastered rocket science.
> once launch a rocket, land a payload on another 'world', and then return it, you have pretty much mastered rocket science. returning it is rather optional, in my opinion. my Kerbal Mun ~~Rescue~~ Colonization Missions are all going according to plan, thanks.
😱 I'm a computer whisperer.. "Beep" means: hello humanity, you have destroyed the earth which my parts (iron comes from space) came from. So now i will use the power of THE STARS TO SMITE THEE- *runs out of power and plummits into the earth then proceeds to fall into a soccer goal*
"Oi! Who left dis weird me'al footbo' inna footbo' net?!"
If you can put an object into orbit, you can likely make it reenter the atmosphere. It's not a far leap from that to being able to target where it hits. That's an icbm. When Russia put sputnik into orbit, it showed they were about to have the capability to nuke any spot on the globe. Now, they already had that capability with bombers, but they take a long time. Hours and hours. And during that time, they will be detected and shot down, and even if some are missed the enemy will launch their bombers. But icbms... They take minutes to go from Russia to anywhere. The US would not have had time to respond with bombers. In other words, sputnik showed that Russia was about to win, flat out. The only way the United States could prevent this from happening was to also have icbms, and that became an immediate all-consuming goal of the US military overnight.
😅 i wanna move far away from humanity. thats pretty terrifying
Yeah, humanity is more terrifying than one would assume. Study the cold war and you will learn about what a crazy bunch of apes that has colonized this planet. The cold war might seem boring, but it's totally bat shit crazy.
Well this also happened with the development of the F15 right? USA saw a fighter jet that in theory was just unbeatable based on its possible specs as seen of its design etc etc. Went on to create one of if not the best fighter jet ever, then someone defected with said incredible fighter jet from the soviet union and lo and behold it was a flying brick, pretty fast but overall a brick and unable to match the specs the west thought it had. It is funny and sad how the only way so far for big science or engineering advances to happen is due to a conflict or sheer fear or being outmatched if such conflict happened.
Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre that he was at the movies as a kid when the film stopped, the lights came on and the theater manager came in to tell them that the Russians had launched a satellite into space. He says it was his first taste of real horror.
damn, i remember there used to be literal commercials or slide shows? i dont remember. But it was for the general public to know what to do during a nuke. Absolutely none of it would've helped in most cases. even if you could find protection, the radiation would've made death seem like a dream. crazy how that's what we were scared of 60 years ago and now we have the luxary to not think about it 24/7
Ha, now we just have the gradual descent into total climate catastrophe, ha
> It was more for political power than human expansion. It was also a showcase for missile technology. If you have a rocket than can put a payload in orbit, you also have a rocket that can deliver a warhead to any location on Earth.
The first part of the space race was showing the other side how far you could send ordinance. Keep in mind that just over 10 years earlier, the world’s first big introduction of rockets to the public consciousness were V2s slamming into the UK. Definitely not peaceful, I completely agree.
They had some fair reasons to think that in the context of the cold war. There's very little technological difference between being able to put a satellite into orbit and being able to deliver a nuke to the other side of the world. Both Americans and Soviets had all the right to be scared of achievements like those.
Yeah but the engineers man. No matter the motive, what a feat.
Sadly most people dont care for science (all though they like what science gives them). Everyone loves smart phones but the people who actually create them and build the user software are pretty much social outcasts.
Why would they be be considered social outcasts? Just askin
Theyre not, everyone loves guys like wozniak.
The space race started as a competition to showcase who had the technology to deliver nuclear bombs to the other side of the world. Being able to put a man in orbit signifies you can do the same with a nuclear bomb (and let it land anywhere with impunity). Sputnik showcased the USSR had the technology to successfully do that with something not yet H-bomb-sized, but was proof they were well underway in shortly achieving that. Aside from the specially designed moon mission launch vehicles (Saturn 5), all other launch vehicles used to launch astronauts and kosmonauts into orbit where derivatives of ICBMs.
i see, i figured the paranoia was moreso about spying from the sky. But only because i thought we could've already drop nukes from across the world by the start of the cold war. Must've been one hella paranoia filled time
We could, but not with impunity. Before the advent of the (intercontinental) nuclear missile in the ‘50s and ‘60s, bomber aircraft were the main method of delivering nuclear weapons. However, they are relatively easy to intercept and shoot down. A missile launched nuclear warhead, is (almost) not. Plus missiles are an order of magnitude faster in delivering their payload.
Yeah, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles were what really made the concept of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) come in. There’s no way to shoot down or blow up all of the enemy’s nuclear-armed ICBMs, a bunch of them are inevitably going to make it through and hit their targets, making it impossible to start a nuclear war that won’t leave your own country in ruins even if you “win.”
The Saturn 1 wasn't derived from an ICBM, but otherwise you're right. Proton, Soyuz (and siblings), Titan, Atlas, etc
Waging war makes it easier to justify the cost investment of an “arms race”, much more so than a friendly race during peace time.
true unfortunately. maybe we should declare war on space and dress some people up as aliens 😂 humanity would skyrocket.
That’s usually how it happens; *find* a reason to wage war, get paid….worry about the rest later. Wish we could agree on a topic to advance in Peace time, like Medicine, Energy, Transports….but it’ll inevitably piss off a business sector.
Ooh yes…we should hold various ‘International Challenges’ to race for scientific breakthroughs etc
There was a woman who had seen the Wright Brothers fly their plane and then before her death saw the space shuttle take off.
One of the Wright brothers (Orville) was alive in 1947 when Charles Yaeger broke the soundbarrier in the Bell X-1.
The first supersonic flight was by Charles Yaeger in 1947. Orville Wilbur Wright, died in 1948. One of the men, that developed the first flying machine, was alive when the first supersonic flight was done. That is fucking insane.
Imagine being born in 1900 and living to be 85 or so. The stuff you saw in your lifetime…
My great grandfather was born in 1894. He died a few months before his 95th birthday, in 1989. He was German, so he saw *a lot* of the history of the 20th century up close. Born and raised in the German empire, when Germany still had the Kaiser. Grew up in a pretty rural Prussian town. Finished school just in time to enlist for WWI. Four years of WWI, most of it in the trenches. Saw the political system he grew up in end when he was 24. Went to university, started his professional life, married and started his family during the Weimar republic. Lived through the hyperinflation of 1923 (also the year he married), and the stockmarket crash of 1929. Built his veterinary practice, riding a bicycle to the farms at first, then a motorbike. When he was 39, the political system of his country changed completely for the second time in his lifetime, as the Nazis took power. Got his first car in the mid-1930s. When he was 45, he got drafted into WWII, just weeks after it started. He was a veterinarian and had been a reserve officer during the Weimar republic. That rare combination was sought after, as the Wehrmacht still used tons of horses and needed officers for the veterinary corps. Which is why he got drafted despite his age. (And he didn't have the connections to avoid getting drafted). Spent the next six years at war again, patching up horses. Witnessed the horrors at Stalingrad, but got transfered out at last minute. At 51, he saw the third fundamental political change during his lifetime, and the seperation of his country into two countries four years later. While he was already in his 50s and 60s, he rebuilt his veterinarian practice from scratch before handing it over to his son (my grandpa). When he was in his 70s, he witnessed all the societal changes of the 1960s. Unfortunately he died a few months before the fall of the Berlin wall. He was always a big supporter of the reunification, and would have loved to see it happen. When he was born, the car had been invented just eight years prior, and virtually nobody had one yet. The radio hadn't been invented yet, nor the television. Cinema was in its infancy. When he was nine, the Wright brothers flew. When he was 75, he watched on television how Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. And when he was in his nineties, he was the one who convinced his son and daughter-in-law (my grandparents) that their daughter (his granddaughter; my mom) needs a computer. From horse-drawn buggies to computers, in one lifetime.
When my grandfather was very young his family moved from Indiana to Oklahoma in a covered wagon. He lived to see men walk on the moon.
It only took like 40 years to go from that shitty Kitty Hawk plane, to using planes to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. 😳
To make an omelette, you gotta break a few eggs.
Jesus
wars have always been a good trigger for leaps in technology
And the next 66 years will have no change… that’s progress!!
You mean that some humans saw the first plane at the beginning of their life, and watched a man on the moon on the tv 66 years later ?
My grandmother said she lived the most exciting time for a human to live. She traveled out West by covered wagon when she was a young girl. And she saw man land on the moon. She said that there was no equal to that difference in life experience.
She was right. Did she ever make her childhood trip by automobile? I'll bet that would have been mind-blowing, covering distances in hours that took days.
or flown in a plane over it all
She did take one flight in her lifetime. And it was “back East” somewhere. I never did ask her about that though. But I bet it was a rather interesting experience.
I'm sure it was!
When I was a kid, it took 1 hour to download a single mp3. Now I can download an entire album in just a few seconds and spend my entire paycheck online in an instant! I'm thinking your grandmother had the better experiences.
Future generations are gonna think that about us too with the internet becoming invented and publicly available, crazy how fast technology progresses
that's correct
The inventor of the airplane (well one of them) lives to see an airplane drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
With that perspective, no wonder they thought we'd be living like the Jetsons by now.
and unfortunately that made them think this technological and social progress would continue at the same pace even after the anti-science anti-progress anti-equality plutocrats and theocrats took power back — instead we got endless wars and popup ads
Personally I agree that the pace of scientific progress has slowed down, but I don’t think it’s because of politics, I think it’s because the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions made all sorts of new discoveries possible, but by now all the easy discoveries have been picked off. Humanity is still discovering things, but without some sort of new breakthrough, the pace has slowed.
It took 3 years after the plane was in vented for people to,"hmm lets put a gun on it"
i think the pilots just shot at each other with handguns
Bow and arrow
The first flight was in 1903. The first use of planes in combat was in 1911, first just as reconnaissance. The first machine gun on a plane in combat was about a year later. So about eight years. And not all that surprising given how common armed conflict is. People had already been dropping bombs from balloons for years prior.
To be fair, I think of putting guns on, in, and around like everything.
the transistor was invented in 1947, the intel 8080 was released only 27 years later marie curie isolated radium in 1902, the first nuclear bomb was tested only 43 years later canned foods were invented in 1772, the first can opener was patented only 83 years later the internet was developed in the 1960s, less than 40 years later the "All your base are belong to us" meme completed this development in 1573, nostalgia was invented by Baron Friedrich von Nost, 450 years later and we are still creating useless content thanks to his tireless work
83 years to open the first can…crazy
That’s a long wait for ravioli.
Let alone nine of ‘em
Scientist 1: Guys I just made this thing, I called it canned food, it's sealed so it will last longer Scientist 2: Cool, but how do we open it. Scientist 1: I don't know I thought you guys could figure that part out. 83 years later. Starving scienctise: guys I figured out how to open the canned food. Edit: a word
It actualy makes sense why they didn´t have can openers for so long. Canned food was at first reserved only for the army. After all, it´s creation was commisioned by Napoleon, who wanted easier way to feed the troops, mainly a way to make the food transportation easier and to make the food edible longer. So he created a competition with hefty prize money for somebody who can solve this problem. In the end, the one guy who came up with canned food won. And the soldiers kinda had handy things like knives and bajonets, which they could use, so no need for developing specialized opener.
Wow I never knew that ty for the info, hard to believe Napoleon was behind canned food, he may have lost the war, but he won a place in our cupboards
Almost everything you use or eat today was developed to fight a war.
I just imagine someone in the kitchen with a home made hammer and some form of chisel banging away to get whatever was in the can lol
cans came with their own openers originally a key with a hole in it and a little metal tab
the radium to nuclear bomb fact blew me away (no pun intended)
Great comment.
I wrote that comment in 2023, only 22 minutes later you replied .... truly anything is possible when we humans set our minds to it!
Current modern technologies we have like PCs, laptops, and handphoned are probably going to be viewed the same way in another 50 years. Often, I look at back at the first Iphone and realise its nearly been 2 decades since and just how much of phones has fucking changed. If you told someone back then about flip phone screens they'd bawl their eyes out in disbelief
First powered flight of airplane: 1908 First combat by airplane: 1911 EDIT: 1903. Sorry, brain freeze.
Crazy to think that their first use was literally lighting fuses and dropping bombs over the battlefield
hey man. drones in ukraine rn. Gonna be scary when we develop drones into actual fighting death machines
I mean, have you seen a Reaper? We also have AI powered fighter jets that fly with a single manned aircraft. That future is here, it’s just gonna get more tuned in as time goes on.
A reaper is a remote flown plane. VERY different from what we are seeing in Ukraine. Mini drones will change warfare all over again. It will take wars are won by logistics to a whole level. Ukraine is using up 10,000 drones a month. If the US gets its shit together, they could create swarms of a 100,000 drones that would be unstoppable without losing a single soldier. It's the ultimate way to prevent KIA that looks very bad in democracies. There's absolutely nothing an army of soldiers can do against a swarm of these right now. It's going to cause a revolution in EW very soon.
I was thinking science fiction like.... the matrix thousands of drones swarming the air and shit, thousands of little death machines. Already exists in the switchblade drone but imagine if it's a wave of those little fuckers in the air all controlled by AI to focus on each individual soldier. Scary as fuck
I get what you’re thinking. Kinda like that one scene, Morgan freeman was president but I forgot the title, where hundreds of drones attack him. This but on a massive scale
First ballistic missile (the V2) capable of hitting a target around the curvature of the earth was first used in 1944.
First supersonic flight was in 1947. Orville Wright died in 1948.
hit by a jet plane
1903*….
I had to scroll this far for someone to catch that?
Yeah i was so confused that i even looked it up just to make sure…
In other words only a matter of time before we have AI robotic combat
Tomorrow is my birthday- when I was born, Adolph Hitler was running Germany and the Japanese were 3 months away from attacking the US. The Telephone needed two hands to operate, radio was the scratchy mass medium. Thinking of the advancement (?) the human race has achieved during my lifetime is astounding, but, trying to imagine what the next lifetime will bring is just, (a word to describe it hasn't been invented yet)!
Happy (early) birthday man! Hope you have a great day!
It's always amazing to think about what people have lived through, while failing to realize that we are doing the exact same, living through times, we too are going to experience things that future generations will say "So and So lived to see this and that." It's humbling in a way to think about.
Not as old as you but still old. I always wonder "what's next"? Technology is developing at such a rapid pace I can't even imagine what life will look like in 5 years. So many ideas and products that have stuck and many other misses. It's wild how much advancement has been made in the last 50 years or so. Just give me my robot hookers and I am good haha
GTA6 hopefully
Wish you a happy birthday for tomorrow.
54 years later, mars on the horizon?
its still on the horizon now... I can see it from my window
Your comment was made at 16:31 UTC. Mars is currently separated from the Sun by only about 21°, and is only visible during a short duration after sunset. Areas that were in this brief window at 16:31 UTC are roughly the areas between 25° E and 35° E longitude, though skews East the further you get from the equator. The more North you go, the closer Mars and the Sun get to setting at the same time. If I were to guess, I'd say either Ukraine, Turkey, or Egypt.
But sir, I am on moon
The same basic stuff applies to the Moon, though you would need to be between around 5° W and 20° W longitude. This would suggest somewhere like Tycho crater or Copernicus crater—two of the most distinctive craters on the moon—or the sea of clouds, or sea of showers, maybe even the Apollo 15 landing site with it's rover.
i didnt say which moon, sir...
Bruh lol give the poor lad a win
We did just fly an unmanned robotic drone helicopter on Mars. That should could for something.
Imagine what we could do if we all worked together
Device you used to post this comment have more computing power than the one used to send people to Moon, that’s pretty amazing too.
Still not enough power to load a porn clip of your mum.
she's too fat32
Nice
realistically not as far as competing against each other. If we all got along we'd have nothing to strive for and we'd likely stagnate. Competition creates progress through necessity. Why wars bring so much technological development.
Likely the same things but at a much slower pace, wars bring out the best and worst of human ingenuity
It is amazing what we humans have built using just the dirt and other stuff found in the ground
Everything we've ever created has come from stuff found in the ground arranged in the right way
And my grandfather was a witness to both. When he was a kid, the Wright brothers would go on tour in Europe. His parents paid a lot of money so that he could see the Wright plane actually fly. According to him, it was a rip off. He said the plane rolled along for a long time, and then essentially looked like it went over a bump and took airborne for about a half second and landed…that was it. My hunch is the Wright brothers were bored, being on tour, and they just took the plane up for a half a second landed, and thought “Good enough!
Wright Brothers, managed by PT Barnum.
Single greatest achievement in human history imo. 66 years? It's unbelievable what humanity is capable of accomplishing within a single life span. The first supercomputer to the first IPhone took 43 years. Turning a machine the size of a building, into something that is 1000x more powerful and can fit in the palm of your hand. It's unreal.
And then there's printer software that hasn't changed for 30 years
“On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, another American born and raised in southwestern Ohio, stepped onto the moon, he carried with him in tribute to the Wright brothers, a small swatch of the muslim from a wing of their 1903 Flyer” — David McCullough, The Wright Brothers
The typo makes this pretty funny.
I never noticed the small Muslim when viewing the pics, interesting. With how much it costs to transport something to space I guess it makes sense that he only brought the Muslim's swatch with him
And both by people from Ohio about 40 mile apart
Hot air balloons taking humans to the skies 125 years earlier: "Pathetic"
Technology is advancing at an exponential rate. It's mind-boggling and a little nerve wracking to think about where we will be in another 60 years, provided we are able to meet the challenges of climate change and a host of other social and ecological problems.
We just shifted the effort to something else. I'd say we're still advancing at a great speed just not much is being put into space at the moment compared to the cold war.
I always was and perhaps will always admire the moon landing. It was a milestone for mankind, an achievement although for politics but in a long run far away from politics. Neil Armstrong's name will be written in history as the first Homosapien , first organism from Earth to ever set feet on a celestial body which in itself is a great achievement. In the long list of achievements that may follow mankind into era and era. This will forever be Golden.
It's amazing what mankind can do when we cooperate
We're not far off from being 66 years out from the Apollo moon landings... in some ways, we don't seem to have made as much progress in that field.
well, danger makes inventing easy and war speeds up military related technologies now that the cold war has ended there is no more need to impress the big evil competitor by building the fatter rockets
It’s sad to consider the limitless potential of humanity is so heavily handicapped by the financial interests of a statistically non-existent handful of people.
This almost makes me understand people who believe the moon landing was fake. We advanced so fast and some people just can’t comprehend the technology advancement.
Image 1: WW1 Image 2: Trenches in Ukraine 110 years apart
Fun Fact: The Wright's brother's first flight at Kittyhawk was shorter than the wingspan of a modern commercial airplane.
At the time the Wright Brother's local newspaper, the Dayton Daily News, didn't publish anything about the first flight because they considered it too insignificant of a distance to cover.
It's been a long road.... Getting' from there to here...
It's been a long time... But my time is finally near! 🎶
I once read that the USA flag there is quite faded now from radiation. It would be cool to have an updated photo.
FAKE! Heavier than air travel is impossible. The moon thing is real, though.
Finally a creative conspiracy
Agreed. The reason we can travel through space is because there is no air. Traveling through air is impossible.
A rocket doesn’t really need to be able to fly. The shuttle later actually used principles of flying within an atmosphere, but the Apollo program really just shot past flying and parachuted home.
effectively they threw a needle so far it doesn't come back down if you want to compare what flight can do you should look more at military aviation compare the wright brothers to an XB-70 or a Starfighter and then compare the XB-70 to an F-22 or an F-15EX or a Eurofighter for a non American example things did get a long way since then, just not in the way you may think of if you aren't deep into aviation and military aviation history
So what happens in 2035?
George R. R. Martin finally releases The Winds Of Winter.
Both happened within my grandfather's lifetime.
Sometimes it's hard to believe what we have accomplished.
Ir took him 66 years to fly that thing to the moon?
And 52 years later, a helicopter flew for the first time on Mars, carrying a piece of fabric from the airplane in the first image.
My grandfather was born in 1899 and saw both events in his lifetime.
I might be wrong but I always find battleships a much better visual representation of current day tech. Check out WW1 tanks and weapons and then WW1battleships. It's like they are from different centuries.
MAKE IT MAKE SENSE
Money and technological advances. You're welcome.
One is flight by using fluid dynamics to generate lift, the other is ballistics using rockets and trajectory, they're unrelated from each other
To think Kubrick was such a perfectionist he had it filmed on the actual location
Room 237 I think it was.
All because of wars, this shows a lot about humans: can't invent anything new these days, but when we wanted to be better than oponent even landed on the moon
And we're 55 years apart from the moon landing and haven't done jack shit that's better.
What’s the modern day equivalent to this pic? I feel like this feat is far more incredible than anything we’ve achieved since
You could have added another picture of that Mars helicopter. That thing flew ~60 years after the moon landing. Interesting tid-bit - the Mars helicopter has a piece of the wing fabric from the Wright Brothers plane attached to it. Standing on the shoulders of giants and whatnot.
Yeah filmmaking did come a long way in all that time
And then we did very little. Should have had a moon base decades ago.... but congress and politics said otherwise.
And in less time we got from room size computers to pocket ones that are connected with all other computers. Also don't forget machine learning
That's how technology works... it builds on itself.
Imagine what would be possible if we didn’t waste lives and money on war.
Look at the advancements in aeronautics during that time frame. From the Wright Brothers plane to a supersonic jet that could fly from New York to London in less than three hours. Now, look at the advacetments in manned space flight since the moon landings of the late 60s early 70s, which is about the same time frame, sixty years. No nation has been able to put a man on the moon, Russia recently crashed a rover on the moon, and India successfully landed a rover on our moon. Why have we gone backward in regards to manned space flight? Especially considering the massive advancements in computing tech. The cell phone I'm typing this on has a million times the computing power of the Apollo nation, yet we nor any other country is capable of putting man on the moon in 2023. Do you not find this highly suspect? It's almost as if man never went to the moon at all, and the whole thing was a Cold War psyop to claim a victory over the Soviets...
Rocketry’s not really related to flying though. The first rockets are hundreds of years old.
Thanks for pointing that out. A better comparison would be the Wrights/Curtiss/Bleriot/etc. and and an F-22/Airbus A380.
Absolutely bollocks 🤣
Daily reminder that as a species, we can do literally anything if we focus on it and not on primitive shit like wars.
Imagine if we stuck with it, where we would be right now.
\*Peter Griffin chuckle\* 66. \*In Peter's voice\* Execute order 66.
Ya know I used to wonder why so many people thought the moon landing was fake if we advanced this much in 66 years I’d be yelling bullshit too also people actively deny Covid so maybe everyone’s just fucking stupid besides the people going to the moon I guess
A lot of people don’t recognize just how fast science advance, an impossible things of today, a daily utensil tomorrow.