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Comment by psygong2 | Hacker News Reader

It's a black and white photo of rocks and ice.

It's interesting that it is Pluto, but photo of the year? Why?

Because this is the furthest away from Earth that we've managed to photograph in any real detail.

Because exploration. I really get depressed reading comments like yours, and I don't mean to have a go at you, I understand where you're coming from. It just upsets me that you can look at the product of an over ten year mission and dismiss it with such casual disdain, as if this isn't something that is literally at the limits of what we as a species can do. This is what we were meant to do, what we are programmed to do since birth - explore.

The reason it depresses me is because an overwhelming majority think like you - liek wtf is roks innit who cares. And this is why we spend so much time and effort on inwardly focussed nonsense and no time at all, given what we could do, on exploration and actual achievement.

So yeah. It is just rocks and ice. You are right. By so observing, however, you have missed the point so completely that you have made me sad for the entire human species. Well done.

Furthermore, some "rocks" may be water ice and the "ice" is probably nitrogen ice, so it's not even ordinary rocks and ice.

While other have insisted on how that photo is a technology feast, taken from billions of miles away, from something we have never seen before, it's also breathtaking from what it shows: a multilayered atmosphere, completely unique in the Solar System; mountains of water ice next to vast plains of what may be ice nitrogen, also features never seen before on any other body of the Solar System. Before July, many people thought that maybe we would see just another round rock full of craters, ala Mercury, nobody expected what we see now. How many times in your adult life a photo has shown you something that you could never have imagined before?

On top of that, the backlit quality of the photo makes the relief jump at you in a staggering way. It's not like the pictures taken from above, where you can see the same features from very high, in a detached way. Here the landscape just feel real, like if you were there looking at it. Also it gives a sense of the size of the mountains, especially compared to the curvature of the horizon.

Weirdly, the light is what surprises me the most. I always thought the surface of Pluto was cloaked in eternal night because the sun is so far away. Turns out high noon on Pluto is more or less as bright as twilight on Earth!

Check your local "Pluto time" here: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/plutotime/

Pluto is very small (radius 1,185 km), and very far away (about 7.5 billion km from Earth).

Being able to take a photograph of it is a significant achievement. Being able to show features of the landscape? It's amazing.

Here's a nice page that describes a demonstration of the distance to scale.

http://www.noao.edu/education/work/Peppercorn/Peppercorn_Mai...

It's just a representation of a collection of photons taken at a particular point in time and space.

... Context is everything

Usually photos are evaluated not only for the reality that they've captured, but also how hard it was to take that photo.

In the case of Pluto's high-resolution photos, there are maybe billion dollars behind it and hundreds of people that worked for years before actually the photo has been taken.

According to this page [0], which links to a broken link on NASA's site as source, it was "only" $720 million, not billions.

I only mention it to underscore that our intuition on the cost of NASA is often wrong. You see a lot of people complaining about the relevance of spending on NASA, when they actually represent a very small part of the overall budget and they spend the money very well.

In contrast, Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion, tried to buy Snapchat for $3 billion, Microsoft bought Mojang for $2.5 billion. Maybe it's a sign we aren't taxing them enough, if apparently there is enough money to go around for toys but not NASA.

[0] http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/07/14/Here-s-What-It-Cost...

It's hard to agree on that, because I'm not a US citizen. Anyway what NASA / EU space programs are doing is far more significant for humanity ( IMHO ) than what Facebook Oculus and Snapchat are trying to achieve, so it looks really unfair.

On the other hand, I do sort of believe that the work that Oculus and other VR companies are doing is going to help the first manned mission to Mars keep from going insane.

Oh man, I would love to try VR in zero-G. I wonder if the visual ground reference would take over for the lack of vestibular ground reference? ZOMG! There is science to be done!

Those 'toys' create thousands of jobs.

They create demand, which means people work to purchase them.

That work brings value to society (person x helped build a bridge, y did a dental implant, z built a yacht (horrors, a toy for a rich person, but recursively read this post)).

This is how economics works. You can't artificially split out some random activity, decide it is 'frivolous', and tax it out of existence. We are creating things, not destroying things. Dollars spent do not disappear, they are leveraged and multiplied via the labor of millions as they pass through our hands in an elaborate dance of IOUs. A dollar bill is a chit - a promise of later labor.

We can and do all the time.

Ponzi schemes for example are illegal. Gambling creates no net value so it is tightly regulated. Cigarettes are a net drag on society so they are highly taxed.

"Dollars spent do not disappear" is true but meaningless. What counts is the wealth people create, and the opportunity cost of what you do.

For an extreme example, imagine that every day I hire somebody to move my wood pile to the other side of the house. After two days I'm back where I started, but I've wasted a person's labor for two days. The dollars I paid them didn't disappear, but we've lost whatever useful activity they might have done during that time.

Not all work brings value to society. Just because someone is given money to do something doesn't make that something useful. On the other hand, just because something isn't of value to society doesn't mean it should be prohibited or taxed out of existence. And determining whether something is useful to society is really tough, so we shouldn't assume we can figure it out. But saying they "create thousands of jobs" and "dollars spent do not disappear" isn't a good argument for these things.

It is $720 million built on top of the shoulders of billions and billions of dollars of the failures and successes of missions that preceded it.

That's not how accounting works. If it did, I'd personally be worth billions, too.

Pretty sure he/she's not talking about accounting.

Indeed, my point was that arguing that the pluto mission cost "only" $720 million and thus comparing the value of the products of this mission as less than the acquisitions of Oculus at $2B and Mojang at $2.5B does a great disservice to this achievement.

No, that's not what I was doing. I wasn't saying price = value. I was specifically trying to say the opposite, that such an obviously valuable project had come at an incredibly cheap price, comparatively.

Fair enough. Honestly I also think the comparison demonstrates how over valued those acquisitions were (in terms of what they bring to the human race).

The solution is not to tax "toys" as you call them, there are already plenty of existing tax dollars to go around. The larger issue is that we would rather buy 1700 F35 fighters instead of funding NASA for the next 10 years. Actually even the F35 is a slightly more reasonable use of money then some of the other things that make it onto the budget. The money is there in many cases but the will to use it for NASA is not since to many NASA is considered a toy.

Yeah, if we just stopped burning dollars by the cargoship load on a "war" with no defined goals, then we could probably afford to do whatever the hell we wanted on every other project going on in the country.

The money isn't burned, it is used to stimulate the economy and keep people in the military industrial complex employed.

No, the labor, application of skill, and physical resources that the money represents literally gets blown up. We have bridges falling down, not enough roads, the highest healthcare costs in the developed world, and we're spending money on bombs.

It's pretty amazing how cheap that is.

For $720 million, they built a half-ton spacecraft, launched it into space, sent it on a path out of the solar system, tracked and guided it all the way, and had it gather about a million times more data than existed before about a particular small icy body billions of miles away.

To put it into perspective, that's about what it would cost to buy two A380 airliners. Two. You can buy two airliners that are not much different from the ones that existed 40 years ago, but that happen to be somewhat larger and carry some more people, and then have to spend even more money to operate them, or for the same money NASA can do an entire mission to Pluto from start to finish.

Or for a different perspective, for the cost of the B-2 program (an airplane which basically never had a mission, whose key feature probably doesn't work anymore, and which in any case is far too expensive and precious to risk in any environment where there's the slightest chance it could be shot down), assuming costs would be the same as Pluto, NASA could send seven missions each to every planet in the Solar System including Pluto.

For yet another perspective, it's about 1/9th the cost of the Washington Metro's Silver Line product. So, one mission each to every planet in the Solar system including Pluto, or 60 miles of railroad track and 11 light-rail stations.

It's not a sign that people aren't being taxed enough, it's a sign that NASA is a bastion of amazing efficiency and capability in a sea of unbelievable waste.

It's a first-of-a-kind high quality photo of a planet which we have never seen before!

(What would be exciting for you, out of interest?)

It's the first-of-a-kind photo from a probe which flew across most of the solar system and skimmed the target at a range of 7,750 miles while travelling at nearly 31,000 mph.

And sent back images using about the same ambient light as a slightly cloudy evening on Earth.

With no motion blur.

That's not just exciting - it's an amazing feat of engineering.

It is a photo, taken from a camera that we shot out of our atmosphere -- defeating gravity -- got to the depth of our solar system, with the sole purpose of photographing an icy rock.

Pretty neat if you ask me!

A little over a century ago, this object was a hypothesis. The existence of this vivid image provides a peek into the vastness and variety of space, a humbling perspective on what dedicated people are capable of, and more broadly a clarion endorsement of the scientific method itself. Please pay attention.

Except, it's in a temperature regime so alien to us that your assumptions on seeing those 'rocks and ice' are very wrong. The 'rocks' are water ice. The 'ice' is frozen nitrogen. Nobody thought Pluto would have a dynamic weather system - a climate. And yet it seems to have a glacial nitrogen precipitation cycle. The geological forms look familiar. The mechanisms are not. That's pretty incredible.

Pluto is 7.5 billion kilometers away. Let that sink in while you look at the photo.

While it doesn't take away from the magnitude of sending a grand piano-sized suite of instruments and cameras to Pluto, both the planetoid and the NH probe are actually closer to 5 billion km away[0][1].

Pluto does indeed have an aphelion at some 7,311,000,000km (~48 AU), but its eccentric orbit means that its perihelion is about 20 AU closer to the Sun than its aphelion.

  [0]http://spaceprob.es/newhorizons/
  [1]http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Where-is-New-Horizons/index.php

What sort of candidate photo would you find more interesting than this one?

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