India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

Given it's a polar landing I don't know how to translate this to the velocity vector of the lander.

It ended up in a very eccentric polar orbit with its axis pointing at Earth, swinging way out to the left as viewed from Earth. It spent the next week circularizing, after which it was in a nearly circular polar orbit but, because the moon is swinging around, the axis pointed along the moon's orbital path, such that only half of its orbit was in view of (and in radio contact) with Earth. A few days after that it (or, rather, the moon) had swung around enough to put the orbiter in line of sight to Earth for most of its orbit very close to the moon.

If you assume that the world order should look like America in charge, everyone else playing quietly in their own garden then everything is fine. If you assume that the Asian, African and European powers might see the world differently, there is a lot of potential that the last 60 years are not the inevitable tide of history but a happy anomaly while everyone stood back up from WWII.

[0] http://blogs.reuters.com/anatole-kaletsky/2014/06/27/world-w...

Humanity is scientifically and materialistically closer and that will certainly continue, but the world is not closer in terms of modes of governance or ideas of how society ought to be organised.

On the contrary, 30 years ago after the fall of the Soviet Union that sentiment peaked and Fukuyama's end of history seemed plausible. Today with the nationalisation of cyberspace, we can see countless of new divides.

The US is rapidly withdrawing from global affairs, China is emerging with a competitive, alternative mode of organisation, a distinct European identity is beginning to form as a response to this particular in France, India is slowly emerging (see the very thread we're in), and Africa is a whole other matter.

But by no means does it look like the world is converging, as it did in the 90s and early 00s when we were all listening to corporate world music and cheering for Blair.

Well,

(1) there are more sovereign nations now than ever,

(2) all the big empires (from Babylonian, to Alexander's, to Roman, to Byzantium, to Persian, to Incas, all the way to the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British and French colonial empires, USSR, and more) -aside from the Chinese and Indian who are more homogenous racially/culturally - have collapsed

(3) there is way more infighting that on any time in the previous 40 years

(4) nations that were held together for half a century as a single country have nonetheless split at the first chance, often under fierce wars (e.g. Yugoslavia), and even centuries old countries like Canada, Belgium, UK, Spain, etc, still have infighting, and even votes to break up...

(5) a worsening of climate change and economy will more than likely see every-nation-for-itself than some unity, even if there's a coordinated effort to reduce emissions and so on, there will also be huge pressure to ascertain certain resources, safety, etc at a country by country level (sharing is only good for those that need it. For those that have the power to avoid it, or even grab from others, it just gives you moral points)

>You can find kfc, coca cola in societies as diverse as Mongolia and Madagascar.

Yeah, that's a huge cultural (and dietary) destruction...

> hey you can find McDonalds and Starbucks even when you don't expect it, so it means the world is closer than it has ever been right?

You could find pottery exported in multiple places even in antiquity, that did not mean they had a single culture or single belief system in place. Do not equal exchange of goods with the assumption of a mono-culture.

Before we got to see what the internet actually became, it was a realm of endless idealism. It was going to be something that would finally unite people across cultures and any sort of boundaries. People would be able to share ideas, communicate instantly, and effectively turn humanity from a disparate group of people separated by arbitrary lines into simple a group of diverse and interesting people all sharing and communicating among one another. Instead we used its filtering ability to break down into even smaller groups than before. Before the internet Americans were mostly unified by an American identity. Now instead we've splintered off into a whole host of little subculture identities driven by the great ability of the internet to unite niches and expel the nonbelievers.

But this isn't about the internet. It's about people. Birmingham is one of the most "integrated" cities in England. This [1] page has heat maps showing the various religions there. There's basically no overlap. Instead of integration you have the Muslim section, the Christian section, the Jew section, etc. Even the Sikhs have there own little section, though granted they do share it a bit with the Hindus. Now instead of having one mostly unified city you now have a half dozen cities that have some very sharp cultural conflicts. The irony that literally bringing people closer together can, figuratively, do the exact opposite.

Even the notion that we're becoming more integrated is something I'd question. This [2] is a video showing the borders of the world over time. The surprising thing you'll notice is that, over time, divisions between society have actually been accelerating. Check out the mid 1200s. The Mongols created a single unified empire than stretched from western europe to eastern asia. Very near the entire known world at the time. No need for borders when there's one world government, and one that was also extremely tolerant of foreign cultures. Can you imagine living in this time and then somebody saying that within a couple of centuries the entire empire would be scattered like ashes in the wind?

And like nearly all the empire collapses you can see in that video, it was caused by internal culture clashes. Should the Mongol empire adopt western traditions and become a sedentary settled empire, or should it remain a putative Mongol empire? One side said x, the other said y, lots of people died, the empire broke up. A story told a million times on various scales. Of course even if they had chosen one direction or another, it likely would have had the same ending because once one side or another reached a critical mass - you'd see the emergence of internal insurrections.

Of course we've had a pause in open war since 1945 but nuclear deterrence isn't going to last forever. Imagine there were no nuclear weapons today. Do you think China, the Mideast, the United States, China, Russia, Europe, etc would still be maintaining the already tenuous peace we have? Without nuclear weapons the Cold War would not have been the Cold War, it would have been World War 3. And as soon as nuclear deterrence can be nullified by technological means, I expect we'll be quite quick to pick right back up.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Birmingham

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6Wu0Q7x5D0

There are many countries which are open to diversity - India would probably lead that list historically followed by modern Canada. But none is close to USA. On the other hand, Japan, South Korea, China and Asian tigers have done well without being open and diverse.

As to your second point—no government today is as large in scope as say Rome, the British Empire, the Persian empire, etc. The long-term sustainability of the EU and US are also far from certain. As we saw with both, federalism doesn’t work. As soon as you have a single voting polity, people will want to escalate everything to the federal level. It’s unacceptable to many in the US, for example, that Iowa might have a different minimum wage than New York. When climate change really hits, and California is fighting with Colorado over water and contemplating invading the PNW, we shall see.

Assuming some sort of breakthrough in cheap propulsion and living systems, I couldn't disagree more. If anything, you'd see efforts at a sub-state level with the early colonies in the Americas given as examples.

I think that states, and particularly nations, are well suited to large scale efforts with minimal or no immediate payoffs. It's hard to get a sufficiently large group to pull on a rope at the same time.

To think that in one hundred years any outer space colony will be self sufficient compared to whatever is produced and available on Earth is highly unlikely even in our wildest dreams now. We have literally no pathway for complete self sustainability on other planets in sight, and as long as this remains true space colonies will have no power to break out from whoever they depend on.

In fact, you don't even have to look beyond India to see a country which is doing pretty well for itself (all things considered) despite each state being a quasi nation with distinct cultural and language mores.

Seems like a naive assumption. We don't see Virgin Islands and other US territories trying to sever their ties to the mainland. In fact we see the opposite with Puerto Rico.

People don't tolerate differences well, even when they think they do. For instance how would you like a representative population of the US in your neighborhood and work? People tend to think about things like this in terms of colors instead of views and values. That'd mean, among other things, that of every person who voted in your work/neighbor, more than 46% would have voted for Trump.

Ultimately I think politicians are reflections of the people rather than their directors. Did Abraham Lincoln end slavery, or had the public mind changed in such a way that the election of a figurative Lincoln was inevitable, even if by a different name? So too in modern times. It's not like America was just cheery before 2016. Ever since the normalization of the internet we've been becoming extremely divided. And so it's only natural that our politicians would in turn end up being ever more divisive.

Think about the migration debate. It's not about things like trying to determine what a sustainable level of migration is, or its longterm economic and social impacts. Instead one side wants to build a wall and block migration as much as possible while the other side is dog whistling for open borders and literally suggesting free medical care and other benefits for people who enter illegally. Both sides are basically just trolling each other, and I think that's a reflection of what we the people are doing to one another. And of course this is not just intra-America. See, for instance, the huge rise of 白左 / baizuo. People view things through difference lenses, even when we do have nearly everything in common.

Maybe that is even actually the real point. The more you have in common, the less of a difference you need to create a meaningful divide. When you disagree on many things, one more disagreement isn't really changing your relationship much. When you agree on nearly everything, one irreconcilable disagreement is suddenly a big deal.

But I must note how none of the benefits came from any of the lofty predictions coming true: colonizing other worlds, etc.

If anything we found out that we cannot colonize anything, NASA research gave us cheap flying, globalization of commerce that we now use to negatively impact the Earth ... in the end, instead of giving us a new world, it is making us lose the one we have.

IIRC, at one time the early development of integrated circuits was boasted as a spinoff of space programs. However, it turned out to be a spinoff of classified missile programs by the Air Force and Navy.

Nothing more than distracting partisan virtue signaling.