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Comment by hnedeotes | Hacker News Reader

"One day the magic was finally gone. There was no more wonder. What before would make you question what sit beyond the veil, and its impossibility in a linear universe, no longer did. Everything was catalogued, every inch of soil, wrinkles around the corners of your mouth, the reflection on your iris when you were happy, or sad, circumstances you found yourself in. All of that had a rational thread that could be followed back to the big silent eye, data point by data point. There was nothing else to question, no possibility of impossibles, of something unseen. Just this never ending stream of letters that told you that's all there is, all that you are"

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This is poetic, but I don't think it's true. The world is too complex to model perfectly. It's easy to feel like a digital lens is the whole world, but it really, really isn't. Twitter != Voters

The small sat revolution is a big deal, but much mystery & magic remains.

Consider the impact that simply believing the relevant portions of the world has been modeled "well enough".

If magic and mystery is the good thing, then simply feeling like there's no place you can get to which hasn't been mapped might be enough to choke off that feeling, regardless of the resolution of the map.

Absolutely. It's self-fulfilling belief. If you believe yourself to be trapped in an exhausted world, then you are. It's usually better to choose an abundance mentality.

The idea that the world has been mapped to the point of killing all mystery is ludicrous. The Map Is Not The Territory[1].

There are mysteries lurking in your own neighborhood that you won't notice until you traverse it in a new way. Go for a walk with a child or dog. Take a bike instead of a car. Use a wheelchair. Volunteer with local advocacy groups.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

― Albert Einstein

With a little creativity we should never get bored.

Imagine a world with so much mapped data that it too needs explorers. Data recorded generations ago that has never been observed by anyone to study it.

We live in such a world. It wouldn't surprise me if most security camera footage is never seen by a human.

Additionally, the increase in space access is increasing the scope of humanity to well beyond the Earth. It may seem ludicrous now, but the same tech that makes cheap satellites possible will open up other worlds, in particular the Moon and Mars.

> There are mysteries lurking in your own neighborhood

> Take a bike

I do this... and then I map my discoveries in OpenStreetMap. I recently discovered OpenInfraMap [0] and that inspired me to go find infrastructure that wasn't mapped and add it too.

It works a little in reverse for me; I find a random thing that isn't mapped well and use it as a motivator to go explore it on bike or foot and then map it. I did this for a bunch of local creeks... ran along it, fixed up the errors, and then added all the individual ways to a relation. A lot of places that are accessible by foot only often aren't mapped, so I'll go explore a suburb and find the unmapped paths that shorten foot routes. Making the map better match the territory.

[0] https://openinframap.org/

There are also mysteries that we can map, but still can't figure out. The weather is one of those - we can map the entire world, but we've yet to be able to create a model at a scale that allows us to make accurate predictions of more than a few weeks.

It’s not black or white. OP’s point is still true regardless - as time progresses, things do become more and more mapped. Be it a scientific field, a territory, etc.

> Consider the impact that simply believing the relevant portions of the world has been modeled "well enough".

That is dangerous belief to those caught-out by the edge-cases, especially seeing how actual humans lazily defer to, and others defend "the (application) system": see any HN thread on AI bias and/or Tesla Autopilots deficiencies.

I was just reading about the future space missions [0] to the outer solar system already planned within the next couple of decades.

"Whether it’s Dragonfly going to Titan, Clipper going to Europa, hopefully a lander going to Europa, hopefully a mission that’ll fly through the plumes of Enceladus, exo-planets going gangbusters, SETI hopefully taking on a broader and broader search and surveying those exo-planets. Within the next few decades we could potentially answer this primordial, age old question of, “Are we alone?” And that’s gonna revolutionize biology. It’s gonna revolutionize how we think about our place in the universe. And so for all of the pains and agony of trying to operate on these time scales, we do live in a beautiful time where we might transform the universe in which we live into a biological universe."

Along with the commercialization of space travel, I'd say there is a sufficiently large part of this universe we are yet to "touch" but soon will be able to.

I for one am tremendously excited about the future.

[0] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/04/13/92-k...

More than 90 percent of all galactic systems are moving away from us faster than speed of light. There is no way we can ever reach them. The unreachable horizon is capturing more and more of what we currently observe. https://youtu.be/4iC9Qi3y9q8

Right. To be specific, the whole of the Local Group is available to humanity for exploration. That still has a trillion stars, with at least as many planets.

That's a lot of real estate!

Consider the things beyond this one planet. Surely we're simply at an interregnum between two great ages of exploration.

With respect. The small sat revolution is a load boll@cks.

Forgive me.

Care to bring up any reasons why you believe the small sat revolution is a load of bollocks? I work in this industry, and can address questions or concerns that you may have.

I'll bite. Assume every person put a small satellite into orbit, just once. What problems do we have to overcome for what payoff? What revolutionary change do we open the door to?

Sat launch is at best an Engineering issue at this point. More satellites open up avenues for more data collection by well heeled interests, additional burdens on municipalities when the bloody things deorbit, or worse, if they don't. It already obstructs or complicates ground based observation and launch/mission planning/tracking, and adds excessive risk from debris based on current propulsion methods.

It does nothing to advance the State of the Art in manned spaceflight (one of the species more pressing challenges), and it'll become costlier and costlier to get common fuels for rocketry as demand spins down for fossil fuels elsewhere.

I just guess I don't see the point in throwing more autonomous junk into space beyond the minimum necessary to get the job done, or to hyperfocus on any endeavor that doesn't eventually culminate in people in space self-sustainably.

Maybe I've spent too much time mired in Cost-Benefit Analyses recently and it's killed my ability to dream and imagine, but I just don't sea more passive satellites doing what everything else up there already does, but better and with a queue fixing anything; it'd be a boon for launch companies I guess, but do you really need to be in orbitt to solve half the problems people generally throw mini-sats at? I'm not sure the answer is yes.

Love to hear your viewpoint though.

I think you're downplaying the benefits of more small-sats bring to multiple industries and giving too much weight to certain negative side-effects.

For starters, let's address some of small-sat applications. In you comment you said "I don't see the point... beyond the minimum necessary to get the job done". What job specifically are you referring to? Navigation aids? Communications? Because "the job" that can be handled by small-sats has near unlimited scope. I'm sure you've already heard about LEO communication constellations (such as Starlink) that are bringing world-wide communication infrastructure. Communications infrastructure is a pre-requisite for industrialization, and can greatly assist with providing education to remote areas. Both of these have the potential to lift many of the global poor out of extreme poverty. Communications infrastructure is something that is very easy to take for granted living in a developed first world nation, but the net benefit it provides to society cannot be understated.

People like to focus on the big extravagant projects popularized by eccentric billionaires, but the CubeSat space is filled with other valuable applications as well. Here are some other industry applications that don’t get as much time in the spotlight:

- Resource management / surveying (logging, fishing, mining etc)

- Poaching / illegal fishing detection and monitoring

- Data collection for weather / climate models

- Extreme weather forecasting / detection

- Forest fire monitoring / detection

- Space-based astronomy

- Agriculture monitoring

The above list won't directly impact your day-to-day like the smart-phone revolution did, but that list indirectly touches many aspects of our lives. So again, which “job” are you referring to “getting the job done”? The list above alone (even excluding the comms constellations) could easily require 1000s of CubeSats. The interesting thing about the CubeSat revolution is that because it’s so cheap to send something into space, every possible niche is being explored as industry scrambles to carve out their slice. This comment “but I just don't see more passive satellites doing what everything else up there already does” is not one at all shared within the industry. The CubeSat revolution is doing things that have never been done before. And is doing the things that had been done previously cheaper, faster, and better.

Now let’s talk about the downsides. The space junk and Kessler Syndrome problem is typically brought up in the context of the CubeSat revolution, but it is largely misplaced. CubeSat applications typically require low-earth orbit. In low-earth orbit, atmospheric drag is sufficiently high that junked satellites de-orbit naturally in reasonable time-frames. In addition, placing these satellites into such a low orbit does not create large amounts of junk during launch/insertion. In addition, with space now accessible to more than just government agencies, the appropriate regulatory frameworks for managing space traffic / space junk are being drawn up. The commercial benefits of open, accessible space create huge incentives for governments to manage these issues.

I also see you are disappointed that the CubeSat revolution does nothing to advance manned space-flight. I assure you; this is far from true. In the early days of space exploration, space was very expensive. People focus on launch costs, but it’s much more than that. Supply chains didn’t exist. Nothing was mass manufactured. Everything was custom made. This is changing. The space economy of scale is ramping up, and government-led “for the good of mankind” projects are directly benefiting.

I swear people watch one highly dramatized movie and think we're something in imminent danger of running out of space up there. We certainly ain't, and it's not like companies don't consider these issues.

I’m all for learning how to do space flight better and getting all the regulations in place and getting experience with space launches. The only thing that worries me is whether we will end up in some situation like we are now with plastics that appear everywhere in our food supply chain and are a problem also because the unknown unknowns.

Will we still be able to operate society when we rely so much on all the services provided by These smaller satellites and there is a solar flare. Indeed, what if some event does trigger the Kessler Syndrome. Just like see radiation from Fukushima show at the us west coast in fish.

Will it be too late to do something with all the knowledge we have gained?

With the CubeSats revolution there aren't a lot of unknown unknowns. The risks are clear, and the benefits far outstrip them. Again, as mentioned above, Kessler Syndrome is of little threat in the low earth orbit which CubeSats operate in.

I don't really understand the argument that coming to rely on CubeSats puts us at risk because they could be damaged by a solar flare. And therefore we shouldn't reap the benefits of this new technology? That line of thinking is like rejecting the advancement of electricity because we will be worse-off in the event of a power outage. Sure, black-out incidents occur, and sometimes (like the recent Texas outage) people are ill-prepared. But how is choosing not to pursue electricity because of black-out risk the better alternative? Surely benefiting from the technology in the far more common scenario of normal operation is better than not having it at all.

Do you mind elaborating?

Like how do you make friends who can pay to put one into orbit? Last I checked it was 100K.

Indeed. I suspect it's generally true that the more you know, the more questions you have.

My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. -J.B.S. Haldane

So, why do I like reading a story? It's already written. Yet that fact doesn't suck out the joy.

Unless someone spoils it out before you read it right?

I don't think so. Reading a book or watching a show isn't about the fastest route to a conclusion. To borrow a phrase: it's the journey, not the destination.

IE: I'm watching The Crown right now. I've been "spoiled" on the outcome of the show through simple history and cultural knowledge (I'm Canadian). It doesn't make the show any less enjoyable when I know that Diana is going to die, or that Mountbatten was killed by the IRA.

There’s a different, maybe even better kind of enjoyment from surprises (or non spoiled events) in my experience. I won’t watch any movie trailer or read a review so that I go in as uninformed as possible.

That's fair. There's also some stories/movies that are absolutely critical to come into fresh. Shutter Island is the first one that comes to mind.

Even if I know the destination well, I often still enjoy the trip there.

That kills a kind of a fun, but there are still others. Re-reading an old favorite for example.

Most things worth reading aren't so plot focused that merely knowing a bit of information about it destroys the value.

There is a style of spoiler on the first page, for example see Pharaoh by Bolesław Prus where spoiler is literally the first sentence.

Only if the events of the plot, or unrevealed information are critical to the story. Some stories tell you what's going to happen early on. You know Oedipus is going to kill his father and marry his mother, the story is about how events conspire to fulfill the prophecy despite him trying avoid it.

J. Michael Straczinski (Babylon 5) said he likes to tell people what's going to happen, but he doesn't tell you the context. This lets him put in prophecy as a story element.

Other times the story is really about discovery. You can guess that Harry Potter will bring about Voldemort's demise in book one, but the series is about the process of Harry becoming Harry, so it's not really possible to give away any spoilers because you have to explain too much.

Well, thank you for spoiling it, now I'll need to read Electra's instead.

I always wanted to write a story about a bunch of people in a lab, playing god. In this universe there would be no rings of hell, the reader would also know there wasn't, but I think it would still grip the reader. Like an inverse hero's journey.

Sadly, I've felt this many times while traveling the world.

There's no place to "discover". Anywhere you go, tons of others have been there before you. You can easily look up pictures on Instagram or wherever.

Experiencing a place is by far not comparable then just looking at a picture. A picture teaches you one thing, an experience 1000.

the 4/5ths is calling... https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53119686

You have visited the wrong places, then.

Plenty of truly "unexplored" territory in e.g. the Amazon. You can go off the beaten path if you choose.

But the others were not there when you're there and certainly not with your state of mind. The world is not static and neither are you, which presents infinite possibilities for unique experiences and perceptions.

You might find this reading interesting: https://rolfpotts.com/walker-percys-loss-creature/

In a nutshell, you can intentionally choose to prevent others’ perception of a place from spoiling your own. One step further, you can even use their perception to enhance your own experience.

You’re standing in a place that your extremely distant ancestors and cousins once stood, in a place where your nieces and nephews and children might one day stand. You’re connected to the narrative of humanity.

The concept of “first” is a red herring in the narrative of humanity. It carries a lot less meaning than our current culture leads us to believe.

"Wherever you go, there you are" - Dude

- Buckaroo Banzai, 1984

- Hazelton Collegian, 1955

- Thomas a Kempis, 1400 AD

https://panewsarchive.psu.edu/lccn/2018264052/1955-03-04/ed-...

https://www.figmentfly.com/bb/popculture4.html

There are a lot of places in Siberia or Antarctica where no man has ever been closer than 10km. You are welcome to visit. But the trick is, there is nothing of real interest there. No old temples (if there is a temple, you are certainly not first there), no sculptures, no food or lodging. Being first to discover some exotic island in the Pacific sounds romantic, but in the reality it is far less glamorous. Just rocks, trees, maybe some sand. The main object of travel are people and other cultures, and this is the only meaningful discovery one can make.

Except for discovery of self. If you are fortunate to get to a spot where no "man" has trod, you can feel it. A feeling of amazement, a surreal loneliness. It is awesome. Are you afraid? Alone? Teeming world is just, over there. Yet here are no ghosts. Empty of human soul. But, rich in nature's soul. Wonderful, contemplative experience.

Sounds like the trees have discovered it.

That’s just so not true.

Few people are capable of *real* exploring anyway. Going where no human has been before. Shackleton, Amundsen, Mallory, Harrer, Bonatti, to name a few Euro-centric ones, did so. To do what they did at that time was extraordinary and way beyond any if our capabilities.

And what Insta calls an “Adventure” is merely a tightly controlled and carefully crafted theme park visit. It’s a joke.

That said, any place is there for you to discover. Nobody fucking cares if you visited the Grand Canyon or some fiery hole in Iceland. And even less so if it has been trodden on by humans yet.

All that matters is having a jolly time in an alien place, detached from anybody’s expectations. Don’t chase the next Insta spot.

Go early in the morning. Go in bad weather. Go off-season. Take your time and the rest will reveal itself.

It’s not that hard.

New Zealand and Hawaii are the most recent human settlements, and those were more than 500 years ago. Anywhere else has been home for somebody for millennia. You can't "discover" somebody's home, but you can discover the creek around the corner.

You could choose to visit a "place" that has a different reason for being significant [1].

[1] http://confluence.org/

> There's no place to "discover".

hm. Here's a story: on our second visit to China, one of the main targets was Mount Emei, which is a well-known tourist hotspot. On the top, because of the buses and cable cars, there were probably thousands of people - we couldn't see due to the ridiculously thick fog.

And then we started to walk down. The shortest path down on foot is ~50km stairs. We met roughly 10 people, including the monks in the monastery we had to sleep midway.

Had there been people there before? Yes. Is it secluded? Yes. Did it feel like a discovery? Yes. And I'd even count it as a spiritual experience, despite the fact that we never really left the civilization.

Another story: when we were in Uppsala, Sweden, we visited a place called Norra Lunsen. The young lady in the ticket office literally asked as why do we want to go to the middle of nowhere - and indeed, we met a single person there.

The point to "discover" at our current stage of evolution - in the sense of we can't yet travel across star systems or galaxies - is not to go to places where no human has been before, but to find places that give YOU a new experience.

I lived in Uppsala for 10 years. Never heard of Norra Lunsen.

https://www.uppsala.se/kultur-och-fritid/natur-parker-och-fr...

I visited Uppsala briefly over only a few days.

As I explored this incredible University town I discovered the most special treasure..

The “Silver Bible”, not a Christian bible but a collection of “all the knowledge of the day” encased in a silver cover. It had been lost for 500 years and discovered again under some floorboards. To this day one of the most amazing world treasures I’ve seen with my own eyes.

There’s much to discover in this world.

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/f...

This is just tourism. It's cool but not the same thing as exploration/discovery.

there's a highway interchange near my house with wooded area between the entrance ramp and the highway about a half mile long until they converge. every time I drive that stretch I wonder to myself when was the last time a person spent any significant time getting to know that plot of Earth.

https://www.google.com/maps/@35.8139424,-78.7400188,3a,75y,1...

Probably there were a bunch of construction workers there the last time that Ramo was resurfaced. Also the periphery is probably regularly mowed by the state DOT.

Not sure I agree at all.

I like to go to places and rent an apartment for a few weeks. Then discover your neighborhood. It's fun when you move, and it's also fun when you vacation this way.

That said, I'm not out trying to discover a previously undiscovered waterfall.

Some of my friends explore underwater caves. This is one of the only remaining ways that an ordinary middle class person can discover places that literally no one else has ever been.

I absolutely agree that cave diving is a way to get where people have never been before, and to explore the extraordinary.

But to remark on those people as "ordinary middle class" is a bit misleading. I'd probably lean more towards "extraordinary, and possibly middle class." Otherwise, I think the appropriate label for any normal person doing cave diving explorations is "dead."

(Not serious criticism, hopefully you read in a playful tone)

I'm actually quite the opposite.

With every day bringing more and more construction. Tearing down of historically important buildings for new contemporary condos and gentrification - cities have lost their soul to me. Its not there's nothing new to discover, for me, its the replacement of places people once wanted to go to.

I actively seek out abandoned places now. I try and think about what it was like when it was new, people bustling about. Or that abandoned mansion. How did those people live? Can I imagine what it was like to live in a huge house like that?

We have such a disposable culture now - architecture included, it has prompted me with a sense of nostalgia to seek out what has been left behind and why.

Vice did an incredible job in their series "Abandoned": https://vimeo.com/182703618

I'm mixed on that. I love neighborhoods with lots of tiny mom & pop stops and am sad when they get torn down and replaced with a modern building that usually gets filled with chain stores. This is common in Tokyo.

On the other hand I mostly dislike SF's old houses that have 1 bathroom for 4 bedrooms, creaky warped floors, paper tin walls, single pane glass, bad insulation, and are missing many modern conveniences. And I hate that the city doesn't build up ⬆

Gentrification is what happens when you don't tear down old buildings for condos. The old buildings let fewer people live there, and therefore only the rich lived in them.

Tokyo is cheap because Japan treats houses like used cars - it's actually cheaper to sell the house if you tear it all down first.

I often travel without a guidebook. To discover a temple without a guidebook, and without having seen single source of information on the location around it, that is real discovery. Everything is unexpected, including finding that temple. If you take this approach, you will inevitably depart having missed many of the places listed in guidebooks. But so too did the discoverers of the past who had no guidebooks. You can't have it both ways. My advice is to forget the buck lists. Just go experience a place. Stay awhile. Discover it for yourself. And if you do have guidebook, travel to places not mentioned. Far from having "no place to discover", the world still has every place to discover.

Meet people then. Experience them.

To hell with The Golden Temple. ;-)

What is the source of that quote?

I don't know the source, but it made me think of Gattaca. I should probably re-watch it.

Do you often recite paragraph length quotes without knowing the source? Am I being gullible?

What a fascinating reply.

Check the username...

What's ironic is that the person who posted the quote actually can't remember where it's from, their comment saying so is, at this writing, one comment down.

Well it might even have been in another language, or with totally different words... It's just an envelope, as the saying goes, it takes one to recognise one. The envelopes for the messages that is.

I'm not the one who posted the paragraph, I don't know if it's a quote from somewhere or something the grandparent came up with, sorry.

Can't remember where I read it.

Google turns up nothing on anything from that quote.

This is a very interesting quote, thanks. If I understand correctly, Even if a lot more data is available, because of chaotic systems this causality of events cannot become totally deterministic. Otherwise we could predict the weather perfectly. I find it comforting, somebody else might too :)

I hope this isn't a rehash of other replies, but this is a classic chauvinism, of the sort that humans have been subscribing to throughout recorded history. It's easy to feel confident when you don't know what you don't know!

Yes, it's like that story about a pigeon in a test box that whenever he flapped its wings food would come. I would like to learn pidgeonian just to tell him that not everything is what it looks but to not feel bad, because when everything can look like something and be explained easier through that, everything else falls by the side.

Quoted from you, just now?

I just pasted it into my futureculture novel I'm going to not finish in a decade or so.

It could even be one of those gpt3-generated replies. It's getting hard to tell these days...

It would be extremely expensive for storing such huge number of data. Is this really doable? I think there must be some physical limitation.

pbronez had some great replies below. I wanted to add that more data = more questions. The more we understand, the more we'll have to find out and contextualize. There's more to exploration than mapping

The more you understand the world as it is, the easier it is to change what it is. Take joy in creating something new, not stumbling upon what has already been made.

in other words no space for mysteries here.

Nah.

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