Part of Wright brothers' first airplane on NASA's Mars chopper | Hacker News Reader

Part of Wright brothers' first airplane on NASA's Mars chopper

phys.org

102 pointspseudolus82 comments

It's crazy that only 120 years elapsed between these two events. It's a short time to go from flying on earth for the first time to flying on Mars for the first time.

But the progress of those 120 years completely pales in comparison to the progress during their first 70. Make it 75 and you go from rudimentary cars and the occasional glider experiments all the way to Apollo and the Concorde. After that... not much. We moved on to information I guess, far more scalable wrt natural resources.

I think Peter Thiel hit the nail on the head when he wrote that America went from being led by definite optimists ("I am going to invent the future and it's going to be great"), to being led by indefinite optimists ("the future's probably going to be great, but I'm going to focus on my investment portfolio"). The social capital shifted from inventors and innovators to bean counters at some point after the 60s.

FWIW I'm from the UK and we haven't been definite optimists since the 1800s.

Yeah, and there's a bit of a bucket crab effect where trying to be a definite optimist in a world of indefinite optimists is much harder.

Reminds of me of "The General" from Asimov's Foundation and Empire (spoiler alert for an amazing book from 1952). In a time where the galactic empire is collapsing/shrinking, General Bel Riose makes it his mission to restore the empire militarily and re-conquer the lost territory. He's actually a good commander, has overwhelming force, and looks to be in the process of achieving complete victory in the style of historical military commanders that made the empire great. In light of his achievements, the Emperor sees him as a potential rival, despite the fact that he never appears to have any ambitions to the throne (he's presented as an Imperial True Believer), recalls him right on the cusp of complete victory over the Foundation, and the Foundation survives being snuffed out in its infancy.

Even trying to emulate the old greats with the best of intentions will fail if you don't account for your environment. If everyone else is more concerned about their portfolio, to some degree you have to be as well, even if it distracts from the greater goals.

WWI, FDR, and then WW2 ushered in the age of big government, academic-government collaboration, and bureaucracy over all.

Everything gets done according to process. Elon Musk is a rare iconoclast.

Well, that process was an important innovation as a damage control tool for the cost plus thing. I never really understood the cost plus thing, at least not how it can survive the tiniest excursion out of wishful thinking. Not until the pandemic hit. Then it suddenly became clear to me that in exceptional situations the cost plus model, even with all its failing damage control band-aids, is far superior to waiting for The Market to reach an equilibrium. You wouldn't win a war by giving each soldier a budget and then unleashing them to outbid each other for ammunition and medical support, to put it bluntly. The failure of course is when you stick to that model for too long ("F35").

(sorry for bringing the pandemic into a discussion about Wright Flyer bits flying on Mars)

Bureaucracy stifles innovation as the cost of increased risk management. Being incredibly risk adverse can often be a very short sighted attitude because you surrender the opportunity cost of taking calculated risks like trying new approaches and tools.

Successful organisations are able to adapt over time, where bureaucracies only stagnate.

Markets are orthogonal to that trade off because both bureaucracies and adaptive organisations operate within the market. It's just a tool, you can use it well or poorly.

Markets are not orthogonal in so far as that certain forms of bureaucracy exist solely for dealing with non-market scenarios ("wartime cost plus"). You want either one or the other, never both at once (a market stifled by redundant bureaucracy) or none at all (decisionmakers just wiring the money to family members for vague promises of maybe trying to deliver, perhaps)

Unfortunately it gets a bit murky in that there is another form of bureaucracy to tame markets while they are not circumvented and there's a severe lack of separation between those two forms of bureaucracies. Usually neither critics nor advocates seem to care about the distinction (which plays out much better for critics I suppose).

Our biggest growth happened after those times. I believe the bend in the curve happened closer to the 70s in the US.

Barbara Tuckman is more famous for writing the Guns of August, but she also wrote the the Proud Tower[0] about the (European) world in the 25 years leading up to WWI, and in the concluding chapter she talks about how before the war the people thought they were good, they were proud of the society they had built, but that didn't survive the war, and it /never/ came back at least of Europe. And I mean the book was written in 1996, so any memories of the war are both eclipsed by WWII and burried with a few old people.

I don't think the social capital shifted so much in the US, certainly there are more people being administrators than there was before, but notice how much people like Elon Musk, or the flowers left outside Apple Stores when Steve Jobs died.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Proud-Tower-Portrait-Before-1890-1914...

Did it really? Or is this a bias in favor of private investment. There has been a lot of investments to government programs such as NASA and NOAA (as well as the military for better or worse). Also universities continue to innovate with plenty of new innovation to show for it.

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the American private sector has moved from being led by...

perhaps it is - but it's a cultural thing, and culture tends to affect both the private and public sectors.

DARPA is still doing impressive things though as far as I'm aware. NASA is once again doing cool things, but I can't help but suspect that interest in space was reignited by SpaceX, and Elon Musk is the archetypal definite optimist.

This is just recency bias. We remember those that did great things and we forget those that did not. In 100 years, folks will look back on our time and remember Elon Musk, Bezos, Jobs, Gates, etc... and will wonder why we were blessed with such great visionaries and will complain about how their generation is nothing but bean counters and bureaucrats.

Musk stands out in that crowd for being an actual old-school innovator. Bezos, Jobs and Gates have made huge impacts, but those impacts are evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

That's the difference; the rate of actual invention, or as Thiel puts it, going from 0 to 1, has dropped off a cliff.

lol, and just to nit pick. Musk is probably the least innovative on this list. He did not found Tesla, he took it over. And SpaceX is using designs that had existed for decades. His main "innovation" was betting large sums of money on existing technologies on the hopes that the market was finally ready for them. I will give him credit for starlink and autopilot, but it is too early to judge the impact of either of those yet.

Bezos on the other hand radically transformed the entire retail sector. The logistics required to operate at that scale required healthy amounts of innovation. And AWS is a relatively original and transformative product.

And whatever you think about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, they were both instrumental in defining the shift to personal computing, among many other impacts. Billions of people have been impacted by their work.

> Musk is probably the least innovative on this list.

> Bezos on the other hand radically transformed the entire retail sector

Who cares whether you're doing innovation if your goals are lame? I'd much rather we had more people trying to colonise the stars than people trying to make high availability shopping websites. That's exactly what I've been trying to say this whole time.

I suppose ambition is a better word for it than innovation.

Fair enough. I still think there are no shortage of folks with ambition in this generation compared to previous ones. But the one thing that I do think missing is a "new frontier". Previous generations had oceans to sail, mountains to climb, etc... If definitely feels like there are fewer frontiers to explore in this era. But that is largely due to how much ground was already covered by previous generations and not really the fault of the current one.

The stars are basically the last frontier, but unfortunately, exploring those requires budgets that only big governments can afford. Well out of the realm of your garage-scale inventor.

I think there are more frontiers than we are generally aware of but for sure the lowest hanging fruit are already picked.

Frontiers generally have to be invented by people willing to go out into the unknown, and I guess the willingness to try completely new things with no obvious benefit is what is missing. Startups are everywhere for those whose ambition is primarily "become wealthy", but most are funded and investors want a credible route to market.

The clearest image that portrays this for me is the 60s scifi images where people were imagining robot butlers, flying cars and cities on the moon and under the sea, all by the year 2000. It really captures what's missing nowadays, and what Elon represents to a lot of people.

No it hasn't. CRISPR was a very recent invention and has the potential to radically change biotech. mRNA was just used to roll out a novel vaccine in a record amount of time. Solid state batteries will be a game changer in the EV space.

You are just cherry-picking your facts to fit a narrative that you have built. It is easy to glorify the past when you did not live through it. For every Wright Brother, there were hundreds if not thousands of hucksters and shysters. If anything, a close reading of history will illuminate how little has changed regarding the human condition in the last 200 years.

> No it hasn't. CRISPR was a very recent invention and has the potential to radically change biotech.

> You are just cherry-picking your facts to fit a narrative that you have built.

lol

less innovation != no innovation.

the human condition may not change, but culture does. Just look to the economy and how many companies are primarily focused on rent extraction or incremental improvements to existing concepts as opposed to inventing new things. How many new inventions did we get in the 50s-60s alone?

lol, do you seriously think no one was focused on rent extraction in the 50 and 60s? As if that was a recent invention?

I agree, the culture has changed. Right now, I can now apply to 100's of startup incubators to get funding for my idea or invention. Back in the day, you needed to be either very well connected or from a wealthy family. Today, I have a 3d printer sitting on my desk, and I can hack together a little self driving robot in a weekend. Back then, making prototypes involved an entire machine shop and a ton of capital.

If anything there are too many people trying to innovate. I work in the energy sector, and literally every idea with a shred of plausibility has multiple startups working in the space.

> lol, do you seriously think no one was focused on rent extraction in the 50 and 60s? As if that was a recent invention?

No, obviously I don't believe that. You seem to keep going back to black and white arguments, which I didn't make.

> Right now, I can now apply to 100's of startup incubators to get funding for my idea or invention

The biggest, most successful startup examples are incremental. Uber, stripe, Airbnb. Google I would probably argue was a serious innovation over the status quo, but still on an incremental subject.

> Back then, making prototypes involved an entire machine shop and a ton of capital.

I do agree that consumer access to capital, both financial and manufacturing has improved.

But my point in general is that ambition has shrunk and there's less of what Thiel calls 0 to 1 innovation and more energy is going into incremental improvement and rent extraction.

You are wasting your time. It seems quite apparent the person you are arguing with has a rather poor grasp of the history of science and technology and has also bought in big-time to the 'great man' theory of history.

Reality is much messier. It is going 1000 different directions all at once, mostly composed of regular people each working on a small thing and most of those small things are useless, and no one knows 99.9999% of what happened or is actually happening now. In the same way that 5 years from now is going to mostly be like today and 25 years from now will be almost unrecognizable for most people, if people cherry pick bits of the past they can imagine almost no progress with current practices but they also imagine themselves to be in the 0.1% in the past who might have had access to this proto-technology but today it costs less than a days labour.

I don’t think that’s correct. PEW data shows that there is a huge increase in skepticism and pessimism characterized by contemporary America

The last 50 years went from the amount of computing power used to power Apollo to being available hundredfold in everyone's pocket, it's as impressive in its own way

A bit offtopic but I recently saw a surprisingly interesting talk about the Apollo board computer[0], and it's incredible how carefully they engineered the whole thing. Software hardcoded in the wiring, error correction for every memory access, ability to restart the whole system in any situation without losing state...this thing might have been rudimentary in today's standards, but the quality of the software was a different beast.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=B1J2RMorJXM

True, it's not all about computing cycles :)

Closer to a hundred million fold :)

Apollo went to the moon.

My pocket doesn't.

Spaceflight is not compute-bound.

It was just an example

The technology is impressive. How we're using it often is not.

Eh, it also often is. Better transportation, better medical devices, better energy grids. Aviation was and is used to drop bombs on other human beings! Nothing is black or white.

Aviation largely reached "good enough" for general use. With phones and now video conferencing, there's very little legitimate need outside of military purposes to get somewhere faster than the speed of sound.

I have a feeling that the success of the future ballistic passenger service on Starship is going to prove this statement incorrect.

That is, if they can get over the geopolitical hurdles of shooting ICBMs full of people between major world powers. There's no way for an early-warning detection system to know if there's 40 rich businesspeople on board or 40 MIRV warheads. I imagine this challenge will be about on par with the difficulty of building starship in the first place.

But is it limited by good enough, or is it actually limited by approaching the plateau of what is possible? (this is where a presentation would silently flash a picture of a B52) My bet is on the latter, because if you could build a decisively better aircraft you'd own a massive market and all the old stuff would lose any semblance of good enough in a blink.

Consider high bypass turbofans, the most important change of the last fifty years (change, not innovation, the turbofan principle had been studied since before the first turbojet took to the air). If we had airframe geometries supporting arbitrarily big fans, would we eventually see bypass ratios that could only be accurately described with the term ferris wheel? I highly doubt it. Diminishing returns, maybe even some identifiable theoretic optimum long before (just guessing, I might be wrong).

Thought experiment: imagine Star Trek engineering (recent-ish stuff, not Kirk), if they had a competition in building the best airplane without star trek energy sources and all that force field stuff. I'm not sure that the winner would look much different from what we have, if the goals are consistent with those of our designers. Some things are just mostly find. There'll still be development because in a market of a plateauing technology even the tiniest refinement can separate winners from losers, but there wouldn't be a meaningful increase in innovation of you funneled half of the world's economy into r&d. (until some day, maybe there is a sudden major jump, think of foiling in sports sailing)

The single most amazing aviation innovation by the way is the bug wiper. Amazing stuff. Unfortunately no English language Wikipedia, Google it if you never heard of it.

Improving on speed stopped making sense for civil aviation. Concorde was technologically cool, but didn't solve a major problem.

Apollo was a political endeavor. It was rivalry with the Soviet Union. The spending on it in modern dollars is as a percentage of GDP or the Federal budget just wouldn’t happen now. Science obviously has value but this was a huge price to pay.

What changed since was a poor successor (the Space Shuttle) followed by the shift from political to economic motivations in space.

As for Concorde, that was a product of the belief in supersonic transport bring the future that was just plain wrong. Where you can use it is too limited and subsonic jets became way more efficient and reliable than anyone predicted.

You may say that not much has changed but air travel 50 years ago was massively expensive. Now air travel is ridiculously cheap. That might not be as flashy but it has massively changed how people live.

A helicopter... on Mars. That is not much? Also, over one hundred space shuttle flights, a space station, a space telescope, GPS, and public satellite photos.

Fully agree on the ISS, it was high on my list of "not much, except" that I sacrificed for brevity. And GPS has more impact on my daily life than the entirety of aviation from Wright Brothers to Ryanair. But I'd tend to bin GPS under information, the field of innovation that displaced aerospace (and it's also surprisingly old, project start is approaching its 50th and apparently prototype satellites in space when the Concorde was still manufactured. But impact on daily lives is certainly much more recent, it was hardly more than an oddity before smartphones).

Watching 2001 again pains me endlessly for what could have been. What was just background technology in that movie (Skype and iPads) is the best we’ve managed from it.

All comes down to economics. I grew up with the sunny optimistic notion of the human drive for exploration, projected onto everything from Paleolithic Tribes populating the world to Christopher Columbus to Oregon Trail Pioneers to Star Trek. The older I get and the more history I read, well the paleolithic tribes were probably chasing prey or trying to get away from other hostile tribes, no one was interested in Columbus's findings until he told them there was gold/other valuables in the new world. The western pioneers largely had so little economic opportunity on the east coast that going thousands of miles over hostile terrain just to perhaps start a successful farm/mine gold seemed like a good idea. Star Trek is predicated on a post-scarcity, participation-based society (where "doing your best" is tracked and rewarded) which is basically enlightened communism but with open-source algorithms replacing the corrupt humans for pricing/resource allocation. So sure, once we figure that little thing out maybe we can move up Maslow's hierarchy to the "human spirit of exploration". Until then most people are just trying to not go bankrupt, minimize their own misery and perhaps have something left for their kids.

Well, there's an energy wall we still haven't figured out how to work around.

And have no real desire to figure out, if you look at the relatively paltry funding given to energy research compared to other endeavors.

Dark forest. Technological explosion.

(All kidding aside, I don’t believe in the dark forest theory one bit)

Dark Forest theory: https://thoughtcatalog.com/christine-stockton/2021/02/heres-...

Imagine you are alone walking through a dark forest. You hear a noise. Is it your inclination to be friendly to anyone or anything you happen to stumble across while exploring the unknown?

I bet many of us sometimes think that, some advanced civilization is playing SIMs iRL :)

For the Trekkies (such as myself), we may be part of a bet of four Qs, each one started a 'SIM' game in each quadrant of our galaxy. The first one to find someone else, wins! Plot twist, one of the Qs made the Borgs.

I wonder if a piece will end up in another solar system one day.

I say this half-jokingly... are any parts of these missions insignificant? I feel like every component and mechanism has some sort of Easter egg or hidden meaning.

If someone is like "hey I need screw" do I first have to start with melted down metal from the door frame of the first space mission ever or can I just go down to parts and grab a screw?

Why would they wait till now to reveal this?

To keep the rover in the news during a fairly boring period of checking everything out post-landing.

NASA's press strategy has gotten dramatically more competent in the last 20 years or so.

They're also working on deploying Ingenuity right now but yeah they're also probably using it to not fall completely off the radar during the relatively slow initial checkout period.

Overall public option of these programs have a huge effect on funding. So I'm glad their press strategy has gotten so much better.

Also, if Perseverance had slammed into Mars at 200 mph, they wouldn't have "Part of Wright Brothers' plane now in toxic radioactive junk heap on Mars; Thanks NASA!" plastered over the daily headlines.

human narratives matter :)

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