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Comment by vegetablepotpie | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to believe that it's been over 50 years since humans have been outside of low earth orbit. It's like we sprinted forward so fast, going from horse drawn carriage to space flight in a generation, only to get frightened and recede back from the highest point, never to go back.

Granted there has been an enormous amount of innovation in the last 50 years, but by some accounts we've been going backwards. Humans are no longer capable of mach 3 flight, or making Roman concrete.

I think we assume that technology will keep progressing. We assume Moore's law will continue into the future and we forget that there are people behind the progress. The technology that produced those pictures are gone, we might be able to take ones like them again, but never with the same rockets and never with the same photo-chemical processes. Progress is fragile, not inevitable and everything we have can be lost in a generation just as easily as it was made.

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You really need to take the power and "reality distortion effect" of propaganda during the Cold War into account.

Massive projects were started without much rational sense just to beat the other side in an imaginary race (and a very concrete military race). What's the point of landing a man on the moon, if the technology to do so was so rushed and held together by duct tape that it wasn't useful for anything else? What's the point of the Space Shuttle if launches were more expensive than disposable rockets? What's the point of the Buran, if the Soviets didn't feel like they need an answer to the space shuttle "just in case", even though they couldn't see any point in the shuttle design (except as a nuke carrier)?

Etc... etc... the list goes on for both sides. I rather have slow and steady progress that actually makes economical and scientific sense in the long run.

PS: I thought the secret of Roman concrete had been cracked long ago (a certain type of volcanic ash)? But it's just not economical to produce large quantities since modern sky scrapers are not expected to "survive" for thousands of years anyway (and AFAIK the Romans didn't know much about the special properties of their concrete either, it more or less was a "happy little accident").

> since modern sky scrapers are not expected to "survive" for thousands of years anyway

And maybe that’s a problem! Why exactly are we not building beautiful landmarks that will survive eons like the Romans did?

We have a throwaway culture, and nobody ever dares question it.

I think you are suffering a bit from survivorship bias here. Way less than 0.001% of Roman buildings are still standing and the ones that remain have been continuously maintained over the centuries. If humanity will keep maintaining the White House for centuries it will look just as good in 4021 as it does today.

The White House is not a modernist / postmodernist building that was designed with planned obsolescence in mind, so I'm not entirely sure why you've used it as an example. In fact, it's a perfect example of a beautiful neoclassical landmark that was intended to inspire and last through the ages.

Survivorship bias is always brought up in these discussions, but I believe it to just be a cop-out. Take a look at any well-preserved medieval / renaissance / early industrial era city in Europe (Bruges, Edinburgh, Venice). They are all absolutely gorgeous, even the buildings used historically by the lower classes (ones that were not even built with longevity in mind).

No, something flipped around the 1920s, and architecture, along with our whole societal philosophy around it, has clearly changed. I'd argue that it's for the worse.

Needs changeover time. Thick stone walls can provide insulation, but their hell on WiFi etc.

Growing up in a 200+ year old building you find a lot of architectural designs and modifications that don’t fit with modern usage. Pre AC maximizing summer cooling involved maximizing airflow where now we want maximum insulation. Before central heating we wanted chimney’s everywhere. And before wood stoves we wanted giant fireplaces everywhere. Even central heating has gone through several iterations, many different radiator designs for steam/water, central air, and now a zigzag of pipes underfloor.

Very old buildings may look nice, but they aren’t inherently better.

> Very old buildings may look nice, but they aren’t inherently better

I never said they were. I only said that they were built to last and that they were infinitely more aesthetically pleasing because we actually gave a damn about these things as a society. Now we don't.

Old buildings can be upgraded (I should know, I live in one, and have both functional pipes, insulation, heating, and Wi-Fi). So let's upgrade them, and let's ALSO ensure that whatever we build today includes not only modern amenities, but are also objects we can be proud of leaving as a legacy to future generations. Just like our ancestors did for literally millennia.

> we actually cared about this things as a society

No, the buildings that survived are generally more aesthetically pleasing, most old buildings where shacks. Walk around an old plantation for example and the slaves quarters didn’t survive. Search around for some original outhouses and you realize what survived isn’t simply representative of what was built.

> In fact, it's a perfect example of a beautiful neoclassical landmark that was intended to inspire and last through the ages.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess that you've never been to the White House: it's a mildewed, creaky mess that was gutted twice (once by war[1], again to prevent it from collapsing under its own misdesign[2]). It undergoes constant, active maintenance, and is not intended by any means to "last through the ages."

But to get to the actual point: the neoclassical style is built on a historical lens. It takes classical architecture on face value, as it was in the 18th century (i.e., weather-washed and in ruins). Its appliers wanted to promote their interpretation of classical greatness, which corresponds in no particular way to the actual greatness of cultures in the classical period. The Romans would have laughed at our neoclassical use of blindingly white marble[3].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Reconstruction

[3]: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/prms/hd_prms.htm

It's mostly not survivorship bias, actually, and the ones that remain haven't been continuously maintained over the centuries. Many of the ones still standing today suffered from centuries of neglect, damage in war and rebellion, and even were actively looted for materials to build other buildings from. Others just got gradually buried by floods (or volcanos, etc) and are intact underground.

That way lies a slippery slope ;) It's pretty close to the "Ruinenwerttheorie" of the German Nazis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruin_value

From the first wikipedia paragraph, I don't see anything wrong with building things so they'll look cool a) when they're maintained and in use and b) when they're badly maintained and crumbling. I'll take 'Ruinenwerttheorie' buildings over brutalist concrete piles that look disgusting the day they're built and worse as they age.

The 3rd Reich had a lot of problems, but they had some good aesthetics (Huge Boss, etc). To ignore that, and shun a whole realm of aesthetics because it was appreciated by The Devil, is a waste and a poor strategic move; you're abandoning the beautiful elements because they had the misfortune to be mixed into a dark brew. It's an artistic tragedy, and a poor political move, putting you in a similar spot to the 3rd Reich themselves with regards to their ideas about 'degenerate art'.

The height of technology, and we cloak ourselves in ugliness and mediocrity, not daring to build anything beautiful. What a fucking waste. The sorts of small-souled people who build modern western identikit cities don't deserve to go to the moon.

I think the point is that it takes a sort of hubris that's quite typical for autocratic regimes to show off to the rest of the world - and future generations - with gigantomanic architecture.

IMHO a healthy society should be "above" this sort of stuff.

Instead of showing off to the rest of the world, we should ensure that people feel oppressed and demoralized by their every day surroundings. That'll show those autocrats!

Brutalism was adopted by the Soviets, who were also pretty oppressive.

I'd rather live in a beautiful building than a concrete square. The idea that people should live in purely functional environments with no room for beauty or art is a purely modernist idea.

I might be a minority opinion but I think brutalist architecture can be beautiful. My local library (https://www.yelp.com/biz/port-washington-public-library-port...) is quite brutalist but is also one of my favorite libraries. Its reading room alone (the library sits up on a hill and the reading room has one wall of all-glass-and-concrete which looks out onto Manhasset Bay) is amazing.

Actually, it seems that it crept back into vogue while I wasn't paying attention!: https://www.gq.com/story/9-brutalist-wonders-of-the-architec...

Taste is individual, but I just don't understand how you could find a heap of concrete slabs to be beautiful. To me, beauty is life-affirming, and brutalism is the physical embodiment of a philosophy that denies life in favour of rigid functional structure. It's the physical representation of kafkaesque bureaucracy.

I’m glad you’re respecting taste, especially when you’re throwing such anthropomorphological argument against it ;)

I’m not sure why there is such a significant aesthetic difference between cutting stones and stacking them (masonry architecture) and filling the exact same form with concrete, especially when the latter is usually far more robust and thus, safer (read: actually life-affirming, by being neither flammable nor easily collapsible, if designed right) and also permitting structural forms that are simply not possible using any other medium

Architecture follows philosophy. Skyscrapers (internationalist style) and large curved glass buildings (modernist style) have the same core philosophy as neoliberalism, for instance. Brutalism came about as an explicit rejection of aesthetics and "higher purpose" to building facades - an idea deeply rooted in materialist philosophy, hence its adaptation by the Soviets. The grandparent comment demonstrates this perfectly: "IMHO a healthy society should be "above" this sort of stuff". Your argument to building materials is also an example of this - while it's true, it is reductionist; living in a concrete jungle is not better than living in a wooden fishing village just because the materials are less flammable.

The philosophy of architecture isn't really a "anthropomorphological argument" when architecture exists for humans, at the behest of humans, and represents human values. The idea that a building is just a box that people exist in is itself a philosophical position, one that is exemplified by brutalism, and one that I and many other people are opposed to.

Interesting. Very holistic. Which is to say, not very concrete. Wink.

Did you follow the link I posted a few comments up, the "nine brutalist wonders of the architectural world"? Explain how those exemplify "just a box that people exist in"

> Interesting. Very holistic. Which is to say, not very concrete. Wink.

Very modernist thing to say. I suspect we have very different philosophies, and I have a strong distaste for modernism, materialism and reductionism in general. You can't quantify the things that actually matter in your living environment beyond the bare essentials of survival, so of course the concept is not concrete to you if the only things you value are the things you can measure.

> Explain how those exemplify "just a box that people exist in"

Yes I saw the article. The few that actually were buildings instead of sculptures (barbican, bank of London and South America, geisei library and the cathedral) are hideous. The cathedral is the least ugly because its at least not a raw concrete facade, but as far as cathedrals go it has to be the first I've seen that left me with no sense of awe whatsoever.

What we have in our oh-so-humble and "advanced" society is the children of corbusier making horrendous buildings that make the people with no choice but to live in them miserable.

Is the parthenon gigantomanic? Is this? https://cdn.lifedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/22-most...

Is this? https://preview.redd.it/hkwpt88wasv41.jpg?width=1024&auto=we...

Or this? https://blog.eurail.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Florence-...

Because I know a city made of buildings like the above is far more conducive to human dignity than a grid of "humble" glass boxes.

Should we all be living in and surrounded by identikit, homogenous apartments? Except for the architects and the rich, of course; they get to have centuries-old country mansions to flee to.

It isn't humble to humiliate people by making them to live in concrete and glass cages.

I don't quite understand how y'all came to the conclusion that I want people to live in ugly glass and concrete blocks :)

I do doubt however that many people today would want to live in genuine old buildings with the outhouse toilet across the yard. It's more likely that they want to live in a modern flat built into the hull of an old building.

even more insidious is our culture of hollow sentimentality

> What's the point of the Space Shuttle if launches were more expensive than disposable rockets? What's the point of the Buran, if the Soviets didn't feel like they need an answer to the space shuttle "just in case", even though they couldn't see any point in the shuttle design (except as a nuke carrier)?

Rather than nukes, I always thought the main advantage of the Shuttle was the ability to bring things back to Earth. Which it did, a few times:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-32

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-A

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-57

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-72

When then Shuttle was proposed, this was one of the main selling points. Having used it just 4 times over 133 missions... Well, that's not what was envisioned.

AFAIK the Russians were mainly concerned about the ability of the Space Shuttle to quickly change its orbital plane, combined with the planned high frequency of flights (which never happened though) and high cargo capacity.

Put a few nukes on the Shuttle, and you can drop them anywhere in the world with much less warning time than intercontinental ballistic missiles. At least that's what I read about the reasoning of the Russians building their own shuttle, because when they ran the numbers on the Space Shuttle they concluded that a "civilian use" didn't make much sense.

Changing orbital plane requires delta V, and the Shuttle had barely enough to make it to LEO (the highest it ever went was servicing the Hubble).

Cargo capacity... Not that much really, since you're carrying yourself a whole lot of orbiter already. It had a large volume in the cargo bay, and the mentioned ability to retrieve things in that cargo bay.

But yes, DoD/military influenced the design of the Shuttle. It just turns out they never used the capabilities they requested. And so you end up with a craft that makes little sense for civilian use, except for the building of a massive space station in orbit and eventual servicing of satellites.

Would the ISS be possible without the Shuttle?

From some distant memory the dimensions of the Space Shuttle cargo bay was specifically matched to accommodate the launch and servicing of the Hubble Space telescope. I'm not sure which design drove which.

The HST was a close variant of various military spy satellites. The difference is that it was pointed into space, as opposed to towards Earth.

Consider that a large number of Shuttle missions were classified, then put two and two together...

One designed advantage that, AFAIK, was never leveraged is the ability to launch to space and land in a single orbit.

For what it’s worth, the space race along with the desire to build up missile technology in general are the reason we have computers today as we know them. Not many people outside of the space and defense industries were willing to shell out buckets of cash for a single transistor.

> without much rational sense just to beat the other side

Assumes that just beating the other side was not a sufficient rational motive. Which, given that the threat both sides faced was "you and your way of life will be utterly obliterated", is a pretty irrational criticism.

What's the point of <X>, if <something we only learned by doing X>? There's tremendous hindsight bias in criticising even the Shuttle program on the basis of what we know now, while disregarding the value of everything we learned from doing it.

Even copying another country's technology on the basis of speculative military applications may not be irrational, unless you're somehow privy to all the knowledge that was available at the time when those decisions were made.

The remarkable MAD doctrine itself can be criticised as inhumane or insane, but hardly irrational. It's a triumph of rationality and a counter-intuitive application of game theory, the iron laws of mathematics elevated to places where we really would rather see common sense and humanity prevail.

"It is durable due to its incorporation of pozzolanic ash, which prevents cracks from spreading."

Third sentence in the Wikipedia article. Later:

"The strength and longevity of Roman marine concrete is understood to benefit from a reaction of seawater with a mixture of volcanic ash and quicklime to create a rare crystal called tobermorite, which may resist fracturing. As seawater percolated within the tiny cracks in the Roman concrete, it reacted with phillipsite naturally found in the volcanic rock and created aluminous tobermorite crystals."

Neither seems to have been 'lost data'.

such a nihilistic view has little ground in reality

> been outside of low earth orbit

we stopped pushing that frontier because we've been there and found it dull and empty, as a matter of fact, we decided zero g experiment were more important than playing with regolith, and build a freaking human habitat in the void to support that endeavor. beside, we've got regolith here on earth now, we can experiment on it in the commodity of our backyard if needed be.

> mach 3 flight

except the routine space launches that ship scientist back and forth from the space station, going through literal plasma on the descent leg.

> Roman concrete

this has just been widely romanticized, we don't use that because it's incompatible with fast building processes requirements, is too heavy for large structures and it's hard to dismantle when a structure is no longer needed or need renovation.

sure, some other stuff one can cite as having reached an apparent sub-optimal minima, like average speed of travel, but that's not because we're backward, it's because we're learning to take care of our own environment. slowly, but we're getting there. just because the tradeoff are different it doesn't mean that a golf id3 is just worse than a bugatti eb110 or a recess from peak technology.

Your last point resonated with me. An extremely boring electric car that makes some significant leap in affordability, efficiency or whatever can be the thing that brings our entire society forward and literally saves it.

If anything you can argue that the latest Bugatti with a slightly larger engine is moving us backwards by the waste of resources (in design, production and use).

Peak technology right now is not the big sexy machine, it's whatever makes the good stuff boring for the masses.

The primary purpose of ISS is to be a jobs program, not scientific experimentation. The Russians are involved specifically to keep their engineers from going to work for hostile states.

But still, we're to the point where not a state, not a government entity, but a rich, bored dude is sending people into space as a viable business model

Thinking our space tech is going backwards is severely myopic

They're learning all kinds of things by seeing how plants grow in microgravity and more recently how 3D printers work in the same. It didn't need to cost a trillion dollars for that, but now that it's there, we might just get over a trillion dollars worth of science out of it.

Meanwhile a little copter is spinning its wings. On Mars. Mars dammit.

Humans are capable of Mach 3 flight. It's just a "latent" capability. Something we could do but is not currently cost-effective.

> The technology that produced those pictures are gone, we might be able to take ones like them again, but never with the same rockets and never with the same photo-chemical processes.

You can never step in the same river twice, and we are all mortal. This is just a statement about the passage of time.

> Progress is fragile, not inevitable and everything we have can be lost in a generation just as easily as it was made.

This, on the other hand, is important, and why it's important not to let people wreck it by lying about everything.

Worth questioning the "whig view of history" backwards as well; a lot of what we call progress had very large costs for certain groups of people at the time and made their lives worse. Or got them killed.

I think it’s a case of picking the low hanging fruits once the technology is unlocked, then moving on.

We have the same not only with space but with everything.

Steampunk is essentially the feature we never had with advanced enough mechanical machines. Somehow we sprinted towards harnessing the energy of the steam stoping short from coal powered AI robots but was that the case? IMHO what happened is, we exploited the feasible part and moved on.

The same with space. With the science and tech we harnessed so far, it’s simply not feasible to do more than what we have done already. With the advancements made in recent decades, some more stuff might have moved within the range of feasible but nothing revolutionary. We are not going to the nearest star anytime soon and that’s not simply because we lost interest in it. The best we probably can do in human travel is Mars.

Okay, I came here to talk about how the images are a bit soft and a quick, subtle pass of Richardson-Lucy deconvolution restores some detail (and enhances the film grain, that's a plus for me but some people may find it a bit too much -- it is still there in the pictures though).

And then I read your comment and you totally throw me into a Wikipedia rabbit hole with the Roman concrete... Speaking of which, what do you mean we can't make Roman concrete nowadays? Wikipedia even says that there are corporations and municipalities looking into it as a viable, environmental-friendly, long-lasting alternative to regular concrete[0] !

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete#Modern_use

It's essentially an old meme; the exact details had been lost, since the technology was not in continuous use and no written record survived, but the footnote on Wikipedia details its reconstruction. This great paper: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/msa/ammin/article/98/10/166...

Essentially it relied on volcanic ash from specific locations, and they forensically traced those locations.

Right, that's the impression I got from reading. And it looks like we have regained that technology, which is what threw me off the remark. Will take a look at that paper, however I'm totally a stranger to most geo-something sciences, just a regular software engineer here (with quite a bit of scientific curiosity though).

> Humans are no longer capable of mach 3 flight, or making Roman concrete

We have plenty of aircraft capable of mach 3 or faster just not for commercial purposes, and most modern concrete is superior to Roman concrete in most dimensions specifically cost (not to mention its modern mythos is completely based on a single study published in American Mineralogist).

The supersonic passenger flight thing is the one I have to really chuckle at. Nothing against the work being done in this area--hey, not my money. But effectively you have lots of folks, who probably mostly fly coach, super-excited that maybe one day CEOs and high-end lawyers will once again be able to fly from NY to London to have lunch, shake hands on a deal, and be home in time for dinner.

The passenger flight thing is the one I have to really chuckle at. Nothing against the work being done in this area--hey, not my money. But effectively you have lots of folks, who probably mostly take trains, super-excited that maybe one day CEOs and high-end lawyers will be able to fly from NY to London.

France is actually doing something very sensible here (banning domestic flight between cities if the travel time by train is under 2.5 hrs):

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56716708

why is that sensible?

Yeah. If there's good train service, it probably makes more sense to take the train. But if I'm flying through a city to get to another city, switching transportation modes can be a pain. e.g. Normally I'd take a train from (downtown) Manhattan to (downtown) Philadelphia. But if I'm flying into a NYC airport on my way to Philadelphia, that's a terrific hassle especially with luggage.

Technology has not regressed since the 1970s though. We have the latent capability to go any time we want, it’s just very expensive and there’s no point.

Still planning to do it again within the next decade just to reassure ourselves about it.

The most expensive reality TV show ever made.

Actually doing it is important. “I can go to the moon anytime I want” stops being true after a solid generation of not doing it. There is institutional knowledge in doing something in the present world. Further, specs and documents are nice, but rarely sufficient. A famous example is the F-1 engine. Every one of them was made off spec and if you took the factory drawings alone you would never make a working engine. You need builders who understand the design and modify it.

It’s all possible to do this, but the longer you wait to do it again, the more factors change and the more work it will be.

NIF exists to keep a team of nuclear bomb experts warm in case we need them. It isn’t to make a power plant or to make new bombs; it’s just there to keep the kettle warm.

Anecdote: I work at a physics project. When the PI asked for 200 million USD to build a new machine after 20 years they were awarded 3 millions USD to do an upgrade to the old machine. The funders are making sure that a team can still be assembled and get shit done under the PI’s leadership. If the upgrade goes on time and on budget then the new machine might be on the table.

The same thing is going on with many physics projects. Small prototypes get funded. “If you can make that and it works, then we’ll talk about the next step.” It’s slow, but it’s safe.

For SLS a group looked into making boosters powered by modernized F-1's... Turns out a lot of knowledge about welding them had been lost. They managed to get an old unflown F-1A to work, but it's a bit unclear how much they managed to do with the new design, the F-1B. Wikipedia[0] has a few details and some links, but it falls short of telling the end fate of this effort.

Obviously, the F-1B booster wasn't picked for the SLS and they went with the improved 5-segment SRBs[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1#F-1B_booster

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Boo...

> Actually doing it is important. “I can go to the moon anytime I want” stops being true after a solid generation of not doing it. There is institutional knowledge in doing something in the present world. Further, specs and documents are nice, but rarely sufficient. A famous example is the F-1 engine. Every one of them was made off spec and if you took the factory drawings alone you would never make a working engine. You need builders who understand the design and modify it

And I'd argue that's exactly why I'd argue the fundamental approach of the 60s/70s rocket engineers was fundamentally flawed. It was a vanity project and so it died after vanity was satisfied.

The assembly line and standardisation approach SpaceX takes is much superior and much more sustainable.

I agree. Importantly Space-X’s engines are actually cutting edge. They are the best performers man has made, so we’re not walking backwards. However, that progress was not guaranteed and if we stopped all space travel for fifty years there would need to be another monumental effort to relearn how to build rockets.

I play with CRTs as a hobby. It’s popular these days, but it will never be popular enough to manufacture another CRT. The last assembly lines closed a decade ago. The physics knowledge is there, and electronics have gotten better, but it would take many iterations to make a trinitron equivalent in another 20 years. The people who understood the magnetics (ie how horizontal output transistor and flyback transformer characteristics interacted with the impedance of the steering coils) are dead or retired. The same for the experts in mask manufacturing. We can figure it all out again and do it better than ever, but it would be a lot more work than if we had continued making them.

Again, it’ll never happen because they’re too big and require too much material compared to other display technologies. It’s just interesting how fast they disappeared when they were an integral part of human society for nearly all of the 20th century.

I agree that there’s probably not much value in just retreading the old specs, but I’d argue that just having the knowledge that it has been achieved in practice still puts you ahead of the engineers in 1961, and that the intervening decades of progress put you even further ahead.

There’s no reason to think that an equally well funded greenfield effort couldn’t land on the moon from a standing start within a decade; it’s not like we’re living in the shadow of an ancient advanced civilisation with no present day industrial capacity.

No and I agree. Saying that we’ve regressed in rocket science or concrete in any capacity is a fantasy. However, if things go stale then we could be forced to invest a lot of money to discover things we’ve already discovered.

Yes, that’s true. Knowledge-how will go stale relatively quickly as you point out.

> and there’s no point

How do you know "there is no point"? Also, at what points in history was exploration pointless, exactly?

If you had the money, you could rent a rocket from SpaceX and send a film camera to take more pictures. But what would be the point?

> I think we assume that technology will keep progressing. We assume Moore's law will continue into the future and we forget that there are people behind the progress. The technology that produced those pictures are gone, we might be able to take ones like them again, but never with the same rockets and never with the same photo-chemical processes. Progress is fragile, not inevitable and everything we have can be lost in a generation just as easily as it was made.

It's good to be aware of our blindspots. The idea of progress as a monotonically increasing upward trend is a very modern and Western perspective. It's not inevitable.

People have been hiking to the top of mount Everest for a while now, but you still can't ask an Uber to take you there.

Because there isn't much worthwhile to do there, the interesting thing is going there, not being there. At the moment. When/if it can be done for cheap and on the regular, there might be stuff to do.

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