China’s Moon atlas is the most detailed ever made
nature.com
nature.com
With this "mood", Chinese astronauts on the Moon seems inevitable now. And I don't say that with dread, it's just more of an awakening I am having to a future that I had not thought much about until very recently. I think in fact I look forward to it because I suppose I want a technological rival to also draw the U.S. back to the Moon.
I'm not sure why though. My child-brain has never even questioned the validity of pursuing space exploration. But I guess as I get old now and see the Earth itself heading into dangerous territory I can kind of understand the naysayers that may have not been as enthusiastic as I was as a kid about a future that follows a timeline similar to Kubrick's "2001".
I mean, they mostly did it to establish trade routes and exploit previously untapped natural resources, not out of a mere spirit of exploration.
And even if the explorers themselves did it out of a spirit of exploration, the ones funding their expeditions generally had other motives.
This is not saying all is darker, and denies the many benefits that social and technological progresses thhat can be hand picked.
You could say we're better off as a civilization than we were a thousand years ago. But that's true in nearly all countries, regardless of their colonial history. I suspect it has more to do with the Haber process and refrigeration than James Cook or even Ferdinand Magellan.
Focusing inwards to grow isn't "languishing". And while I'm all for the platonic idea of exploration for exploring's sake, there is also a stage of (im)maturity where trying to go somewhere new just results in bringing all your old problems with you.
Down south, the Aztec capital was built in the middle of a lake, and had probably around as many people living in it as London, Paris, Venice, and Lisbon combined. The marketplace alone was around the size of a European capital. Tenochtitlan had aqueducts made out of terracotta, and the people bathed twice a day and drank spring water from a separate source. The palace had multiple zoos, gardens, and aquaria, and the nicer parts of the city were built entirely out of brick and masonry. The big temple in the middle was hundreds of feet tall, and only a couple meters shorter than Notre Dame in Paris.
Of course, all of that was destroyed, completely and utterly.
The myth of the romantic Age of Sail explorer is not compatible with the power structures of the time. What king would send perfectly good ships away "just to see what was on the other side", when there were political rivals to outcompete and usurp on this side? And what king would survive sending such resources away, if they did not gain a profit from doing so (through whatever tactics of exploitation were most expedient)?
Certainly the world would have been quite different if Columbus and Cortés decided to work on themselves, instead of concluding that the Earth is shaped like a tiny pear so they should raze a couple cities they just found out about, or whatever else was going on in those men's heads…
By contrast Indian colleagues seem extremely nationalistic - in a way that's a bit scary
I've had so many people turn from crticizing every aspect of the country to arguing that India has all the quality of life, freedom and opportunity of a western country over the tiniest of comments from me.
Almost everyone I spoke to said that they think the US is a very advanced country and admire the US. They have no interest in changing or influencing the US to be more like themselves. They see this trade war as just "what politicians do". They seem to have an understanding of why China is doing what it needs to do and why the US is doing what it needs to do. It's nothing personal for them.
In contrast, most Americans I've interacted with see China as more of an enemy, a sort of hateful resentment towards China, and ideologically incompatible with any of their own beliefs. It is much more personal for Americans. Americans want China to be more like themselves. It shows on HN comments as well.
How many Chinese people think of America and go "Joe Biden"? I'd bet more of them think "Brad Pitt" or something along those lines.
My point is, Americans may see Chinese people as their political system. While the Chinese see Americans as their culture: movies, tv, music etc.
In 2024, if you go to a coffee shop in China, you'll very often hear American music. If you go to a movie theater in China, you'll very often see viewings for Hollywood movies. If you walk around the street, you'll see many clear American logos like Starbucks, McDonalds, KFC, Apple, Walmart, Ford, Microsoft, Tesla, etc.
If you walk around the US, you won't see many Chinese brands, if at all. In fact, even if a Chinese company operates in the US, they have to hide the fact that they're a Chinese company. American cafes won't play Chinese music. AMC isn't showing Chinese movies.
Furthermore, in a democracy, in order for politicians to win elections, they have to have a popular opinion. The US media has been non-stop anti-China for a long time now. Therefore, the popular opinion is "China bad". In order for politicians to win an election, they must be "China bad" as well. It's a cycle really. It's almost political suicide for a politician to even have a moderate view on China. It's also hard for any American media to have moderate views on China nowadays.
To me, it's not surprising at all that Chinese people in China do not hate Americans the same way Americans hate the Chinese.
On Hacker News comments, I've been accused of being paid by the CCP more times than I can remember just because I'm not automatically "China bad".
I suspect the modal view on China among Americans is just nothing -- they've never even thought about it. We'll never get a poll that confirms this because asking the question at all clouds the answer.
But I’m more talking about the overall perception, the sentiment. I would not describe it as “nothing”. It’s far more negative in my experience.
to add on to this - far more chinese people visit the west than the other way around. many study english. there is significantly greater understanding of their counterpart's systems in china than in the US or europe. the US has trouble recruiting people who are even literate in mandarin, FFS, to say nothing about familiarity with the culture (even more incredibly, nobody questions reporting or analysis on china produced by these illiterate people!)
however
1. they certainly do recognize areas where they are "behind". more interesting than technologies (ex. space, hn's new pet topic in semiconductors eyeroll, etc.) are things like recognizing mental health concerns and better working conditions
2. there are obviously still millions upon millions of people not in the major cities, for whom life has improved but clearly hasn't reached western standards
i dont think the spirit of what youre saying is wrong, but the inferiority complex youre implying is fading fast
I wonder if these impressions are different for those less isolated from Chinese spaceflight efforts?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Lunar_Research_S...
I get the impression that it'll fall apart once Artemis starts doing crewed lunar landings and China will just have to do its own independent thing. Kind of like the initial claims about Russia participating in China's space station, where it turns out that Tiangong is in an orbit that Soyuz can't even reach from its current launch sites. Then Russia claimed to be building their own space station for post-ISS activities, only to later downgrade further into a station that is not always occupied.
Put differently, it seems even less serious than when any US official uses 'sustainable' and 'SLS' in the same sentence.
The Chinese space program however looks serious enough. Some recent press:
https://thediplomat.com/2023/10/long-march-9-rocket-will-be-...
https://www.space.com/china-names-spacecraft-astronaut-moon-...
https://spacenews.com/china-to-debut-large-reusable-rockets-...
A search just turns up essentially the article above which seems to be a copy and paste of the news release.
Seems to still be in the process of being proofed.
https://china.scidb.cn/download?fileId=62b3ceb08e66a93f11a07...
The map itself looks the same as far as I can tell.
[1] https://english.cas.cn/newsroom/cas_media/202404/t20240422_6...
As they said, it is "for studying the evolution of the moon, selecting the site for a future lunar research station and utilizing lunar resources".
Note the date in the metadata: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_geologic_map_of_...
i.e. 15 June 2022
Higher-resolution data would have been cool – but at some point the enormity of the data would probably mean I would have to stick to a small area of the Moon lest I fill my little server with tiles, ha ha.
I was also trying keep parity more or less between the resolution of the elevation data and image data since those voxels have a color in addition to an elevation. I suppose you could add noise to fake that though. (I did end up using Blender to pre-process the color data and bake in the shadows).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_d...
> Energetically, it costs less to shoot your payload out of the Solar System (from a positive gravity assist with planets like Jupiter) than it does to shoot your payload into the Sun.
This is kind of my point regarding the Moon. It's harder to hit the Moon than to miss it, so why aim for it?
[1]https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/surfaceorbit.php
That’s not to include the possibility that there’s certain manufactured goods that could be cheaper or only possible to produce at lower gravity.
Landing on the moon is a very different endeavour than simply reaching Earth orbit from Earth. In order to refuel and reuse rockets on the moon, you'd need to build out all the infrastructure for doing so first, not to mention the resources necessary for continuous operation. Even getting running water on the moon would be a huge logistical and infrastructure challenge, let alone operating a launch pad.
Anyone that wants to intuitively understand these challenges can simply play Factorio's Space Exploration mod (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-exploration).