Neil Armstrong, the first human being to walk on the moon as commander of the Apollo 11 space flight on July 20, 1969, has died.
For some reason this news appeared on my Arsebook just today. Being an idiot, I didn’t check the dates. This is what happens when you don’t watch the TV news, kiddies.
At the risk of sounding ignorant, I wanna talk about this because I want to.
This is what modern US schooling does to children. There’s more to the Internet than Facebook, pornography, and captioned cat pictures you know.
Now, you ever notice how when astronauts go onto other planets the sky (universe) is always black? So, if there were life on other planets, for example, their sky would always be black .
The reason for that is because in space there isn’t enough gas for light scattering to occur. [Source] [NASA] [And a third]
Also, when astronauts “went” onto the moon, some placed a flag into the surface of the moon.
- How can you place a stick, whether it be plastic, metal or steel, into a huge, hard rock?
The moon isn’t a solid rock: From The University of Tennessee website: The Moon is coverered with a gently rolling layer of powdery soil with scattered rocks that is called the regolith; it is made from debris blasted out of the Lunar craters by the meteor impacts that created them. Each well-preserved Lunar crater is surrounded by a sheet of ejected material called the ejecta blanket.
- Wouldn’t the lack of gravity cause the flag to float away?
The moon has enough mass to have its own gravity well, roughly 1/6th that of Earth.
Just wondering.
Wondering is nice, but eventually you have to do research like I did.
A list of neat trivia about the moon, along with some wonderful moon photos and snarky comments.
A list of neat trivia about the moon, along with some wonderful moon photos and snarky comments.
This unfinished story will probably never be finished. It started out as an idea for a “dark science fiction” series, ripping off all manner of sources.
If anyone wants to throw large sums of money into putting this thing on screen (yeah, right), let me know.
The red supergiant star Betelgeuse is getting ready to go supernova, and when it does Earth will have a front-row seat. The explosion will be so bright that Earth will briefly seem to have two suns in the sky.
Just hope it happens in my lifetime. What’s the odds it’ll happen on 20/12/2012?
Madeleine Ashby has a piece on the Tor website entitled A Moral Argument for Hard Science Fiction. The main take-out quote:
All too often in fiction, we choose to batter our science and technology in a thick coating of McGuffin and then deep-fry it in a vat of boiling handwavium. But just as we should avoid an ignorant depiction of human beings whenever possible, we should also avoid ignorant depictions of science and technology — because how we discuss science and technology is inherently political.
And she has a point. In a lot of popular fiction - in print as well as on screens - science is this miracle… stuff… that is either inherently Bad or is only understood by a few Nerds Gone Bad.
He’s only mad because it’s all Mary Shelley’s fault.Now, it has to be said that from a visual standpoint real science is B-O-R-I-N-G. It’s slow. It’s subject to review, to the mercies of failed replication of experiment… you get the idea. (Indeed, the same could be said for near-future space travel, except that failures tend to be more lethal.) At the same time, that’s what characterisation’s for.
Now, Ashby in particular nails Hackers as a culprit. I don’t remember seeing that movie, but I think I read a novelisation of it - which was pretty bad; my interpretation was that someone had heard of this ‘computer hacking’ thing and used the notion to flavour a chase movie, HollywoodOS and all. (The Wikipedia article has a synopsis that’s so cringeworthy that you don’t need to see the movie.)
But the problem she raises with depictions of this ilk is that they affect understanding - a major concern in a time when people are not taught how to tell the difference between fact and fiction. Presenting technology as mere magic isn’t good enough and, in her opinion, leads to bad policy and people being scared away from scientific disciplines.
Real science doesn’t involve sitting about in swim trunks (usually).I’m not entirely convinced this is really the case. Yes, there’s a lot of science fiction that owes more to fairy tales than PHYS101. But at the same time that more speculative or imaginative 'soft’ SF allows for exploring different avenues.
On the other hand, I feel a terrible dissonance when reading space operas where the characterisation doesn’t match the scale of the worlds built; lovely scenery but the actors ruin it, leaving, as Woollcott said, the taste of lukewarm parsnip juice.
SF has a difficult path to travel; to keep hope and interest in the future alive; to assure us that all our brains and our science and technology aren’t dead ends or lost causes; to assure us that even without wands or pixie dust, there is still magic in the universe, waiting in that terra incognita we know about but haven’t worked out how to reach yet.
Scientific ignorance in this country drives me insane. I’m no genius, and never really took any science courses in college, but I know how it works. I was asked where science came from, as if it needed to be created by something in order to be valid. Science is not a thing, it’s a process....
It’s not so much ignorance, as a lack of faith in their god/s. This is a belief of mine: The louder one proclaims their faith, the less faith they have.
Boing Boing observed that on Tuesday 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men on the moon.
In the comments, this anonymous lament:
On this date last year, I was in a check out lane at a drugstore, filling out a check when the friendly teenage clerk volunteered the date.
I replied “Thanks, but I know this one. Big Day in History.”
The nervous look I got in return made me pause. I asked her if she knew what had occurred, and she stammered “No Idea”. I asked her if she’d ever heard of “One Small Step For Man, One Giant Leap For Mankind”?
“No.”
How about “The Eagle Has Landed”?
“No.”
“Neil Armstrong”?
“Who?”
I told her that on this date, forty years ago, man first set foot on the moon. She stared at me for a few seconds and then burst out “Get OUTTA Here! We ain’t been to no MOON. You CRAZY!”
Randall Munroe’s cartoon uses the moon landing as an example, and unfortunately the actual comments are just as bad.
People these days. They just want to be Right, even if they’re not even wrong.
Literalist consumeroid cattle, trampling god, history, family, even reality into the ground as they race to their slaughterhouse Paradise.
Sometimes I think there’s a conspiracy to keep people earthbound in both mind and body.
That, or people really are that small-minded and desperate for some, any, authority.
Boing Boing observed that on Tuesday 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men on the moon.
In the comments, this anonymous lament:
On this date last year, I was in a check out lane at a drugstore, filling out a check when the friendly teenage clerk volunteered the date.
I replied “Thanks, but I know this one. Big Day in History.”
The nervous look I got in return made me pause. I asked her if she knew what had occurred, and she stammered “No Idea”. I asked her if she’d ever heard of “One Small Step For Man, One Giant Leap For Mankind”?
“No.”
How about “The Eagle Has Landed”?
“No.”
“Neil Armstrong”?
“Who?”
I told her that on this date, forty years ago, man first set foot on the moon. She stared at me for a few seconds and then burst out “Get OUTTA Here! We ain’t been to no MOON. You CRAZY!”
Randall Munroe’s cartoon uses the moon landing as an example, and unfortunately the actual comments are just as bad.
People these days. They just want to be Right, even if they’re not even wrong.
Literalist consumeroid cattle, trampling god, history, family, even reality into the ground as they race to their slaughterhouse Paradise.
Sometimes I think there’s a conspiracy to keep people earthbound in both mind and body.
That, or people really are that small-minded and desperate for some, any, authority.
(Originally posted 21 July 2010)
