• Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Both the US and Russia have spent my entire life cooperating on the most ambitious space endeavor the planet has (the ISS), why are we trying to create some kind of ideological wedge between the two countries on the one issue we seem to agree on? Don’t we have enough of those?

    • kautau@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Yeah one of my favorite little stories / poems is something I read on Tumblr years ago. It’s currently attributed to Swan Jolras:

      we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

      because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

      and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us— we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

      and then

      we built robots?

      and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

      and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more! , maybe we’ll be gone

      but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

      the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

      and they told us to tell you hello.

      The astronauts of today from various nations literally live and work together in shared space stations, less concerned with who’s tribe is better and more concerned with, you know, space, which is vast and doesn’t give a shit about our petty differences

        • KazuyaDarklight@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          TV series on Apple where Soviets land on the Moon first and a whole new timeline of events is explored. It’s really good.

            • TheRealKuni@piefed.social
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              3 months ago

              Apple TV is a great service. It’s like Netflix pre-Enshittification. You don’t need Apple devices to use it.

              Also you can just pirate it.

              • bassomitron@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                Apple TV is the only streaming service consistently putting out good content at the moment. To me, it’s like how HBO used to be.

      • trolololol@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Oh yes. The world would be much better if they could self destroy or destroy each other while leaving everybody else to their own problems, like Switzerland is famous for.

    • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Yeah, even in my so-shitty-sometimes-cows-wandered-in highschool we learned about this (and a whole lot more about Russian-american cooperation post space race.)

  • carrylex@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Oh this stupid discussion that we have like every 3 years

    Here some other memes from the last time this came up:

  • Pirasp@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I hate to be that guy, but the first space rocket was one of the V2 test vehicles in 1944. It made it to an altitude of 176km Wich is most definitely in space.

    • Venator@lemmy.nz
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      3 months ago

      But without wholesale slaughter we’d never have the motivation to build rockets that made space exploration possible! /s

  • AeronMelon@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    The people who do this cool shit are scientists and Cosmonauts who genuinely want to learn and explore. The fact that they did it under communism is irrelevant.

  • HollowNaught@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I get where they’re coming from

    I went to a space cadet camp at the Kennedy Space Centre. Considering I’m not American, Florida was a bit of a change for me

    It was really odd how much they glossed over how they managed to do things, and instead focused on what they did instead

    One good example of this was when the USA made these new engines for a rocket, and they tried to really underline how much of a scientific breakthrough they were, all while never actually saying what they did differently. Similarly, every time they brought up Russia it was always about how they were a step behind, slapping on a bunch of rockets to compensate for the fact that they had worse machinery

    Of course, they never brought up how Russia was basically in front for the entire race until the US moved the goalposts, as shown in this meme

    So yeah that’s my experience on how this is taught in America

    • trolololol@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Checks out how America was the single factor that allowed WWII to start favouring the winning parties in Europe theatre.

      Cue to the stereotypes that you only hear if you speak English: France surrenders at a mosquito’s notice, USSR could only fight because Americans leased tanks starting from 1941, and everybody else was just dumb.

  • comrade19@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I like.this but I always get bothered by the pressure analogies. You wouldnt feel a cow crushing every inch nope.

  • bbboi@feddit.uk
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    2 months ago

    Not a space people, but wouldn’t it have made more sense to build a satellite to study mercury rather than kamikaze-ing rover after rover?

    Edit: Fuck I’m dumb.