It’s an age of marvels

https://blog.plover.com/tech/its-an-age-of-marvels.html

by pavel_lishin • 2 years ago

449 377 2 years ago

blog.plover.com

pfdietz14• 2 years ago

I believe GPS also uses multiple wavelengths to allow estimation of signal delay from passage through the ionosphere.

The way Martian meteorites are identified is from isotopes of inert gases (neon, argon, for example). Mars has a particular pattern of these that's been measured by landers there. Meteorites from the moon are identified by oxygen isotopes, which are on the same line on the oxygen isotope plot as Earth rocks (this is also a strong clue about the origin of the moon.)

changoplatanero• 2 years ago

The gps thing is even more amazing that what he said in the article because it turns out that the receiver doesn’t need an accurate clock of its own for it to work

perlgeek2• 2 years ago

That's right, you get rid of the requirement of its own clock, and instead accept that you need to "see" one more satellite than you'd need otherwise.

The (oversimplified) mental model is this:

If the receiver knows the exact time, and sees a signal from one satellite, it knows its position in one spatial dimension.

For each satellite signal you add, you can determine the position in one more dimension. Once you get to the 3rd satellite, you have no more dimensions to add. Instead, the 4th satellite lets you drop the requirement for your own (absolute) time keeping.

After that, each satellite you see improves the overall precision.

throwup238• 2 years ago

On top of that, with modern surveying and an RTK GPS base station you can get centimeter accuracy for very precise measurements of land, all by carrying a stick with a receiver on it. Most populated counties in the US already have a network running so you usually just need the receiver.

blacksqr• 2 years ago

Medicine is magical and magical is art Think of the boy in the bubble And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe These are the days of lasers in the jungle Lasers in the jungle somewhere Staccato signals of constant information A loose affiliation of millionaires And billionaires and baby

These are the days of miracle and wonder

goodgoblin• 2 years ago

I also appreciate the marvelous rhythm of the modern world, more miracles per square foot than the life of any saint.

RetroTechie• 2 years ago

Yeah that's sure to blow past peoples' minds: how many of those marvels there are all around us.

Few everyday objects that did NOT result from a production+logistics chain 100s of nodes long.

ks20483• 2 years ago

Hate to be a downer, but the bomb in the baby carriage is wired through the radio.

AStrangeMorrow• 2 years ago

I am just glad to see I am not the only one making up imaginary scenario where I bring people from the past to have them marvel at our world.

tetris112• 2 years ago

I do this with music, and measure how good a song is by what fraction f of the words I would need to change for me to send it n years back in time to be understood by an older audience.

I have a small community (n=1 or 4?) where I write this up:

https://lemmy.ml/c/howtimeless

nicbou• 2 years ago

Which one would require the most explaining, according to you?

epiccoleman2• 2 years ago

My favorite "one of these" is the idea of taking a Raspberry Pi, or ATtiny, or modern Macbook Pro back to the ENIAC guys. Can you imagine how they'd have reacted to see these tiny little devices which pack orders of magnitude more computational power than their warehouse-sized computer? The mind boggles.

somenameforme7• 2 years ago

I tend to always play the cynic in these games. And I think one little way to easily do that is to reverse the roles with an example you are giving. So for your example, imagine somebody from the future came and showed you a pinhead sized device with countless exabytes of computational power projected onto a holographic screen. While I'm sure you'd be impressed and have plenty of questions, I don't think there would be any particular shock. Evolutionary progress - even at absurd scales, is still just evolutionary progress, and easily 'graspable'.

satvikpendem• 2 years ago

Hedonic adaptation. See even the other threads about ChatGPT where people are complaining that it's still not good enough, even though nothing like it were possible a mere few years ago. People will adapt to anything over time, and so like the other commenter, I too would not be shocked to not see much shock on their faces if you showed them such a miniature computer.

tiborsaas• 2 years ago

I'm 40 now, but I'm still blown away. It's amazing that we can just keep installing web-servers into random things like wall switches, power outlets and control them wirelessly and just treat is a business as usual.

I just got a WiFi enabled ESP8266 with a thumb sized OLED display for like $10.

I can't really keep track of how many computers are in my home :)

chasd003• 2 years ago

me> in my pocket contains a device that gives me access to all of the world's information almost instantly

person from the past> wow! what do you do with it?

me> look at pictures of cats and argue with people i don't even know

/i think that's from an xkcd

pixl973• 2 years ago

Benjamin Franklin: "So you're telling me there are hot single women in my area that are looking to date?"

more_corn2• 2 years ago

Xkcd having a joke for every occasion might be a true modern marvel.

quectophoton• 2 years ago

My made-up imaginary scenarios are usually about scientists of the past that had to do everything by hand, and today's Desmos Graphing Calculator[1].

[1] https://www.desmos.com/calculator

eleveriven4• 2 years ago

It's fascinating to imagine how people from the past might react to the technological advancements and societal changes of the present day! I love to imagine my great grandpa exploring the world now.

munchler• 2 years ago

I do when I'm driving to the airport in the DC area. I imagine that I'm actually picking up Abe Lincoln from the 1860's and what I'll show him on the drive back.

ctenb• 2 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240512232147/https://blog.plov...

ertgbnm2• 2 years ago

More than anything else, I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists.

You have blueberries for sale in January??? A variety box of tea from 7 different countries? A wall of spices? Pineapples? Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away? The bread isn't full of sand and grit? And it's sliced!!!

All relatively affordable and accessible to the average person.

Rinzler89• 2 years ago

I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists

Mate, the 7-Eleven Big Gulp, the Walmart 5-gallon bucket of Snickers and the giant Costco bulk bag of peanut butter M&Ms blows my present day European mind, let alone someone from 1900.

qlm• 2 years ago

The quantity of chocolate for sale in bulk certainly is surprising. Unfortunately I find American chocolate to be borderline inedible.

RGamma• 2 years ago

There's tasteful advancement of civilization. And then there's mountains of trash food.

oblio7• 2 years ago

Those are the ones that scared you?!?

Walgreens/CSV literal buckets of medicine like Advil and whatnot were some of the scariest things I've seen, and worst of all, people DEFENDING them.

brigadier1324• 2 years ago

It really is amazing, that's why we really need to appreciate and protect what we have. The incredible abundance we currently have is not the norm. It was not even 100 years ago that people were starving in the US during the great depression.

Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric.

CooCooCaCha2• 2 years ago

But at what cost? How much should we sacrifice so that blueberries exist year round?

keybored6• 2 years ago

It really is amazing, that's why we really need to appreciate and protect what we have. The incredible abundance we currently have is not the norm. It was not even 100 years ago that people were starving in the US during the great depression.

This is fine and a good exercise (like a gratitude journal). The problem is that this is often used to tell people indirectly that they should stop with their political complaints, which may be well-founded. Like...

Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric.

Like this?[1] I don’t know what extremist means here but there are real political problems out there, and some of the solutions are “extremist” (like e.g. some of the solutions to climate change).

Violence is less debatable and should be reserved for when it it truly necessary.

[1] If you make vague gestures I in turn have to guess.

nradov2• 2 years ago

The Haber–Bosch process also played a major role there. It was around 100 years ago that cheap nitrogen fertilizer manufactured from fossil fuels started to become widely available. That greatly reduced starvation, at least in countries with functional governments.

btbuildem2• 2 years ago

Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric.

Think about how this standard of living is enabled by centuries of colonial exploitation, mortally dependent on continued extraction of non-renewable resources, and propped up by an insanely profitable military-industrial complex.

If you're on the outside, watching fools burn it all so they can drown in excess they don't appreciate.. yes, the rhetoric is bound to get violent.

petesergeant• 2 years ago

would blow the minds

I think there are two aspects to this. I think anyone who's ever been to a food market in the history of time would conceptually understand it's possible to have a bigger market, and perhaps even a faster horse or mechanical bird to bring the items there. Commerce bringing you items from the other side of the world is millennia old. So I think it would be more of a case of "how did u mad lads actually pull this off", rather than a true mind-blown situation.

True mind-blown'ness I think comes from other examples he brings up, like GPS, and making items apparently hover a hundred miles above the earth and transmit information from above there, instantly, silently and invisibly. That's supernatural stuff, and the realm of the holy or the uncanny. You can't go back very far in time without talking about that stuff getting you accused of heresy / talking to the devil.

perlgeek2• 2 years ago

The real progress with the supermarket is the availability and ubiquity.

Maybe 80% of US Americans now have access to a larger variety of fresh fruits than even most nobles had 200 years ago, and it's not even a big deal to us.

Project that kind of progress another 200 years in the future... it's hard to imagine how that would even look like.

ertgbnm2• 2 years ago

I think people would have a deeper appreciation for what a super market is because they could understand it since it's exactly the kind of thing they would imagine a utopia would have. Throughout most of history people have spent most of their time worrying about food.

Air conditioning, satellites, and CAT scans are just too far beyond imagination that I don't think it would be fully appreciated.

anal_reactor• 2 years ago

Yeah that's what I was thinking of when paying at the supermarket. Try explaining contactless payments to someone from 18th century.

nico• 2 years ago

This is still mind blowing and a huge luxury for most of the world

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” - William Gibson

eleveriven4• 2 years ago

It's so pity that it is hard to create a future that is truly inclusive and sustainable for all

marcosdumay3• 2 years ago

Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away?

Well, aluminum was supposed to be luxurious and everything... But I think before that they'd pick a piece of plastic packaging and be without words to explain their marvel.

b3ing• 2 years ago

They didn't have plastic back then, it would of been paper or cloth

keybored6• 2 years ago

It seems utilitarian to the person who doesn’t understand the concept of microplastics.

genewitch7• 2 years ago

bakelite was patented in 1909 - i understand franklin was before 1907, but the idea of "plastic" as something separate from wood, metal, and glass has been around over a century.

perilunar• 2 years ago

How would you explain plastic to someone who hadn't even seen it? I would say it is like candle wax (which it is), but it melts at a higher temperature and is much stronger when solid.

dotnet009• 2 years ago

It brings to mind the story of how when Boris Yeltsin was visiting the US, he took an impromptu detour to a random American supermarket to try to catch them off guard, only to be blown away that Americans really did have supermarkets everywhere practically overflowing with food. The story goes that the experience played a big role in shaping his vision for Russia when he went on to become its first freely elected leader a few years later.

https://www.cato.org/blog/happy-yeltsin-supermarket-day

Or similarly there's the story of the Lykov family, who lived life cut off from humanity for 40 years but still somewhat understood what the new, moving "stars" in the night sky must be: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-rus...

Edit - Plus, this quote: “What amazed him most of all,” Peskov recorded, “was a transparent cellophane package. ‘Lord, what have they thought up—it is glass, but it crumples!’”

bee_rider6• 2 years ago

Although, Yeltsin was already a liberalizing reformer. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was playing it up a bit.

QuantumGood• 2 years ago

Many in Yeltsin's circle believed it had been set up, and was not actually used by everyday Americans, similar to how many Soviet PR setups had been undertaken

glompers• 2 years ago

Good links, thanks. I had read the Houston anecdote before but never seen this photograph.

agumonkey2• 2 years ago

Yeltsin visit is to put in contrast with Tucker Carlson visit in Russia.. where he somehow tried to do the same in reverse (without knowing he was actually visiting a french retail chain brand but anyway). Very odd.

ijidak• 2 years ago

A friend of mine in college around 2002 was from Russia and had lived under communism.

He told me his grandma cried the first time she entered an American grocery store.

It was interesting to hear.

throwaway-123c• 2 years ago

If you think those stories charaterize USSR production/planning system, they do not. Specially the historical period when Yeltsin took power, at that time, they already had market like elements of production. If interested, there is a few books on planning, f.e. Cockshott. I think it is important since we as humans capable of conscious transformation of production relations. In some parts of production may be it is ok if it is done by independent agents, in some parts it could be better if agents could communicate not just by market, but directly, as with free softwere/GPL where you can directly work on it, not though market. What is good about USSR, is that you could likely get any schematic of any device. I do not like proprietay things so this huge market of phones and etc, is not really for me. Some ICs used do not have datasheets. The many supermarkets, it is 10 or so in radius of 1-2 km here. I'm ok if it is 7 and one lab equiped with electronics, etc equipment. There is a clear by now bound of what individual agents communicating only over market, can do.

southernplaces73• 2 years ago

For a wonderful scene that mirrors exactly something like Yeltsin's real trip to the supermarket, i strongly recommend the (generally wonderful) movie "Moscow on the Hudson" with Robin Williams.

odiroot• 2 years ago

More than anything else, I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists.

Modern American supermarket would blow the minds of anyone from the Warsaw Pact countries ;), up until probably mid 1990's.

tomjen33• 2 years ago

There is a video where it literally blows the mind of an immigrant from Cuba:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBA41QgIty8

creer2• 2 years ago

Still current for some countries: 2 weeks ago, a shopper clearly confused half to death barely manages to make themselves understood to me in 3 words of english: They are asking what is the price of the bag of oranges.

Because there were 3 different prices on that price tag. The price, the one if you have the card, the one if you have the app or some other deep magic. (They were not stupid - presumably they could understand on their own the additional price per unit - but most likely not which price this was based on and why...) What a world we live in /s!

more_corn2• 2 years ago

And yet a lot of people go hungry in this age of marvels. We have enough homes to house all the homeless, we have agencies, money, social workers. And yet we somehow can’t seem to figure it out.

paulryanrogers6• 2 years ago

We can. It's just uncomfortable to admit. For example, making housing an investment steals from the poor to give to the rich.

LouisSayers• 2 years ago

We, as society could easily "figure it out", but there are so many misaligned incentives for those that are in charge or in power.

Why build more housing when it would only work against the value of your own properties? Why give out free food that's "spoiling" when you risk getting sued for potential food poisoning?

Rules are made up in the name of "safety", and they pass because yes there's an element of truth, but what goes unsaid is that much of the time it's maintaining the status quo and blocking competition.

swatcoder• 2 years ago

I agree that a modern grocer or butcher might wow them, but it's way less given that contemporary supermarkets would.

Those supermarkets are a product of a far more modern and culturally specific consumerism, which is not so innate as you might think. Many of us have been raised into and it's been gradually exported around the world, but it's the food equivalent of free to play MMO -- overstimulating, manipulative, confusing, and in many ways far divorced from the far more universal basics of buying food to cook and eat.

DamnInteresting• 2 years ago

And a whole aisle full of splinter-free toiler paper![1]

[1] https://www.historydefined.net/splinter-free-toilet-paper-di...

mikestew• 2 years ago

Is that whole site just LLM-generated crap? About the only thing that link has to do with "splinter-free toilet paper" is that those words exist in the post, and yet telling me nothing about the topic. I cross-checked another post (because everyone has a bad writing day), and yup, more of the same.

ghaff7• 2 years ago

The mind would be perhaps be not quite as blown but the modern large urban area supermarket would be pretty mindblowing to someone from the 1960s. You could probably get a lot of the stuff the random gourmet-ish cook might want but it would probably involve some combination of Saturday farmer's markets--which might have other things like beef--(which my mother did with some regularity), maybe a separate fish market (ditto), a specialty gourmet store, ethnic market, etc.

And, as you say, things like out of season fruits and vegetables or the variety of things like spices and teas would be largely unavailable outside of maybe specialty stores in the largest cities.

eleveriven4• 2 years ago

I sometimes think that modern American super market would blow the minds of a lot of people nowadays too

pfdietz14• 2 years ago

There's a reason some people celebrate when Wegmans opens near them.

metadat• 2 years ago

And why would bread be full of sand and grit?

NateEag• 2 years ago

Because using millstones to grind grains into flour leaves traces of sand and stone grit in the flour.

It's really hard on the teeth long-term, IIUC.

buildsjets• 2 years ago

Thresh a bushel of wheat by hand by tossing it in the open air outdoors, and let us know the results of your experiment.

ks20483• 2 years ago

This would blow many people's minds, but *more than* the magical rectangle in our pockets that plays endless moving pictures and sounds and all the world's information? Oh and talk (with live images) of people instantly across the globe? Not even close.

MisterBastahrd5• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the story of the VERY early German settlers in Louisiana. They didn't have work animals such as horses or food / sustenance animals such as cows for the first decade of their time settling here (and to be clear, cows were used ONLY for milk... killing cows was a crime in early colonial Louisiana). Clearing the land for farming? The Company des Indes gave them each a pickaxe, a hoe, and a spade.

The progenitor of the Folse family in particular cleared the land, then became ill with malarial fever all summer, and then a hurricane flooded his property. 2 years after his arrival, he managed to harvest an entire 7 barrels worth of rice, which he had to hand-transport from the Hahnville area of modern day St. Charles Parish to New Orleans for sale.

One of the reasons the people there had such good relationships with the local native Americans (and why Creole Louisiana is such a melting pot to this day) is that they didn't have time to focus on procuring meat, so instead they would trade their crops with the natives, while the natives went hunting for meat and taught the children how to hunt, too.

wordsinaline• 2 years ago

Can you explain the sand and grit part?

bongoman42• 2 years ago

Poor quality grinding of grains and adulteration can leave sand and grit in the flour. Still happens sometimes in places like India at least.

kjkjadksj2• 2 years ago

There are tradeoffs of course, its not all a direct upgrade. The deli section has certainly gotten a lot worse than 100 years ago. No capicola anywhere that I've seen. Cheese offerings leave a lot to be desired now that they've been reduced to the same half dozen usual suspects. All the food in that deli might be entirely monopolized by boars head or dietz and watson. Pickles, same thing with the vlassic/mt olive race to the bottom. I'm not even sure we can really honestly say the bread situation has improved other than the fact a machine now slices it.

wayeq• 2 years ago

Kind of rough for those of us that prefer sand and grit unsliced break though..

nsguy• 2 years ago

Sliced bread is a step in the wrong direction though ;)

Merad• 2 years ago

Walmart. Walmart is totally the winner in this category. It has all of the grocery store things you mentioned plus mountains of clothing, household goods, mind blowing technology, medicines...

Show them all of these wonders - then tell them that this is where poor people shop.

schoen2• 2 years ago

Last year I read some fan fiction in which a young woman comes isekai-style from a medievalish fantasy world to present-day Nevada. To make a long story short, one thing she concludes during this experience is that God wishes to bless everyone with ... a CostCo!

bmitc3• 2 years ago

I think supermarkets hide a bit of a scary thought though. It sends this signal as food always being available, but it sits atop a very tightly "balanced" supply chain that is quite fragile. A few major supply chain disruptions and food scarcity becomes real very fast (a few days at most).

prawn3• 2 years ago

Also exposed when thinking about hardware stores. If you need to build/repair part of your house and the supply chain for wood or steel is gone, are you going to wait for tall, straight trees to grow? And then if you don't have milling hardware? Know how to create and extrude steel roofing or angle iron or similar?

dclowd9901• 2 years ago

Anything that stems from _protocol_, to me, is astounding.

Yes, the internet is predictable in a sort of “yeah I think people will eventually all want to be able to communicate with each other easily.”

But if I said to Benjamin Franklin — the ambassador to France during the American revolution — that the internet only works because every country in the world agreed to do internet the same way, he would’ve said “fuck you, no way”

throw__away7391• 2 years ago

I remember when I was a kid reading an old fairy tale, perhaps from Grimm's, about a girl given the "impossible" task of getting "strawberries in winter" or face some horrible consequences, but she was helped by a fairy. This was considered literal magic not that long ago.

m463• 2 years ago

I think stores have become much more welcoming.

The doors automatically open for you, the interior is nicely arranged, everything is brightly lit, and food is chilled, refrigerated and frozen.

Also, cold coca cola.

xdennis• 2 years ago

The bread isn't full of sand and grit? And it's sliced!!!

I agree with you on the other points but this. People too often try to make the present look better by hyper focusing on bad things in the past.

Bread was sometimes adulterated with sand or sawdust, but it was not the norm.

I don't think that a past peasant (who would bake his own bread and eat it fresh out of the oven) would be impressed by supermarket bread. People who think sliced bread is good have never tasted real bread.

weiliddat• 2 years ago

Just this past month was my first ever visit to Canada, and the supermarkets here also blew my mind (I spent the last decade in Germany and before that in a mix of Malaysia/Singapore). I heard this was also representative of US supermarkets.

I was mostly surprised at the ridiculous size of the mall footprint (no wonder they need to put these in the middle of nowhere and require cars); of the variety of things (like the parent comment mentioned); the variety of the same thing (30 different types of frozen pizzas), of the packaging (especially Costco holy shit, some package sizes are what some supermarkets where I live have on display).

It is very convenient and impressive, but I have mixed feelings about the trade-offs, like needing a car to get around and carry larger quantities of groceries (though I’m unsure whether big box stores or car dominant culture came first or maybe hand-in-hand), the majority of food choices on offer seem less than ideal for your long term health (lots of packaged and processed meals, junk food), and lack of origin or locality of goods (though farmer / wet markets do exist for that).

Bendy• 2 years ago

“The future is going to be boring.” - J. G. Ballard

genewitch7• 2 years ago

"Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than originally thought" - Krista Now

marssaxman3• 2 years ago

Writing to you from several decades into the future of my own past, I can confirm that this is definitely the case.

ativzzz• 2 years ago

Is it the future that's boring or do we just lose our sense of wonder as we age and become jaded about the world?

gmuslera• 2 years ago

There are emergent processes that would make people from some centuries ago wonder how they ever become to be. And it goes beyond technology. Pervasive internet, information and social networks, are technologies, but how that has changed us, how we relate to others, wherever they are, and how we see the world should be something to marvel about, for good and bad.

flobosg• 2 years ago

The big science news on Friday was that for the first time we have done this for an insect brain.

If I’m not wrong, the Drosophila connectome was released last year.

dotnet009• 2 years ago

It's refreshing to see a rare openly optimistic article about the world here first thing in the morning.

I also like to occasionally appreciate how someone from even just the recent past would see our current world as one full of manmade wonders.

Another one of these would be microwaves, although conceptually simple as a box that heats stuff, it'd be pretty mind bending that it does it essentially wirelessly.

Adding on to the point about going to the Moon being universally mind blowing, I think it would be (and still is) even more mind blowing that we stopped doing that and didn't bother trying for 50 years, in large part because the people of the time lost interest...

lordgrenville• 2 years ago

Considering that it's staggeringly expensive and there's not much to see there, it seems like the right decision to hold off once we'd established it could be done.

somenameforme7• 2 years ago

Except in a parallel world where we continued forward making advances in space we could already be a defacto post-scarcity species (as far as materials are concerned at least), exporting our heavy carbon producing industries to the Moon - simultaneously helping create an atmosphere there, while avoiding any climate impact here, have effectively infinite land to expand outward into, countless high paying jobs perpetuating all of this across the entire solar system if not beyond. And so on endlessly.

Instead we're sending toy rovers to Mars, unable to solve climate change in any way that has any chance of actually moving forward, trending rapidly towards WW3 as nations' schemes invariably turn towards each other, with no grand outlet for expansion/growth to otherwise occupy themselves. And so on endlessly. I think it's quite a poor direction we've chosen.

And I'd also add that this is assuming there are no revolutionary discoveries out there awaiting discovery. It's basically impossible to imagine something like electricity/electromagnetism before its discovery. As we live on a single planet in a virtually endless - and ever stranger - universe, one can only imagine how many other revolutionary discoveries, things we cannot even really imagine today, await our eventual discovery. It's hard to know what we don't know, but I think there is probably a rather tremendous amount. And it seems reasonable to expect that exploring the cosmos is one way of taking us closer to it.

dotnet009• 2 years ago

While I can understand that as a reason for not sending crew there, we didn't even send uncrewed landers. The result being that now our technology has changed so much that we have to relearn how to autonomously land there. If we had been sending the occasional lander, we would've smoothly transitioned from the technology of then to the technology of now.

Nevermark2• 2 years ago

It remained staggeringly expensive because the Space Shuttle was a disastrous design to follow up the lunar rockets. It held up the space program half a century in some ways.

It reduced the manned program to Earth orbit, was supposed to be highly reusable to reduce launch costs, but didn't work out that way. And of course, it was supposed to be reliable and safer.

If we had continued going to the moon, even infrequently, or aimed further, we would have had no choice but to actually achieve reusability, safety and reliability much sooner.

(In the meantime, ... NASA's current manned program isn't better. Multi-billion dollar throw away rockers. Good thing someone validated reusable first stages and space craft, and is working to eliminate non-reusable second stages.)

aftbit3• 2 years ago

Foolish short-sighted take. Imagine if the same opinion held during the age of sail. There's literally more resources than are currently controlled by our entire planet in the asteroid belt, and a lunar colony (at least a refueling station in space) would be a huge boon to anyone who wants to go explore further.

If that's not good enough, how about outsourcing our shitty resource extraction and polluting manufacturing to space, where there's no life to care about the waste and disruption?

Not to mention that if space flight were commonly available and cheap today (more feasible than you seem to think - remember computers were once phenomenally expensive and now they're so cheap as to be thrown away), more could experience the overview effect, the cognitive shift that comes when you see Earth hanging in the void of space. That would probably make humanity better to each other and our planet.

Or what about the fact that the Apollo program basically launched our discipline of computer science? Surely there was more to be learned and discovered from striving to make spaceflight routine. If only we had a generation of scientists and engineers working on hard science problems rather than ad-tech, the world would be a much better today place.

somenameforme7• 2 years ago

Re: Moon landing -

It had very little to do with people losing interest. In 1972 Nixon defacto completely cancelled the human space program, which he had been rapidly stripping away since Apollo 13. He was paranoid that a catastrophic failure was imminent and would negatively affect his 1972 election campaign. Interestingly when he signed off on the final stripping down in 1972, he remarked that we may never set foot on the Moon again this century. That would've sounded quite absurd at the time, but was ultimately completely correct.

It's kind of ironic that the stereotypical context of the space race was it supposedly having been a proxy for an ideological battle between capitalism and communism. Yet the US space program existed solely and exclusively due to a large and heavily centralized governmental effort. It's only in very modern times that private companies can take to the stars, completely independent of governments, which is why we've been able to make vastly made more progress in the past 10 years than we did in the 40 prior.

A good starting point off for going down this rabbit hole would probably be here. [1]

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

dotnet009• 2 years ago

That covers the cancellation of Apollo, but the fact that we didn't even put an uncrewed lander on the Moon within the 50 years in between is indicative of a lack of general interest, since we've had several presidents in these 50 years.

Still, this did lead me to the discovery that apparently the often made claim that viewership of the landings waned after Apollo 11 doesn't seem to have any clear evidence besides the point that Apollo 11 had the highest live viewer count until apparently the most recent Superbowl. The EVA camera was damaged in Apollo 12, and 13 was just poorly covered by the media until the crew encountered trouble.

paulryanrogers6• 2 years ago

It's only in very modern times that private companies can take to the stars, completely independent of governments...

Are there any private companies putting humans in space without huge government grants, launch facilities, or ex-gov talent?

thombat• 2 years ago

NASA had only contracted for 15 Saturn V stacks, and in 1968 declined to start the second production run. That was still under Johnson - although Nixon was doubtless happy with the decision it had already become obvious that Congress wasn't going to approve sustaining the NASA budget at that level once the moon was in the bag.

hnbad• 2 years ago

This reminds me of how the sad state of fiber broadband in Germany is ultimately the result of 1990s chancellor Helmut Kohl (the one who saw over the reunification, consequently selling off the East German public property to private investors for scraps) thinking that public TV was too hostile to him and wanting to empower private broadcasters by publicly funding cable television, which delayed the investment in fiber broadband by repurposing cable for broadband as a stop-gap solution.

Basically a long-running chancellor in the 1990s wanted to push media that presented him more favorably and that's why thirty years later our Internet is slow.

titzer• 2 years ago

it supposedly having been a proxy for an ideological battle

More than anything, it was a proxy for developing ICBMs and other space capabilities (e.g. satellites) for fighting the cold war.

adwn• 2 years ago

Yet the US space program existed solely and exclusively due to a large and heavily centralized governmental effort.

That's not quite the right conclusion to draw from this. The US could afford to put a humongous amount of resources into its space program because of the productive output unleashed by capitalism and a market-based economy. For example, the US spent a lot of money on a brute-force approach to fixing the combustion instability problems in the huge F-1 engines through trial-and-error; the USSR could not afford to do this, and was forced to go with a much larger number of smaller engines (which due to budgetary constraints couldn't be tested together before the actual launch, with catastrophic consequences).

jrgd• 2 years ago

"It's a bit fiddly because time isn't passing at the same rate for the device as it is for the satellites, but we were able to work it out."

that just knocked my brain down.

yen223• 2 years ago

The fact that we worked it out before sending out those satellites is a minor miracle in of itself

genewitch7• 2 years ago

Yeah, the idea that you can triangulate from the delay in receiving timestamps that are synchronized within (40ns? seems high, see below) isn't that mind-blowing. If you have synchronized clocks and a mechanism that records timestamps from various locations with those clocks when you get a voltage spike on an antenna, you can triangulate lightning strikes to within several hundred feet - from practically anywhere in the hemisphere (blitzortung.org).

But i like pointing out that it was the relativistic part that was impressive, for sure.

40ns seems high since you can have an "error" after many hours of receiving of less than 10ns, and on a good, clear day, you can get to within 1ns, on cheap hardware. My GPS drift is 10 feet over a week, gradually getting smaller. If i put my good receiver in the center of my kitchen, the points converge to within the confines of the walls within 48 hours.

However this may just be error correction, and the satellite clocks may be inaccurate to 40ns, i am unsure.

wiz21c• 2 years ago

Computers. Franklin had none of them and if he'd see ours, he'd had is mind blown.

pushcx• 2 years ago

I think this post is right that Franklin would've been impressed by GPS. The author doesn't call it out, but the Longitude Problem was a significant area of scientific and engineering inquiry in Franklin's lifetime, with special focus on the difficulty of doing so at sea. I haven't looked into it, but given his research mapping the Gulf Stream it seems likely he spent time on the problem himself.

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

mckn1ght2• 2 years ago

If only Ben Franklin had access to https://ciechanow.ski/gps/, he could’ve invented GPS to solve it!

genewitch7• 2 years ago

this reminds me of that site linked here last year that explained and diagrammed the inner workings of a wristwatch. I used singlefile to save the page, as i do with any page that impresses me (or is noteworthy or newsworthy or needs to be saved as proof, etc)

nuancebydefault• 2 years ago

Indeed, GPS is when you think about it, possible in theory but practically impossible. So it must be magic!

PS I believe I found a little mistake in the article: '...and because the GPS device also has a perfect clock...'

tomjen33• 2 years ago

You also need to take into account what isn't there: How do you think Franklin would take it that we went to every single corner of the earth and killed Smallpox dead?

Like every tiny hamlet in India?

In fact, let him by the grave yard and note the ages of the dead.

sethammons5• 2 years ago

let him by the grave yard and note the ages of the dead

Suggesting what? That people live longer? That is a modern myth. Socrates died in his 80s. The average lifespan being low was because so many children died. People have been living 70-90 years for thousands of years, likely longer.

verisimi• 2 years ago

An obvious winner, something sure to blow Franklin's mind is “yeah, we've sent people to the Moon to see what it was like, they left scientific instruments there and then they came back with rocks and stuff.” But that's no everyday thing, it blew everyone's mind when it happened and it still does. Some things I tell Franklin make him goggle and say “We did what?” and I shrug modestly and say yeah, it's pretty impressive, isn't it.

I hate this sort of writing - 'WE did this or that', 'shrugging modestly'. It has this arrogance about it. Pride for being part of something that the individual had nothing to do with. It reminds me of the kid at school that joins the winning team to get a medal, but can't even play the game and only gets in the way.

dotnet009• 2 years ago

It's more like a kid who is really proud that the current champion at their sport was an alumni of the same school. It's inspiring without doing any harm.

Perhaps you're being too bitter about life if you think that the only things people are allowed to feel a connection to are the things they've personally played a role in.

In this specific example, considering that most of us are under 50 and thus weren't even alive to be able to participate, and thus can only see it as part of our collective history as a species.

Ferret74462• 2 years ago

I felt the same, during a low period in my life. Now that I am older, more experienced, and recognize my own contributions to society, I no longer feel this guilt or project it onto others.

sethammons5• 2 years ago

See every sports fan, political armchair pundit, etc. "what we need to do is..."

beginning_end• 2 years ago

There's so much cool stuff these days, like interstellar iron: https://physicsworld.com/a/antarctic-snow-yields-interstella...

fooblaster• 2 years ago

Don't forget about our terrible marvels. We have a red button in Washington and if we press it, within 15 minutes we can turn half of the cities on the planet into a burning hellscape.

pfdietz14• 2 years ago

There's a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal about the fantasy of explaining current knowledge to leading lights of the past, but I can't find the link. Anyone?

saintamh• 2 years ago

This one?

https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3106#comic

pfdietz14• 2 years ago

Yes, that one. Thanks!

fritzo• 2 years ago

Ribosomes. People are filled with 10^20 little printing presses whose typeface contains four letters, and whose newspapers conduct microscopic commerce. All of life is based on ribosomes.

wwarner• 2 years ago

We can feel superior to the past, but by the same logic, how will the past judge us? I suppose it depends on what problems we manage to solve in the future; i.e. the future will have a lot of the same problems we have today, but which ones?

the_af2• 2 years ago

A related thought-exercise I sometimes engage in, inspired by Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" is this:

Ok, so I have a university education and know lots about computers. If I traveled back to the Middle Ages -- actually, make it the (inaccurately named) Dark Ages or even more ancient times, say the Roman Republic -- how much of my modern day knowledge would I be able to use to impress the natives?

The telephone? Nope. I cannot even explain how the telegraph works.

Electricity? Sort of. But how would I use it?

Hm... computers are completely out of the question, I wouldn't be able to explain how they differ from an abacus or why they are so novel.

TV? Not without an example.

The... um, steam machine? Look, I cannot really make anything with my hands, so I understand the principle but wouldn't be able to replicate it.

The... um... the printing press maybe?

Or tell them to wash their hands thoroughly before/after touching an open wound?

In conclusion: I suck.

ghaff7• 2 years ago

Assuming someone would take your word as gospel your amateur medical knowledge is probably worth more than most of your knowledge of engineering which just requires too much of a tech tree.

Maybe if you’re a gunsmith on the side or something.

marssaxman3• 2 years ago

You may enjoy the novel "Lest Darkness Fall" by L. Sprague de Camp, who explored this idea back in 1939.

the_af2• 2 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation! It seems I will enjoy it; it belongs in the same theme as Mark Twain's novel, only it's not humorous.

On that note, Wikipedia took me to "The Man Who Came Early" by Poul Anderson, which fits what I'm saying exactly: a modern day man is taken back to Viking-age Iceland, where his knowledge fails him catastrophically as he is unable to explain it or put it into practice, to disastrous results.

AnimalMuppet2• 2 years ago

You could calculate stuff, just by using arabic numerals rather than roman. You could calculate even more stuff with calculus. Between those two, you could solve lots of impressive problems. (Again, though, they'd have to trust you, because they wouldn't understand the answers at all.)

bandyaboot• 2 years ago

“That’s all really amazing, but I’m having trouble with the thing you said about how despite all of this half the country thinks things are terrible?”

“Yeah, but get this, the half that thinks things are terrible regularly flips and vice-versa.”

“Really? What’s changing so drastically?”

“Nothing. Let’s talk about microchips.”

inasio• 2 years ago

Nice article! I used to have a similar "friend" I liked to chat with and impress him with our modern marvels, not quite Benjamin Franklin though, I read a ton of pirate books and this particular Malaysian gentleman was pretty impressed by what modern artillery could do, and lately about those insanely fast hydrofoil sailboats/kitesurfs/windsurfs

asdfman123• 2 years ago

I hate to play the pessimist here, but I wish we could balance these amazing technological advances with the wisdom on how to use them.

Phones are awesome to look up information or video chat family members on another part of the planet. But staring at them for emotional regulation while avoiding real people around you is a mistake.

I wonder how we're going to solve this problem culturally. I'm trying to change my own habits, but it's hard.

pyrale• 2 years ago

I hate to play the pessimist here, but I wish we could balance these amazing technological advances with the wisdom on how to use them.

This article left me with the same feeling. Technology advances so fast we're simply unable to collectively process the power we have. We're the equivalent of a toddler finding daddy's gun.

aftbit3• 2 years ago

Or this quote from Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars:

"We're like dwarves in a waldo[.] One of those really big waldo excavators. We're inside it and supposed to be moving a mountain, and instead of using the waldo capabilities we're leaning out of a window and digging with teaspoons. And complimenting each other on the way we're taking advantage of the height."

We don't even realize what is possible with our current technology.

nicklecompte• 2 years ago

Minor nitpick:

A past what-the-fuck was that we know exactly how many cells there are (959) in a particular little worm, C. elegans, and how each of those cells arises from the division of previous cells, as the grows from a fertilized egg, and we know what each cell does and how they are connected, and we know that 302 of those cells are nerve cells, and how the nerve cells are connected together. (There are 6,720 connections.)

We have no clue what most C elegans neurons actually do, we only know how they are connected. The behavior of most individual C elegans neurons (and by extension the brain) is basically a mystery, and it might take a few decades of experimental advances to figure it out.

Not to downplay the coolness of this. But a lot of people seem to think "we know the C elegans connectome" means "we know how the C elegans brain works." In fact it tells us very little about the brain - an analogy I like is that it's akin to understanding a complex circuit purely by wires and solder, without knowing if you're connecting to a capacitor, an inductor, etc. The information is necessary but far from sufficient.

afpx• 2 years ago

"What I cannot create, I do not understand." - Richard Feynman

andbberger• 2 years ago

no one but sebastian seung and his gang of hacks actually thinks this. the connectome is but a very useful, _very_ expensive tool.

and, actually as of writing, we have a connectome for the _adult_ drosophila brain (more than one actually). two orders of magnitude larger, 200,000 neurons.

neuroscience discussions on orange website are always a sight to behold but, uh, even more so than the connectome (we spent $50M peeling atomically thin layers off the most important fly to have ever lived and then hundreds of man years annotating it) the techniques of modern neuroscience would blow people away. we routinely image from the entire drosophila brain at several hertz, while it is running on a virtual reality treadmill using biological sensors genetically engineered to be expressed in a specific subset of neurons.

corytheboyd• 2 years ago

I’d like to imagine explaining e-sports to a ye olde person. Alright so we invented computers, cool I guess, but then we made video games, which are like movies you get to drive yourself with a human interface device (we just call it a controller). We then developed competitive skill based games over time, and the ability for many humans to play at the same time in the same video game world. Then we created leagues and tournaments, to the point where it’s a serious career.

We love fantasizing about what future sports would look like in sci-fi, but… we kinda already have them now! Way more interesting than “football… but in space!” Fun to think about, loved this article :)

sanderjd• 2 years ago

The Internet? Well, again yes, but no. The complicated engineering details are complicated engineering, but again the basic idea is easily within the reach of the 18th century and is not all that astounding.

I get that this is a set-up to the more astounding inventions discussed further on, but I think this one is a stretch. I buy the paragraph as a description for why telegraphs would not have been astounding, but I think there are a few step-changes from there to the global broadband packet-switched internet that exists today. I don't think this is the same "basic idea" as telegraphs.

actuallyalys• 2 years ago

Yeah, I think the idea of a single interconnected network across the planet would be astounding, even if the idea of using wires for communication is not.

credit_guy• 2 years ago

That's nothing.

The thing Benjamin Franklin would have marveled at is how many things we refuse to do.

If you told Franklin that within 9 months of us getting hit by a new virus we would start mass-producing a vaccine, he would be impressed, but not all that much. But if you told him hundreds of millions of people refused to take the vaccine, he'd then be truly astonished.

If you told Franklin that only 65 years after first flying an airplane we landed humans on the Moon, he would give an appreciative nod. If you told him we built and tested a thermal nuclear rocket engine and it was working better than one could hope, and then we completely shelved the project, he will admit that his brain is too small to comprehend that.

Make sure you do not mention GMOs to Ben Franklin.

bmitc3• 2 years ago

My threshold for marvel is much higher. I feel we're in an age of un-marvels. Nearly every technological "improvement" feels worse than the thing it replaced. I'm not even that old, but things were once much, much more simple before the Internet controlled us all. Except when it comes to healthcare related advances, I feel we'd be much better off without all this technology we've slaved ourselves to.

rlhf• 2 years ago

Agree with the comment "Trying to handle the stolen use case but not allowing nefarious tracking seems to be at odds with each other."

femto• 2 years ago

and because the GPS device also has a perfect clock

The smart thing about GPS is that the GPS device doesn't need a perfect clock. It's comparing the phase of signals from multiple satellites, so avoiding an absolute time of flight measurement, which would require an accurate clock.

physicles• 2 years ago

Came here to post this comment. It's a common misconception even among people who sort of know how GPS works.

jvm___• 2 years ago

We've convinced sand and various metals, at the nano-scale level, to allow us to remotely view - in real-time - things that are out of sight.

Time-machine back to 1900 and tell someone that. You'd be burnt at the stake as a witch (not really, but you'd sound insane).

GMoromisato2• 2 years ago

For real existential-crisis-inducing marvels, you have to go with evolution. Once Darwin worked out natural selection, and it was combined with Mendel's genes, a whole host of primal questions were suddenly answered: Who created us? Why are we here? What is our purpose?

If you were to give Franklin a copy of "The Selfish Gene", I'm curious if he would believe it. Would he reject it and become (remain?) a creationist? Or would he accept that everything he believed about why we are here is wrong.

w0de02• 2 years ago

In fairness to the explicitly agnostic, I don’t think evolution or genetics are teleologies of humankind, or of consciousness, or even of simple life. These primal questions remain unanswered, if not unanswerable. Granted, a whole host of prior answers were revealed to be nonsense. (I’m sure Franklin would be unsurprised at this; an enlightenment polymath can hardly have credited the common man’s creationism - Jefferson, by way of comparison, was a rational deist.)

GMoromisato2• 2 years ago

This is an excellent point. And you're probably right that Franklin and maybe Jefferson might have understood and accepted evolution--Darwin's world of the 1860s was not that different from Franklin's era.

But even today, I think many people do not understand the philosophical implications of evolution. Daniel Dennet wrote a whole book on this: "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" (which, perhaps you're familiar with). I think Franklin would have been shocked at evolution's explanatory power. It's hard to talk about things like emotions (anger, lust, jealousy), ethics (justice, retaliation), medicine, or even sexuality without invoking genetics and evolutionary theory.

I agree with you that evolution does not (and cannot) disprove the existence of God (or gods) or even that we were created 6,000 years ago (maybe God created the world to look as if it's ancient).

But I think Franklin would see that evolution has shrunk the numinous realm down to a very small box, and I think that would have shocked him.

soueuls• 2 years ago

I truly enjoyed the read, my only criticism is about the « internet »

Yes, down to the core it’s indeed just transmitting electrical current from one side to the other.

But I believe Franklin would be amazed by the sheer ingenuity that followed.

The absurd hacky ways we found to make video games.

The protocols. The encryption and all the people that make completely useless stuff, just for the beauty of it.

Like implementing a Turing complete machine inside the game of life, to build a game of life from it

It’s an age of marvels

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