It is fifty years since the beep beep beep sound emitting from little Sputnik 1 echoed around the world.

It was October 4, 1957.

It was the beginning of the Space Age for humanity.

The New York Times on AOL: Sputnik

In a world still afflicted by conflicts, children dying daily from preventable diseases, environmental degradation, atrocities, and a multitude of other depressing problems, there is so much solace and optimism in the amazing exploits of humanity in the field of space exploration.

The past fifty years has seen many marvellous events…

The first man in space… Yuri Gagarin - First Man in Space - Vostok Spacecraft -

the missions to the Moon… Human Space Flight (HSF) - Apollo History

The Pioneer 10 spacecraft… http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1...ay: Spacecraft

The Space Shuttle… http://history.nasa.gov/shuttlehisto...]Space Shuttle

The Mir Space Station…Mir space station

The robotic missions to Mars…Mars Exploration: Home

And much more we did…and much more yet to come.

Happy birthday, little Sputnik…may you beep forever in our hearts.

Tethys

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-- Harry S. Truman

It is truly sad. If the worlds populace/governments could only work together, it would be amazing as to what we could do for humanity.
Eliminate disease, eliminate hunger, eliminate poverty, eliminate "etc".

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Anyone who thinks freedom comes cheap, please put the blindfold on and stand against the wall.

Many times I believe Americans will have to take back the country and start a new government.

My hat is off, as well, to the little silver sphere that paved the way for the future of humanity.

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“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” - Mark Twain

A little something to show just how far mankind has come in our journey into space (from Popular Science, August, 1933):

Link to full article and scans of original pages

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“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” - Mark Twain

Well, some people still say humans cannot visit the Moon, and have never been there.

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President Josiah Bartlet: Sweden has a 100% literacy rate. 100%! How do they do that?
Leo McGarry: Maybe they don't and they can't add.

I do likewise. It is actually beside the point, but Sputnik 1's surface was made of polished aluminium.

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President Josiah Bartlet: Sweden has a 100% literacy rate. 100%! How do they do that?
Leo McGarry: Maybe they don't and they can't add.

Yes, we need a global cooperation in the form of the friendly competition of the market economy.

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President Josiah Bartlet: Sweden has a 100% literacy rate. 100%! How do they do that?
Leo McGarry: Maybe they don't and they can't add.

And those people have placed their mistrust of the US government over their reasoning abilities.

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“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” - Mark Twain

Not unlike people who spout similar fanciful notions like:We will never eliminate disease. The elimination of smallpox has allowed for the rise of cancer. The quest for a germ-free environment has given rise to near-unstoppable 'super germs'. People are designed to self-destruct and make room for the next generations, and viruses and bacteria are designed to overcome whatever defenses we may come up with.

We will probably never eliminate hunger. While your premise of getting all governments to work together negates the fact that all vaguely recent famines have had a major political component, less hunger will generally lead to more people, which will lead to more food demands, which will be met if ending hunger is our primary goal, and thus we will have even More mouths to feed, and so on, until at some point we truly meet the saturation point of earth's food production (or exhaust its supplies), and we'll find ourselves with a Lot more people and a lot more... hunger. I did throw in 'probably' because if some sort of draconion population control measures are adopted in parallel, it Might be achievable.

We will never end poverty. Poverty is comparative. If you could wave your magic wand and give everyone on the planet a house with running water and a full pantry, a medical savings account, and a college education (and a couple other things you consider the opposite of 'poverty'), you would simply have college grads asking if you wanted fries, dopeheads letting their houses fall into disrepair, and people whose houses only had 1 or 2 bedrooms. While much better off, they would still be the new 'poor'.

We will never eliminate "etc". It is too much fun to use, plus can sneak in by way of its many aliases, "et cetera", "...", in some cases "blah blah blah", and so on. There are probably even versions I'm not thinking of. (Like the one I already slipped into this paragraph after I had made my 'comprehensive' list!) Just like disease and poverty, "etc" is a scourge that we'll be stuck with for a very long time.


Besides which, a lot of advancements have been dependent on, or at the very least facilitated by, war and conflict. Among other things, Sputnik went into space on what was essentially an ICBM, built over-powered to carry not-yet-designed H-bomb warheads. We're discussing this on an internet originally designed to maintain military and governmental communication even when many hubs were destroyed by such nuclear weapons. Modern electronics are based on metallurgy and materials sciences that trace their roots to the quest to build better cannons. (Or at the very least made some appreciable progress in the course of that quest.) The US space program itself, plus whatever technological spin-offs it may have engendered, were a result of the one-upsmanship of cold war non-cooperation. So while I won't go so far as to say war and conflict are overall Good things, they do have some appreciable upsides that a lot of people ignore.

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Today's forecast: Government corruption.

Tomorrow's forecast: 100% chance of more 'politics as usual'

Maybe it's finally time to vote Libertarian

I was thinking more along the lines of feeding the hungry and eliminating disease. Economics alone wouldn't stop that.

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Anyone who thinks freedom comes cheap, please put the blindfold on and stand against the wall.

Many times I believe Americans will have to take back the country and start a new government.

True, I mean WMD changed everything. The dropping of the atomic bomb especially. While people often debate on whether it should of been dropped or invented in the first place, I on the other hand can't imagine what the world would be like without it nukes. The Cold War was just the result of it, in which conflict didn't dissipate entirely but I do honestly believe that WWIII's delay has a lot to do with WMD. Fear keeps us in check after all, since reasonable/nice people don't seem to do it.

Fools! Where do they think I'm posting from?

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THE GOVERNMENT HAS SENT ME

On Sunday I went to listen to an amazing talk by an Australian physicist, Dr. Ken McCracken, at the Power House Museum in Sydney.

50 years on, Sputnik success still shines | COSMOS magazine

Dr. Ken McCracken was co-opted by NASA to track Sputnik from his lab in Tasmania when he was a young scientist in 1957. One of his tasks was to confirm that the signal was not a hoax.

Tethys

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-- Harry S. Truman

Quite agree. And beyond that, we could go to Mars and undertake many other ventures that are prohibitive for individual nations to tackle on their own.

Tethys

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-- Harry S. Truman

I could not read the article, but it sounds interesting. I love all that historical stuff. …it is probably not in a format readable by my screen reader. Any chance of obtaining it as a text file?

Anyway, at the talk I attended, Dr McCracken talked about how flights to the Moon had to be timed to avoid sun spot effects. This would be a bigger challenge for any manned mission to Mars, where apparently the windows for a safe voyage could be around 11 years apart. Talk about missing the bus!

Tethys

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-- Harry S. Truman