
What Will the Moon Landing Mean to the Future? - benbreen
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/moon-landing-50-years-later/593803/
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qubex
I hate to say this, but this whole piece just reeks of reactionary postmodern
celebration of a lone, absurdist contrarian. I stopped reading when the author
doled out the painful phrase “ _It must mean something that only 12 humans
have walked, laughed, and even danced on the lunar surface, and all were white
men_ ”. Beg your pardon? It certainly _doesn’t_ need to mean anything beyond
that we collectively abandoned our ambitions _before_ the modern drive for
equality kicked in – and that means that the moonshot was a throughly _modern_
, as opposed to societally self-absorbed _post-modern_ enterprise. Trotting
out a theologian, if the Catholic vein who allegedly believed in a personal
and very much masculine God in the Judeo-Christian tradition and using his
words as an excuse to segue into this kind of tacked-on, post-hock drivel is
nigh unforgivable.

Should’ve people of other races and genders walked on the moon too? Certainly.
Because _we shouldn’t have stopped going there once the symbolic victory was
attained_. But to disparage the achievement by draping it in the cultural
terms of _our_ time is just... hideous revisionism.

I’m beside myself with contempt for the author and the editor. Stuff your
revisionism and woke virtue-signalling where the sun doesn’t shine and at the
awkwardest angle you can devise.

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jobigoud
I think it's in Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky", space faring humans
far in the future are still using the Unix Epoch in their time keeping code,
but it's so ancient by then that the exact origins are lost and they are
conflating it with the Moon Landing, a more concrete seminal event for such a
civilization.

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libraryatnight
10-15 years ago it was sort of an ironic joke to mock moon landing conspiracy
theorists, ("Moon landing? We never landed on the moon!" lulz) that sarcasm
was lost and now I meet lots and lots of people who think it's a legitimate
position to deny the moon landing. Like everything - it's just a belief or an
opinion.

So I think it'll be remembered as a hoax in the future thanks to memes and
just general internet fuckwadery.

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dwaltrip
Is there any serious and generally respected organization that denies the moon
landings? 99.99% of memes will be forgotten forever, crushed quietly by the
grinding stone of time.

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wincy
The only way I would pay attention to denial of the moon landing is if it was
someone like Russia. The fact that Russia did not dispute the moon landing
seems like a very strong signal that it actually happened.

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dwaltrip
I was simply being skeptical of the idea that historical records in the future
will, in any serious way, deny the moon landings. Seems quite far fetched to
me. Moon landing denial seems pretty fringe from my understanding.

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RodgerTheGreat
It comes as no surprise that the author of one of the least subtle allegorical
strawman attacks on scientific institutions in literary history- _That Hideous
Strength_ \- can see a stunning feat of engineering and human will only as an
attack on the mystery and romance of the natural world.

To explore and understand our universe cannot diminish it- it only enriches
our ability to appreciate it. I for one hope the future will regard Clive
Staples Lewis as a dogmatic, small-minded fool.

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Jun8
Obligatory link of Feynman expressing the same thought:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo)

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fdavison
Yes! That was the first thing I thought of: "I don't understand how it
subtracts"

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imtringued
The moon is devoid of everything interesting.

If it was easy to extract water from the moon then we would have colonized the
moon merely a decade after the first moon landing. The true space age could
have started before the age of the internet. Unfortunately it just didn't
happen.

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ourcat
Due to the amount of money involved in these ventures, the phase in the future
will be 'Moon Branding'.

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EliRivers
The furthest a human ever went :/

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Koshkin
... and, I am afraid, ever will. One just needs to realize that life (on
Earth) critically depends on being able to increase the entropy of the
environment. A spaceship (smaller than a planet) simply cannot provide an
environment that could support such need for an extended period of time.

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krastanov
Except for the fact that we continuously discover new energy sources and new
ways to store information. There are indeed fundamental limits imposed by
thermodynamics, but something as crude as space travel is not limited by them.
Rather the limit is the immaturity of our technology.

And a space ship is not an isolated system: it can shed waste heat, and as
long as it has a power source, the entropy of the living space can be
controlled.

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paulryanrogers
> Except for the fact that we continuously discover new energy...

Is that really a fact? Is it guaranteed to be true in the future? Past
discoveries seem very lumpy and unpredictable to me.

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hyperman1
What's more important: The first man in space or the first on the moon?

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alexashka
I still don't know what I just read. Random opinions/feelings regarding a
historic event?

What's next? How one feels about vanilla icecream? I don't understand the
human race sometimes, I have to admit :)

