
Visions of the Future - aps-sids
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/
======
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11104124](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11104124)

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shawnmk
I love these and wanted prints of them for myself and thought others might too
(and I own a printery), so:
[http://www.artfrom.space](http://www.artfrom.space)

~~~
mattbeckman
You should ask SpaceX if you can print their retro space tourism posters from
last year as well. You know... where these NASA artists probably got the idea
from :)

[http://gizmodo.com/spacex-just-dropped-these-amazing-
retro-m...](http://gizmodo.com/spacex-just-dropped-these-amazing-retro-mars-
travel-pos-1704855680)

~~~
mikeash
As that article mentions, JPL's exoplanet tourism posters preceded SpaceX's
posters:

[http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/exoplanet_travel_bureau](http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/exoplanet_travel_bureau)

In any case, no need to ask SpaceX, the posters were released into the public
domain.

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Lio
Lovely stuff. Reminds me of old British railway posters ...but in space!

[http://railwayposters.co.uk](http://railwayposters.co.uk)

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Grishnakh
I like looking at stuff like this, but it's a completely unrealistic view of
humanity's future.

If we're really lucky, the cities of the future will look something like those
in Blade Runner (minus the part about people living offworld) or Dredd, or
even the Mad Max movies. But more likely, things are going to look more like
28 Days Later or The Walking Dead, or the scene of the future in The
Terminator.

~~~
davnicwil
Just on the off chance these are anything but tongue in cheek, I think at
least wrt tourism it is completely unrealistic.

It's hard to see how the cost and difficulty of interplanetary travel could in
any reasonable (or just any) time frame beat other, new, forms of
entertainment and relaxation that may constitute or replace tourism in the
future. Completely realistic VR 'holidays' to anywhere, simulated or invented,
comes to mind as an obvious alternative.

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tyleo
For people interested in getting these printed as posters, you could probably
use FedEx: [http://www.fedex.com/us/office/poster-
printing.html](http://www.fedex.com/us/office/poster-printing.html)

IKEA sells pretty cheap frames for stuff like this too:
[http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/dec...](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/decoration/10789/)

~~~
smellf
$7/sqft? It looks like Costco is much cheaper:
[http://www.costcophotocenter.com/Help#/topic/pricing-
shippin...](http://www.costcophotocenter.com/Help#/topic/pricing-shipping)

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vonklaus
I have a lot of respect both for the artists that made this and for the
scientists pushing boundaries forward in a way that was almost inconceivable a
decade ago.

That said, if anyone here works at JPL, I can't be (but feel like I am) the
only person wondering what the hell happened to memex-explorer.

We are talking about the obvious change in search. If you are not familiar,
the memex-explorer project seemed to be the first company that realized an
open source tailored version of google can ve assembled out of Apache open
source projects. You define a crawl structure and save your data into silos
you control while using your own parameters to search.

However, despite what appeared to be solid progress and the initial buzz of
articles labeling the google killer- and to be clear this tech will evolve in
1-2 years and diminish googles adverts, the project has a simple commit that
says:

Not actively maintained.

Why did JPL stop working on this? Darpa brought the world TOR so they do
deliver projects that could potentially be problematic to the gov't, so I
don't want to jump into conspiracy theories, but what the fuck.

Tl;dr super obvious hadoop, solr, dns and elastic search is pretty much google
and the browser can never be decoupled from search. JPL got close to giving
the user all 3 in unity under their control and then project was abandoned.
I'll say it i guess, having 50% concentration in browsing and the only proper
centralization of most peoples thoughts is a big loss to google, and if I am
being honest I think the govt.

~~~
hodwik
Why don't you e-mail continuum and report back:

[https://www.continuum.io/contact-us](https://www.continuum.io/contact-us)

~~~
vonklaus
i emailed who I believe to be the lead dev.

edit: email bounced to support. Since the email was a super autistic and
sarcastic look at the ecosystem as I made a case for continued development,
the support guy whose desk it bounced to from the lead dev, was forgiveably
baffled.

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sanderson1
These are great. Something I've always found interesting is how often "looking
to the future" campaigns harken back to decades-old iconic art styles. That's
not a criticism. I love the juxtaposition of concept and style.

Side note: Am I the only one that sees the No Man's Sky reference in the Venus
poster?

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pmontra
Am I the only one getting bad CRC errors when extracting the files from the
zip with all the images?

$ sha256sum ALL_POSTERS.zip

b77b67acc0d1a74cfe79ad1c223ccf801da5651b407e60d7ce225cda31623354
ALL_POSTERS.zip

It's a 672'712'771 bytes file.

The single image downloads seems to be OK.

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3solarmasses
Level Frames is printing and framing these now! (Disclosure: I'm a founder)
[https://www.levelframes.com/collections/visions-of-the-
futur...](https://www.levelframes.com/collections/visions-of-the-future)

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Shivetya
As a fan of The Expanse the release of posters like this was very timely.
While there is obviously no tie in I am just glad to have another very good
scifi show on and interest in space not waning

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bjornlouser
Ah yes, the infamous photobombing Cowboys of Europa...

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theothermkn
FTA:

> Imagination is our window into the future.

Maybe. But the outlook is from the past, and is subject to the past's failures
and to failures of the imagination that are due to the juvenile foible of
nostalgia. These posters are, after all, riffs in the genre of travel
marketing, which is designed to sell the experience of a place as more than it
is; they push a particular and motivated hyper-reality. This betrays their
appeal as a longing to be deceived, a longing that is all too happily filled
by the marketing arm of JPL.

The very idea that "space travel" is anything like "travel" in the vacationing
sense is mere wordplay. Who among us can take 4 years off to "vacation" to
Mars? Or 3 for Venus, to stare at the clouds? Who among us wants to die of
embrittled bones and radiation sickness in a tin can?

No proper vision of the future can come from the myopic eyes developed in the
dim light of popular history. These posters are adolescent fantasy, and mature
minds knowingly smirk at the naivete of those so stunted as to be taken in.

EDIT: FWIW, I expect the down-votes. Bringing reality into a discussion about
space fantasy always brings down-votes. It's a measure of the quality of
discussion on HN.

~~~
TheCoreh
Intercontinental travel was once like this, too. Take several months to make a
horrible journey that could very well kill you. Now you can do it in under a
day, safely, for a very reasonable price, with just a mild discomfort.

I think the point of these pieces is to make us think about the possibility
that some day technology will have advanced so much that this is possible.
Maybe we'll get there faster, or we'll develop a way to live longer so it
won't matter.

~~~
gervase
Or maybe not - the Grand Tour[1] was historically restricted a wealthy elite,
after all. I guess it depends on the time scale of the perspective.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour)

