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?
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
This has some tankie level vibes. It’s referencing the Cold War era. Though I seem to remember as a kid in the 80s learning about Russia’s Venus crafts. This is like reverse propaganda.
Exactly. And let's be real, both countries are absolute shit.
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.
Because we wouldn’t have “For All Mankind” without that sweet sweet political tension
I'm sorry, I don't know what you're referencing :(
TV series on Apple where Soviets land on the Moon first and a whole new timeline of events is explored. It's really good.
Shame it's on apple, but neat! Thanks for telling me.
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.
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.
Even their animated stuff is superb, getting both right at the same time is huge. I hate Apple, but credit where due.
This whole post seems like bait for drawing out nationalists.
It utterly ignores the vast, vast spectrum of space exploration and discoveries that many other nations have contributed, as well as the US's ongoing progress towards a permanent space presence after the USSR collapsed. And all it, from the advancements of Russia in the 60's and 70's up through today to India and China and ESA exploring our solar system as the US collapses er, scales back from the frontier of science and exploration. It's all worth celebrating and being glad happened in our lives so we get to see amazing sights and learn amazing things about our local space neighborhood.
If you take pride in shit you didn't personally do and feel others are inferior for not achieving your own measure of success, you're setting yourself up for being a mindless chud and girls will never touch your weewee.
Oh this stupid discussion that we have like every 3 years
Here some other memes from the last time this came up:
Lmao that last Poland Ball one is hilarious.
We absolutely saw those photos in school in the US… maybe this person just didn’t pay attention?
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.)
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.
having a cow on every square inch of your body
It would take approximately 17 to 31 adult Dalmatians to equal the weight of an average adult cow, depending on the specific weights of the animals.
Gee, wouldn't it be nice if both countries prioritized space exploration instead of wholesale slaughter?
But without wholesale slaughter we'd never have the motivation to build rockets that made space exploration possible! /s
"Increase the orphan input to the orphan crushing machine! We need more blood/lube for the war machine!"
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
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.
Turns out when science is publicly funded you can do a lot of really cool science for science sake
Hey, the US funded science education for roughly 15 years when the space race was ongoing
Not a historian, but folks on The Internet have characterized the Soviet program as a series of milestones, with the US program a series of stepping stones in support of a single goal.
This makes sense with the cartoon, where the Soviets were first in basically everything except walking on the moon.
Not sure how much merit it has, but it's kinda interesting.
Less merit truthfully it wasn't the single goal to put a man on the moon until it became a convenient "win condition " for Western politicians.
Well well if it's the first thing you do first, it's very convenient to say it's the winning condition.
Because you're late or incapable of winning every single thing imaginable besides the one you declare to be the "only true race". If this sounds racist, it's because they are. Coincidence?
If you cannot read it, open in browser. It is your app.
Or get a better app! Vogager (app, not probe) lets you double click to make tall posts zoom to screen width.
Smartphone pinch zoom worked great
pretty clunky format regardless
Good call getting past "first dog" quickly, lest we dwell on it too much.
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.
I like.this but I always get bothered by the pressure analogies. You wouldnt feel a cow crushing every inch nope.
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
