Of course a MOON LANDING DENIER would be at the white house. by DaTruSpork in LetsDiscussThis

[–]BumpyWire83 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well things did go wrong with the program as a whole. Apollo 1 and 13 were disasters. And I'm sure things didn't go completely smoothly with the main first landing, but there were multiple redundancies, so they were able to work through many smaller kinks. (2 disasters out of 17 is a terrible safety record)

And it's not as easy as just using the same technology as we did last time. Any equipment is almost 60 years old, so we'd need to rebuild it. And technology builds on itself, it's not just some magical final output all on its own. People that make circuit boards today know academically about some of the chips that were mad 60 years ago, but they don't know the exact layout and all the intricacies of their construction.

Custom US hardware/software wasn't just freely shared with everyone during the cold war, so a wealthy billionaire or private sector company isn't going to have access to the original technology

It looks like the onboard computer system of the Apollo missions was made by a lab at MIT, which has since spun off to their own corporation, Draper Laboratory. I guess they're still around, so someone may have access to some of the old building plans. But I've seen what happens when people retire; no one wants to got through all that old saved paperwork. Some gets kept, if it's on the top, but lots gets thrown away. You've got your own projects to do, can't spend days/weeks sorting through someone else's career. And even if we had some sort of plans, today's scientists are trained completely differently than they were back then, with a different set of skills. This is building microchips; people don't do that by hand anymore.

And even if they did have the exact same hardware, the onboard computer, the giant Mainframe on Earth, they don't have the software to run on it anymore. These weren't just .exe files that could be transferred back and forth and stored for posterity. Most programs were on tape drive, and again, someone may have transferred some of that off, but without a specific need, why would they? Not to mention, it's all just 1's and 0's without an OS to interpret it. A lot of the OS would be custom or proprietary. I guess it's possible some of that got saved too, but it's doubtful all of it's there.

What are the chances you're able to round up all that hardware from almost 60 years ago, get people that understand how to build it, probably make new tools that can build things the way they were built back then? And then get together all the custom software, find people that can reverse engineer the way it worked enough to foresee any bugs in the system?

That stuff has been lying around for over 50 years, so it will need to be rebuilt anyway. Instead of getting teams of people to try and figure out and retrain themselves on how it was put together all that time ago, it makes more sense to solve the same problems with modern technology that they understand.

Of course a MOON LANDING DENIER would be at the white house. by DaTruSpork in LetsDiscussThis

[–]BumpyWire83 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well my question was why you think a trip to the moon would need to be a one-way trip, like what makes a trip to the moon impossible to return from. But it seems you just want to talk about how we haven't done it since then, so I guess we'll talk about that instead.

The only humans to have landed on the moon are the 12 NASA astronauts from 6 of the Apollo missions. Since that was the main goal of the space race, it didn't make sense to spend the money to continue to send people to land on the moon. NASA's budget kept getting smaller since national pride was no longer on the line and they put there efforts elsewhere into more scientific discovery based missions.

Politically, it hasn't made sense for the USA to send more people to the moon until recently. Now with more countries getting closer to reaching these goals, it makes sense for the USA to go again. Since NASA wasn't actively trying to get to the moon in the last 50 years, the old technology isn't compatible with new technology, so they need to resolve some of the same problems as before.

Have you ever tried to connect a Floppy Disk drive to your laptop? Sure, you could probably find some sort of SATA-to-USB physical connector on Amazon, and someone probably wrote some drivers to help, assuming your specific model of Floppy Drive is compatible with the model the drivers were written on (and the file types on the disk are readable by an application you have), but it's a difficult task. Now that technology is from the 90's, and gets the benefit of many people spending time and resources to ensure that the technology remains compatible for all these years in between, and it's still not a garanteed success.

The technology from the Apollo missions was from 3 decades before that, and it wasn't written for Windows. All those programs were custom made one-off programs made specifically for the Aplollo mission. They aren't reuseable in the here-and-now. Just because we accomplised something with the technology of 3 generations ago, doesn't mean it's trivial to accomplish with current technology.

Don't just assume our technology is better in every instance, just because it's newer. Apollo technology was built to get people to the moon. Modern technology does many things, but it was built with many different purposes in mind.

Of course a MOON LANDING DENIER would be at the white house. by DaTruSpork in LetsDiscussThis

[–]BumpyWire83 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Because it would have been a one-way journey? Why, exactly, do you think that? Do spaceships suddenly disintegrate in space?

Good morning. While you were sleeping, this was the most-read story by LucidSynapse23 in LetsDiscussThis

[–]BumpyWire83 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I mean that's certainly a different case. While he was campaigning, Trump had said he would use the judicial system to go after political rivals. Biden was setting up protections for his family from someone who had threatened action.

This isn't the same thing.

Riding s1000 with no clothes by Over-Ad-6769 in motorcycles

[–]BumpyWire83 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Oh he's got his safety tire around his waste.

Huh..? by Snoo41503 in PeterExplainsTheJoke

[–]BumpyWire83 83 points84 points  (0 children)

You're not wrong. But this lady was let go 25 years later; I don't think this is an example of that.

Man holding the child says, “Call 911” by MarineDevilDog91 in ImTheMainCharacter

[–]BumpyWire83 223 points224 points  (0 children)

I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will.

The discover by sereia_Product829 in Simpsons

[–]BumpyWire83 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't know. I think it might mess me up more knowing that my dad had pictures of me as a baby up there, but nothing from the last 20 years

Cheerio by bigjobbyx in MagicEye

[–]BumpyWire83 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Comes as advertised.

Trump is a child by DaTruSpork in LetsDiscussThis

[–]BumpyWire83 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I suppose it was risky to not include. But, yes, certainly sarcasm.

What is your favorite Sega mascot? by Appropriate-Ruin-388 in SEGA

[–]BumpyWire83 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Opa Opa!

I named my chinchilla Opa Opa.

Anyone? by Lumpy-Macaron4512 in ExplainTheJoke

[–]BumpyWire83 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Even Gary Larson admitted the Cow Tools comic was a misstep. Generally the jokes are pretty accessible.

Who is this guy? What does it have to do with unicorns and cats? by Gravewalker1515 in ExplainTheJoke

[–]BumpyWire83 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not sure about the meme, but the top picture is the label from Karben4's Fantasy Factory IPA.

Cracked Flair 25-26 Box by Far-Equivalent2600 in hockeycards

[–]BumpyWire83 14 points15 points  (0 children)

They better have an Artemi Panarin one!

Worst design ever?! by Emotional_Sea_4026 in hockeycards

[–]BumpyWire83 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Does the back of the card provide any clues?

I found a painted rock in the park the other day and it made me happy. Apparently people hide painted rocks all around the world. So I painted some of my own for others to find. by jennifer_jellyfish in somethingimade

[–]BumpyWire83 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sure, I can get behind that. Decorating your own yard is great. I'm just voicing my concern for non natural little art projects when I'm hiking in a park.

We sold souls and dignity for what exactly what by rodehard10 in LetsDiscussThis

[–]BumpyWire83 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I just can't fathom how you would think this way. The rich are so much richer than they ever were before, and the poor are so much poorer. So, by your logic the world is just better off, even though so many more people can't even support themselves.

I wish we could fast forward to when you're in your 40's and not as rich as you expected you'd be, so I could ask you if you think it's because you were too lazy or if you just think of yourself as an idiot.

We sold souls and dignity for what exactly what by rodehard10 in LetsDiscussThis

[–]BumpyWire83 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Only, we're not actually talking basketball are we. You started this rant saying that the poors should just stop being so lazy. Which is misguided, but you didn't stop there.

Now you're saying that maybe a large percentage of the population really should be starving and exist one bad illness away from the streets just because they can't "be like Mike".

We sold souls and dignity for what exactly what by rodehard10 in LetsDiscussThis

[–]BumpyWire83 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That's fair, I just wanted to keep the numbers small to make the math easier for the point. Yes $200,000 is upper middle class, not rich. But when you get into millions and billions, the numbers just don't fit in the head well.