With NASA preparing for more manned moon missions what do you think the first task should be when they return to the moon?

I think they should find and return to Earth the two golf balls Alan Sheperd left up there.

Noel

Edited March 19, 20224 yr by birdguy

Its never going to happen. Western civilization and especially the USA is in free fall. I anticipate by the end of this year there will be no one left to go the Moon. Sorry to be such a pessimist! 😭

Bring back those expensive Moon buggies!

 

43 minutes ago, birdguy said:

what do you think the first task should be when they return to the moon?

Clean up all the poop left from the previous visits.

Simply sending people to the moon and back will give us back the know-how that we had in the past, but with much more advanced technology at our disposal.  We'll need that knowledge and experience for the real mission - Mars.

They should 1)scout the moon for suitable permanent base locations, and 2)look for rare minerals that we could one day mine and use here on earth.

Dave

When I look back and think of the rather primitive space vehicles the original astronauts flew on those moon missions, I almost shudder.  Plus, my IPhone probably has a more computer power then was aboard their craft.  The last trip to the moon was almost 50 years ago!  The new target date for a return is 2025, and will cost mucho $$$.   

And right now there's a cold war aboard the ISS...

 

10 hours ago, overspeed3 said:

When I look back and think of the rather primitive space vehicles the original astronauts flew on those moon missions, I almost shudder.  Plus, my IPhone probably has a more computer power then was aboard their craft. 

 

Actually, a modern pocket calculator has more computing power than Apollo. 

 

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This means that the iPhone in your pocket has over 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed man on the moon 50 years ago.

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It’s mind-blowing to think about that a simple calculator, designed to help students decades ago pass their exams, was more powerful than the computer that landed man on the moon.

https://www.business-standard.com/article/technology/would-your-phone-be-powerful-enough-to-get-you-to-the-moon-like-apollo-did-119070200272_1.html#:~:text=Each word comprised 16 binary,is equivalent to 589%2C824 bits.

 

They were brave men. In fact Neil Armstrong had second's of fuel left before he found a landing spot and Aldrin had to use a pen to push in a broken circuit breaker or they would never have been able to ignite the modules engines to leave the surface. 

50 minutes ago, martin-w said:

It’s mind-blowing to think about that a simple calculator, designed to help students decades ago pass their exams, was more powerful than the computer that landed man on the moon.

I don't know where you triggered that quote, Martin, but it triggered the 'old man response' in me.

I recall when I was in high school I was doing my homework and I asked my Dad in what year did Lincoln deliver the Gettysburgh Address.  He told me to look it up.  So I went to the bookshelf where the 26 volumes of Brittanica were and pulled out 'G' and looked it up.  It was in 1863 and I have never forgotten it until just a couple of years ago when my memory started failing.  But it was locked in my mind for 70 or so years.

When today's kid is doing his home work he just has to ask Siri and write down the answer.  And if you ask him the same answer tomorrow he will have forgotten it.

There's a lot to be said for doing it the hard way.

When I worked for Storage Technology the offered to buy all the techs and engineers the new HP-35 calculators that had just come out.  They would pay half and the the other half out over three pay checks.  It cost over 300 dollars at the time.

My kids begged me to let them use it to do their math homework.  I refused.  They had to learn long division the hard way and learn how to multiply 5468x35 the hard way.  I did let them use the calculator to check their answers.

I suppose in today's world learning how to use all of the hand held devices like iPhones and calculators that have the power to land a man on the moon is necessary and why learn how to do long division with a pad and pencil when you can do it instantly by pushing the right button.  

I have outlived my usefulness.  It wasn't that long ago I designed digital circuits using the National 7400 series integrated circuits like the 7474 flipflop.  And the dozen or so ICs I put on a circuit board and wire-wrapped according to the schematic I drew are now all contained on the head of a pin.

I am obsolete. 

Noel  

 

 

 

12 minutes ago, birdguy said:

I am obsolete.

 

Nope, you certainly aren't. You have many decades of fascinating experiences. Those experiences are a learning opportunity for all of us.  

Martin,

Have you ever seen the movie About Schmidt with Jack Nicholson?

He's a just retired insurance underwriter for a large insurance company in Omaha.

When his young replacement comes into his office on his last day of work he shows him a closet with boxes of files containing his life's work.  He tells they have a lot of things to lookup when underwritng new policies.  A valuable source of information.

That evening at his retirement party they tell anecdotes about him and praise the work he has done.

A week later he visits the company and the old office he used to work in and everyone is polite but they have no time to chat with him anymore.

He leaves the building as in walking down the back alley past the open room behind a gate where all the trash bins are located for the trash collectors to pick up.  In front of the bins he sees his boxes of collected files waiting to be picked up and hauled out to the land fill.

At that moment he realizes he is obsolete.

Noel

53 minutes ago, birdguy said:

It wasn't that long ago I designed digital circuits using the National 7400 series integrated circuits like the 7474 flipflop. 

How about the ubiquitous 555 'timer' chip? There are so many unique circuits that can be created with it! 😉

6 hours ago, birdguy said:

I asked my Dad in what year did Lincoln deliver the Gettysburgh Address.  He told me to look it up.  So I went to the bookshelf where the 26 volumes of Brittanica were and pulled out 'G' and looked it up.  It was in 1863 and I have never forgotten it until just a couple of years ago when my memory started failing.  But it was locked in my mind for 70 or so years. When today's kid is doing his home work he just has to ask Siri and write down the answer.  And if you ask him the same answer tomorrow he will have forgotten it. There's a lot to be said for doing it the hard way.

I'm curious what you feel the value knowing the date of the Gettysburg Address is, relative to a lot more interesting and valuable ideas around the Civil War and Reconstruction. We made children memorize and regurgitate a ton of facts without ever explaining the reason why or the value, and then we wonder why we have raised generations that are uninterested in learning and education. I really don't blame them.

I learned early on that memorizing facts was for suckers and wasted valuable brain cells that could be better used remembering the "why" rather than the "what". Data is trivial to lookup. When my daughter was in high school and studying the Civil War I didn't bother asking her to regurgitate dates - I just asked her to write about the constitutional validity of the Emancipation Proclamation. That's a lot harder to answer than the date (which I have completely forgotten) and a lot more valuable.

I will tell you another story from when I was a child - I used to hate writing, mostly because we had to write multiple drafts formatted correctly and so much of the effort involved was around the physical act of putting symbols on paper and so little around the actual intellectual aspect of figuring out what you wanted to write. The final version was torture because I was essentially copying what I had written earlier, around 95-99% identical to the first draft except in pen and ink so I had to focus even more on the technical aspects of transcribing rather than writing. It seems like I was being trained not to be a writer but an Egyptian scribe or a medieval monk.

Once I received my second computer (but the first with a functional word processor and printer) 90% of the busywork vanished and I could focus on my writing, rather than printing and the technical aspect of putting words on paper. Immediately the quality of my work and my desire to do it doubled because the pointless parts vanished to be replaced by the interesting and challenging parts (and to be honest, the parts I was supposed to learn).

To this day my job is all about eliminating the tedium and allowing people to focus on the intellectually challenging and valuable parts of a task. I manage a team of very highly paid software architects and their time is simply too valuable to waste with silly things.

6 hours ago, birdguy said:

I have outlived my usefulness.  It wasn't that long ago I designed digital circuits using the National 7400 series integrated circuits like the 7474 flipflop.  And the dozen or so ICs I put on a circuit board and wire-wrapped according to the schematic I drew are now all contained on the head of a pin. I am obsolete. 

My father says the same thing. At which point I remind him that he has had a computer in his residence for almost half a century. Do you feel that you were a hardware engineer, or a wire-wrapper? And if you were the former, why does not doing the latter bother you? To me being able to create designs five or six orders of magnitude more complex in the same amount of time and effort as the original circuits would be a dream come true.

Cheers!

Edited March 19, 20224 yr by Luke

Let me answer you last question first Luke.

I worked in a small department where we designed test equipment for the manufacturing floor.  They were one of kind projects.  I did both the circuit design, purchasing the parts or getting the parts from the parts room, and the assembly of the unit.  

The first part of your post you question what is the value of knowing the date of the Gettysburg Address.  Or more commonly, "Why do I have to learn this? I'll never use it."  How do you know you'll never use it?

Twice I have been asked to speak to a class of 8th grade students about to graduate and go one to high school.  I tell them this personal story.

When I was in high school taking English Literature I had to memorize the first paragraph of the prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury tales in middle English.  I asked my Dad, "Why do I have t learn this, I'll never use it."  He just told me to go ahead and memorize it.

Three years later I found myself a young Marine in Japan.  I was an EOD specialist but there weren't a whole lot of times my EOD skills were called on.  So most of the time we loaded and unloaded munitions from trucks in the bomb dump.  A very boring job indeed.

One evening we had a beer party in the mess hall.  Our commanding office got quite tipsy and stood on a table and started reciting the prologue to the Canterbury Tales. "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, the droghte of March hath perced to the roote, and bathed every veyne in swich licóur of which vertú engendred is the flour....."

I stood up on the table next to him and began reciting it along with him.

The next morning I was called into his office.  He said, "Private Sivertson, you've been to school.  I want you to be my company clerk."

I was promoted to corporal.  I didn't have to pull KP or guard duty anymore.  In fact part of my job was to make the KP and guard duty rosters.  And I didn't have to load and unload trucks filled with munitions.

Think of your brain as a tool box.  There are tools you use every day.  There are tools that you might use once a month or so.  And there are tools you will never use, but they are there, available, just in case, like the date of the Gettysburg Address,.

The prologue to the Canterbury Tales was one of those 'just in case you might need it' tools.

Nothing you learn is wasted.   

Noel

 

22 hours ago, birdguy said:

Nothing you learn is wasted.   

Amen to that!

On 3/19/2022 at 11:38 PM, birdguy said:

I worked in a small department where we designed test equipment for the manufacturing floor.  They were one of kind projects.  I did both the circuit design, purchasing the parts or getting the parts from the parts room, and the assembly of the unit. 

My question was somewhat rhetorical, but given the specifics I think we'd both agree that your primary value was that of a circuit designer, not a procurement clerk or gopher or wire-winder. While those other tasks may have been a pleasant distraction or good break in the day to reset your brain, from a productivity standpoint it wouldn't make sense to have you doing those regularly, and anything that allows you to design 10x as complex circuits with none of the low value work is far, far better. I wouldn't see you as obsolescent at all - the world has just shifted to focus more on what your real value was.

On 3/19/2022 at 11:38 PM, birdguy said:

Twice I have been asked to speak to a class of 8th grade students about to graduate and go one to high school.  I tell them this personal story.

The challenge I have with this anecdote is that it's conceptually not that different from a lottery ticket that had the right numbers. If you play the lottery enough, you will eventually get some winning tickets and for some people, they come out ahead. Let's of course not loose sight of the fact that you may have had the only NCO in Japan that read Chaucer. What would you have done if he preferred Milton or Walter Scott?

While time seems almost infinite at both ends of our life, one challenge I've recognized in adulthood is how scarce time and cognitive capacity really is and how I need to prioritize what I learn and focus on. That usually ends up being concepts and processes over facts - processes can be applied to new situations, while facts can be looked up. When I was a child I had a map of the world in my bedroom and at night looked at the lower parts of it, leading to a lifelong fascination with Sub-Antarctic islands. I wonder what neurons were consumed by that interest, and perhaps they were the same ones that would have preserved my knowledge of calculus or linear algebra. Perhaps one day I will meet a beautiful heiress who has the same fascination and who will whisk us off to the Kerguelen Archipelago where we will lord over the penguins, but the odds are not good. 🙂

Cheers!