I've never seen a more accurate application of this meme, honestly. The amount of grandstanding by the US on one achievement out of a hundred is impressive.
No one ever remembers voyager. 40 years old and the first craft in interstellar space.
Those photos from venus are still the coolest space photos I've seen
Not much to gain by going there. Wildly corrosive, too hot, too hard to terraform with present tech.
Terraforming isn't on the table anywhere. We can't even stop fucking up this planet, let alone unfuck it, let alone apply much more advanced unfucking tech on planets without any of the environmental cycles we take for granted.
Space programs do science stuff and military stuff. Revisiting Venus would be for science stuff.
Space programs definitely do science and stuff. All I meant to say was that Venus might not be the lowest hanging fruit for scientific discovery. It's really expensive to go there. Doesn't mean we shouldn't.
I see now how my post could read as an elon-fanboi type "colonize all the things" and that was not what I intended. I do think Atmospheric sensor clusters on Venus would be pretty awesome. It could give us an interesting set of insights into a wildly different environment.
At 50km high it is literally the most Earth-like environment in the whole of the solar system (outside of Earth / the ISS / Tiāngōng obviously)
You wouldn't even need a spacesuit or a pressure suit to stand outside, just a respirator and some light protection against acid
One of the only places in our system where you could feel the wind of another planet in a cool 25C against your face without protection except for eye goggles (not for very long though, again, acid).
The idea of floating outposts there is at least 50 years old (and comes from a soviet scientist originally IIRC); balloons filled with breathable air - which is a nice reserve for the same as a bonus - would have enough buoyancy at this altitude to support relatively large outposts attached to them. Not only that, the cosmic ray protection afforded by the atmosphere at that altitude is basically similar to the one on Earth; and those balloons wouldn't need to be pressurized either, just filled, meaning if you get a leak you have potentially hours to fix it (or even days / more if you connect several such balloons together with some buoyancy margin).
I'd always assumed that floating Venus colonies were fun sci-fi nonsense. I'm kinda taken aback at how feasible it actually is
Jesus Christ liberals' brains are mush. the point of science is to learn things, not find new planets to ruin
Death to America
Maybe we should try terraforming earth before we start to look elsewhere idk.
Me: Can we go to Venus?
Mom: No, we have Venus at home.
The Venus at home:
hard to terraform with present tech
What place isn't hard to terraform with present tech?
Hell, even terraforming Earth with present tech can prove a challenge at times.
I mean other than scientific discovery like what's up with the phosphine, we keep detecting it and debunking it sure would be nice to have something floating there to figure it out (or landed for however long they last)
BAHHHH I MADE AN ESSAY ABOUT THIS LIKE LAST WEEK CAN YOU PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP
Soviets are also the only country to have landed on Venus. Not just the first, the only one.
The images from Venus are absolutely fascinating. If I recall, the craft that took the first images burned up after a very short amount of time (like 50 or so minutes) because of the extreme heat.
It always comes across to me as maximum cope when Americans brag about "winning the space race". I mean, even if it was true, the US's economy was massively wealthier than the USSR's. This "race" was literally between the wealthiest country on earth and a very poor country. Even at the height of the USSR, its GDP was only about half that of the US's.
It really does not show the US's "strength" to brag so much about winning against someone with so much less resources. It's a sign of weakness to actually even be in a "race" with a developing country to begin with, which suggests they are actually competitive and have a chance of winning.
That's really what the whole "space race" shows. It does not matter who "won", the very fact a poor developing nation could compete with the wealthiest and most powerful country on earth in the first place demonstrates the extraordinary weakness of the capitalist system.
The US only placed a man on the moon because of NASA, which they founded as a direct response to the Soviets launching Sputnik. Meaning, the US literally only implemented this space program as a response to the Soviets, they were not a natural outgrowth of the US's system and would not have happened without the Soviets (as we have seen NASA massively defunded ever since). The fact the US even got on the moon in the first place only happened because of the USSR.
That was back in 1969, and we're now in 2022 yet, funnily enough, the capitalist private sector has not got a man that far yet.
—aimixin
It really does not show the US's "strength" to brag so much about winning against someone with so much less resources.
It really does show the US's strength when no country has nearly the same amount of resources.
"Everyone else being weaker than you does not show your strength" is a very odd take.
With all that wealth plundered from the rest of the world they ought to perform better.
I'm not sure what you're arguing.
Yes, the US has a large amount of wealth. That is what makes them strong.
they ought to perform better
So you're saying they should be even stronger (than the strongest nation to ever exist)?
Or are you saying that "strength" is not about the total power one has, but about the efficiency with which one can convert resources into power?
Where did they get all that wealth from?
Where did they get all that wealth from, motherfucker?I never argued that they became strong using rightful measures.
But they did become strong.
So if you agree that the US obtained its wealth through plundering and imperialism then what the fuck was your original point? I don't think you have one and you're trying to debate just to debate.
My first comment:
It really does not show the US's "strength" to brag so much about winning against someone with so much less resources.
It really does show the US's strength when no country has nearly the same amount of resources.
That was my sole point. Noone having nearly as much resources as the US does show the US's strength.
It does not matter how they aquired those resources or how strong they could theoretically be.
My point was simple and clear from the beginning on: USA = strong.
There are different kinds of strength. One kind of strength is to be really good at colonizing and plundering the rest of the world. Another kind of strength is to be really good at dreaming of new horizons and using limited resources to reach them. America has more of the first kind of strength, the USSR had more of the second kind.
I'm not sure what you're arguing.
Do you not understand what plundering is?
Wealth extraction from the global south into the global north via american companies involved in resource extraction - minerals, gases, etc etc. Rights to said resources gained at the barrel of the gun of the US military itself or a coup instigated by the CIA.
For the love of god read a book about modern imperialism and how it works and save us from your international political illiteracy. https://resistir.info/livros/imperialism_john_smith.pdf
You completely deviated from the original point.
Never did I claim that the USA gained their strength rightfully, so why are you arguing against that?
I only ever claimed that the USA having significantly more resources does show their strength.
You can discuss the bad things the USA does and has done, but I don't know why you're discussing them with me.
You said you did not understand what the other person was saying. This can only come from not really understanding what imperialism is and how it functions.
I explained what they were saying.
You are now trying to divert away from that. Because it is not a topic you wish to engage in while you do this nationalist thing of engaging in apologetics and sly weasel-word half-hearted US support.
Is guess I could've said "I'm not sure why you're arguing" instead of "I'm not sure what you're arguing".
you do this nationalist thing
I'm not American, how would speaking well of a nation I've never even visited be nationalist? (I can already imagine you calling me a traitor to my own country)
half-hearted US support
As opposed to full-hearted US support? You don't have to be extremely against something or extremely for something (though I'm aware extreme leftists would like to see it that way).
I do recognize the negative things the US does and has done. But that does not mean that I'll unreasonably make up negatives (like the USA not being strong while being the strongest nation).
There are enough factual things to dislike the USA about, no need to make stuff up on top of that.
Politically illiterate dumbass posts a self-own.
This image depicts liberals and fascists being close to each other, while the far-left (hexbear) is far away from them.
Yes. And that's what "hexbears be like".
Because you call anyone not far left a liberal, therefore not differentiating between people who are not far left.
Do you think fascism is something unique? Different from capitalism in some way?
Fascism is not unique or different from capitalism. It is capitalism converted into a format that allows the highest level of extreme violence to be carried out against its enemies. It occurs when capitalists feel threatened by socialists, gaining monetary support, media and backing from the bourgeoisie who recognise the need to use ultra-violence to exterminate the revolutionary threat to their existence. It is not a separate or unique thing to capitalism. It is still capitalism.
We only need to look at the places where fascism was not defeated to see proof of this. The fascists won in Spain and in Chile, they were not defeated like they were in Italy or Germany. What happened there? Did fascism ever become anything unique? No it did not. The fascists maintained and even increased capitalism, the term "privatisation" comes from Hitler himself. Over time in the countries where fascism won, once they defeated the left, exterminated them and their leadership, rendered them inert and no longer a threat to their bourgeoisie, these countries simply morphed back into liberalism which is a more efficient form of exploitation and extraction. Once the ultra violence was no longer required they morph back into "friendly" versions.
It is this that you are seeing when we discuss fascists and liberals in the same breath. They are allies in their support for capitalism and opposition to socialism.
And who exactly becomes the fascists? They don't simply spawn out of a spawning pool. They were liberals until the media, money and influence of the bourgeoisie backing the conversion of society to fascism successfully radicalises them to the cause.
I just see *removed externally hosted image*
here's a link to the picture this person posted https://lemdro.id/pictrs/image/d6c8a45d-d579-48de-903b-6d7f5f885fe0.jpeg
maybe I'm daft but this picture makes no sense to me. So leftists are on the left, liberals are in the middle, and... I guess the point is that instead of continuing rightward it loops back around to liberal again? Are you mocking leftists for lumping liberals and conservatives together?
They are all liberals. Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. They are all ideologically committed to capitalism.
I never finished writing my response. ADHD and too many tabs :/
We lump them together because liberal and conservative politicians are unanimous on a lot of topics we care about.
off the top of my head, US politicians from both parties:
- do nothing about climate change
- want owners rather than workers to control production -- this is sort of a big deal to communists!
- serve (and often are themselves) business owners, bankers, and landlords rather than working people
- Clinton deregulated finance and contributed to the 2008 crisis, allowed huge corporate media mergers, and tried to privatize social security
- Obama let Citigroup pick his 2008 cabinet, did fuckall to help foreclosed Americans, and presided over the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history
- Biden has done next to nothing to protect American workers from COVID, and rail workers are still on-call 24/7 with only eight sick days a year
- 70% of Americans want single-payer healthcare but it remains politically impossible
- support wars and coups
- Clinton bombed and sanctioned Iraq back to the stone age, causing around 1.5 million deaths
- liberal media helped sell the Iraq war, which caused over a million further deaths in Iraq
- Obama obliterated the once-prosperous country of Libya, and there are now open-air slave markets
- Biden continues to support the siege in Yemen, which has killed hundreds of thousands
- support massive wealth extraction from the global south
- IMF and World Bank loans that enforce austerity and depress wages
and on social issues, democrats are one half of a one-way ratchet: republicans make it worse, democrats do not make it better
some more thoughts
I think there are two reasons democrats are ineffective on social issues, and maybe you'll find them too cynical: 1) as long as our basic rights are in jeopardy, we have no leverage to ask for progress, on things like universal healthcare, that the rich donors oppose, and 2) offering effective resistance would set the precedent that the government has the power to help people, and then people might ask for more improvements to our lives, which, again, the rich donors oppose. And for that matter, a lot of the politicians themselves have backgrounds as rich businessmen, bankers, executives, and landlords, so their own class interests oppose ours.
So, anyway, liberal and conservative politicians look similar to us.
But sometimes the voters also look similar, especially the well-off ones! I have heard so many disgusting takes about the homeless from well-off liberals. And no one seems to really oppose the massive wealth extraction from the global south. And too many support wars and coups at the time and then oppose them later when the lies come out, only to support the next one and believe the next lies. Too many liberals seem to support awful things, tolerate them, or have no knowledge of them.
Now this is me going on a petty tangent, but I also think there are some annoying cultural differences between certain liberals and socialists. Many liberals buy into meritocratic myths. They see liberal politicians as the adults in the room making the hard decisions, while ignoring the class interests of those politicians. They fawn over British royals. They watch shows about aristocrats and DC politicians. They watch game shows where working class people try to appease a panel of rich judges. And way too often, liberals seem to care more about civility and norms than about what actually happens in the world. As soon as Trump came to power, W. Bush was fucking rehabilitated in an instant. Never mind the wars, never mind 2008. At least he was civil.
Maybe I'm being too harsh, but this is the impression I get.
...But anyway, the bottom line here is that we're socialists. We want workers to control production. Liberals, and conservatives, don't.
you might disagree with the points I raised, and that's fine — just realize that we communists do have our reasons to lump liberals and conservatives together. It’s not just vibes. We have an actual coherent perspective lol.
even as an anarchist, I’ve got to hand it to the soviets on this one.
It's like the tortoise and the hare, us caught the soviets sleeping
No one gives a shit who's first at the check points just who crosses the line first
When it comes to contributions to the body of international science, putting space stations in the air and putting rovers on planets are a lot more important than the propaganda victory of a spacewalk. A person doing a spacewalk on the moon isn't even as efficient at collecting mineral and soil samples as a rover would be. It's also kinda irresponsible since it puts lives at higher risk than just doing standard space missions.
At the end of the day though, this is just a communist shitpost. Science has always been international collaboration and not a national chauvinist thing. Communists are the first to acknowledge that since communism is an internationalist ideology that upholds the working class.
That really depends on where you consider the "finish line" to be? Is it the Moon, Mars, Venus?
The Soviets have done things in space that the US has not, like sending a probe to Venus. That's why I bring up my first point. The Soviets were also the first to land a probe on Mars. The US has also done things the Soviets have not, like sending a man to the moon. So where do we define the end point for the "space race"?
The finish line is the most impressive thing America managed to do first, so I always win
No one besides the US wanted to put a man on the moon, because it was a pointless and dangerous stunt.
Lol
'" we didn't want to anyway"
Also completely false anyway, they wanted to and failed
However, the Soviets shall get the last laugh, because 50 years later the American SpaceX company would copy the same concept for their super heavy lift vehicle design (Super Heavy used for Starship), which in many ways conceded that the Soviet design was a more viable one
This happens often in American industry, especially aeronautics . More promising designs are considered "ahead of their time" and often lose out to more conventional designs, only for the more promising designs to return later and be adopted. With regards to fighter jets, one just needs to look at the YF-23 vs the YF-22. The battle for the fifth gen fighter jet program. The YF-23 was faster, stealthier, more maneuverable in most common scenarios. The YF-22 ended up winning, and becoming the F-22, because it had thrust vectoring and was more appealing to conventional tactics. But now that the US wants to build a sixth gen fighter plane, and other countries want to build 5.5 gen planes, all the proposed designs look extremely similar to the YF-23. Almost as if it was the better overall design. Similar is happening with the Airforce's proposed replacement for the F-35, the replacement looks like a clone of an F-16XL. An experimental design that also lost out on a contract to the F15E if I remember correctly, but is now coming back.
oooh 86 comments about the space race. I’m sure this will be very normal
I didnt expect even this one to make the federated libs mad because its just... basic description of the facts. But ok.
I don't subscribe to that one. Personally, to me, it seems to require too many people to stay silent to sincerely fake.
Especially at a time when tensions between Russian federation and USA are at an all time high. They have an extreme incentive to lie in the opposite direction and say America never landed on the moon. But they didn't say that.
Neat. Do you know where could I read more about this? Google is failing me.
would you rather send actual people with sapience in first? What's next, no labrats for medical technology?
ah okay, this I can more readily accept.
Thank you for the reading.
You probably mean sapience and not sentience, because dogs and monkeys definitely can feel things.
I'm going to give an opinion that some may not agree with. The most ethical form of eating meat is from an animal that can consent. Since we can't ask a dog, monkey, cow, pig, etc. if they want to be consumed, the most ethical meat is humans who consent to it. If you disagree please explain how.
The same goes for sending things into space to die for us.
What if I just don't care. I'm against needless cruelty, but for the near future we will need some amount of meant (until correct substitutes are found). The things bred for centuries to be meat will continue to do so for the near future, until we have the time and effort to spare in order to change it.
As someone above pointed out to me, the testing nor space deployment of animals was not truly necessary for any data, its all needless cruelty that gives no results. That practice should be ended.
edit: and thank you for the correction
You'll probably get flak for this but I agree.
if humans can only progress into space by first kidnapping animals, then they don't deserve to see the stars.
Indeed; I'd have happily volunteered instead of a monkey or a cat for such an endeavour for the benefit of our species; and I'm sure I'm not the only one. There's something far more moral about testing such things with people fully aware of what they're doing and the risks compared to sentient beings not comprehending what's happening to them and likely being in a panic all along the way. There should be a word for it, really.
Oh wait, I think there is: consent
btwDamn morally superior people always mentioning their moral superiority while making a morally superior argument. Let me eat my eggs in peace (I still eat eggs but I promise only from farms that have lots of space for their chickens, I'm almost there comrade)
