Atlantis

[Deckard]

No, not that one. This one:



What a fantastic shot.

Also good to see the Herschel and Planck telescopes lifting off safely. Must have been a scary time for everyone who worked on them.

[jOHN rODRIGUEZ]

Yeah, that's a good one.

[Dunwho]

Its crazy how space flight is gettin so normal these days.. this mission is incredibly dangerous and is going to provide huge amounts of info and photography if successful yet there so little media coverage. Well compared to a space mission 20years ago lets say. Yet the second something goes wrong, people die (because it is still incredibly dangerous) or money is wasted, the media latch onto it and question the use of this money, the need to go into space, whose fault was it that this or that exploded... and NASA and other space gencies are damaged by these reports and have to waste time justifying their actions, maybe ground their fleet and waste even more money by cancelling missions... The success of this mission is going to be a backpage report on most papers and only if something goes wrong will there be a media frenzy.

its such a shame because space flight used to be so romantic an idea and every kids dream... i dunno, it just seems like its taken for granted now, the heroic era of space exploration is well and truely over... now its a struggle just to keep public opion on their side!

[Deckard]

It is a shame. As is the general ignorance of science generally. Maybe that's what happens when you stretch the idea of personal freedom and supply and demand to its inevitable limit. A large part of the news media - and the media in general - now give people what they want, and little if anything else. And the problem with that is it leads to a downward pull. Instead of understanding how stars form or how telescopes can peer through dust and gas, people know more about the marital break-up of two Z-list celebs, or who's appearing in this year's Big Brother.

When you think about it, for centuries, the most powerful and intelligent minds on Earth would have given anything to posses the kind of knowledge that most of us today have at our fingertips - about the cosmos, how stars form, what the sun is made of, about time, space, gravity, about how different reality actually is to the one we experience in our daily lives - and yet so few people today appear to know any of this or appear bothered to know any of it. Instead, we just occupy ourselves with trivia, with bubble-gum.

It would have surely taken months for the most powerful and wealthy medieval King to seek out the right sources and obtain a fraction of the knowledge that we have available today. And even then he would have been badly misinformed. Today, ever more since the internet, we have an obscene amount of instant and free information - or, at a push, a book from Amazon costing less than a tenner - not just related to astronomy or cosmology, but the world in general: other cultures, natural selection, politics, etc. So much knowledge, and yet so little interest.

It's f*cked up, that's what it is! Where is the thirst for knowledge these days?

Perhaps it was always that way, but the disinterest is now merely more obvious and less excusable, at least for those of us fortunate enough to live in developed nations with time to go down the pub or watch TV.

[Sean]

I wonder if this is something that the public WOULD be interested in if they were given more information about it. It's not that hard to present this stuff in a pretty fascinating way given how inherently incredible it is. Or who knows - maybe people really just wouldn't give a crap. Working in feature films, I find myself wondering what the hell people respond to more and more as shitty movie after shitty movie makes bank at the box office, while great movies frequently don't make much, or aren't even green-lit in the first place. I just don't think I understand or identify with much of our society.

[cacophony]

i've been following astro_mike on twitter. he doesn't update much but when he does it's soooooo cool to think he's updating from space. and leading up to the launch you could sense that he was really looking forward to it and it was fun to see that human element.

i'm a die-hard nasa buff. i once skipped out on the chance to interview for a job at nickelodeon because it was my only opportunity to go to cape canaveral and tour the kennedy space center. it was worth it, nickelodeon would have never panned out. i've also done johnson space center in houston and marshall space center in alabama. and i have quite a little collection of mission patches.

and someday i will totally send my kids to spacecamp.

[Dunwho]

Originally Posted by Deckard

It is a shame [....]
It's f*cked up, that's what it is! Where is the thirst for knowledge these days?

Too true. But you know, we do have the thirst for knowledge, i mean, the popularity of sites like wikipedia speaks for itself, and the world is a better educated place these days by far! We are by no means deprived of knowledge but i have always applied an idea to the way i do things like make music and play guitar and things like that, in light of the tech advances that we benefit from....
.
..what i think is that, for example, when i started editing music on a computer i had a shite windows recording program that made wav files, and i would manually record a selection of soundbites from movies and radio...in such a way that they made a sequence of noises (not very good but it was enough to get me hooked on production of music and sound) - this would take me maybe 4 hours at a time if not more...

..nowadays since i know what im doing and i have far better programmes and equipment i could do the exact same thing in 30mins

....what i try to do therefore is apply that same four hours of work to enhance the piece of music or sound, so that even though i have already achieved the same thing in 30mins, if i apply 4hours i will inevitably learn and progress and do a better more sonically brilliant job than ever before


..if we use the same idea in searching for info online...

....we would manually look for books and info in libraries and archives before the internet, take notes by hand before the computer, 2/3 weeks if not month or two for a college essay.

....these days we can sufficiantly research a topic in less than a week to the same extent as had been done in 2 or 3weeks before.....but what if we still researched for 2/3 weeks with the research we have now... researched until we had nothing left even if that took less than 2/3 weeks... there are of course those that do this anyway these days, and they are inevitably the people that succeed, but i think on average there are less people willing to commit these days to somehting like this and we are becoming lazy... comfortable...

we need an impulse!


sorry its 6am and i havnt slept in 24 hours... so this kinda thinking is bound to result in a reckless and waffling message board rant.. but i am adament about this...we are getting so lazy