Russia seems to have lost contact with its first lunar probe in half a century
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WWII Germany total surrender - 7th May 1945
You stated you just turned 60 - so born 1963.
There may have been a chance your parents could have been nuked if Nazi Germany had held out a year longer.
However the cold hard maths shows that you had no WWII nuclear weapons aimed at you, other than the nuclear weapons we all had/have aimed at us. The Cold War ended 28 Dec 1991 - so anyone in their 30's or older had the same threats. Engineering made those nuclear weapons, wars deployed those weapons, but politics and by extension economic policies stopped the Cold War. Engineering didn't solve the Cold War, it just made the flashpoints more dangerous.
Likewise an appeal to authority of your age being 60. Belated Happy Birthday for last week. However I don't think you will find that your age and wisdom is an outlier, IMDHO I think you will find you are no where near the oldest on Ars, no where the oldest who read the article, and still not the oldest who has even been in this thread.
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Molten aluminum and water have about the same kinematic viscosity so they end up atomizing about the same (I'm speaking from experience here). If you drop a cup of water it will atomize (splash) so yeah, molten aluminum accelerating from 2 km/s to zero in a few meters will too. I'm not suggesting the metal droplets will be 50 microns. They might be several millimeters across. That's still an atomized fluid. And from where I started: pulverized and atomized, I still feel my initial description was right. Ok, nothing not near propellant will vaporize. Fine.
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Are people still going on about that tired old "knowledge makes you ethical and good, and ignorance = evil"? I would've thought World War II would've debunked that one. The most educated population in the entire world allowed themselves to fall in line and torch off the most destructive war in human history.
People who learn things and are smart just have better tools to help justify what they want to do and believe, to themselves and others.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
People who learn things and are smart just have better tools to help justify what they want to do and believe, to themselves and others.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
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Colonialism is people using technology to beat those with less technology. We have often conflated higher technology with higher morality, when often the opposite is the case. Possibly because those with more tech have better printing presses...
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Unless you are Turkey or from there, there's a limit to how far you can compartmentalize issues related to other countries, active genocide is one of those things that shatters the ability to compartmentalize these issues, Putin wants to erase the Ukrainian identity, that's genocide, and that will and should taint all of Russia's actions until Putin takes the Russian window express, or however else it happens, and possibly not even then
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Taking a different angle on it, perhaps Helmut Gröttrup, the German engineer who jump-started the Soviet space rocketry program?
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Is there an absolute scale of morality? Isn't that an internal judgement only? Two moral codes could be different and yet each finds the other to be morally inferior. What's the objective test?
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now, historic actions are about as relevant today as maps of Kyvian Rus.
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That's news to me. I've read a number of histories of the Second World War and the Manhattan Project. As far as I know, they never got as far as putting together a list of German targets for atomic weapons. Do you have a reference to support your statement?
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12 pages of comments and some marvelous stuff: well done everyone. Surprised it took so long to get to "HA HA"
Wouldn't it be nice if we could extrapolate from the failure and ineptitude of the Luna-25 that the Russian ICBM's are in poor shape too
Except far too many Russian weapons are still functioning effectively
(I'm thinking of the (minor) plot point in a Tom Clancy book where the Russians shook down the US gov't for some 'disarmament' money that turned out to be deactivation of rusted out ICBMs in non maintained silos )
If only we could hope that was true
Wouldn't it be nice if we could extrapolate from the failure and ineptitude of the Luna-25 that the Russian ICBM's are in poor shape too
Except far too many Russian weapons are still functioning effectively (I'm thinking of the (minor) plot point in a Tom Clancy book where the Russians shook down the US gov't for some 'disarmament' money that turned out to be deactivation of rusted out ICBMs in non maintained silos )
If only we could hope that was true
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Snarky Robot
Ars Legatus Legionis
Hmm...
Public Health Announcement:
Inappropriate use of beauty products, such as internal application, can lead to smoothness of the brain, not of the skin.
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Special Lunar Operation was a success for Mother Russia! Ars is American propaganda that exists purely to degrade Russia as a nation!
/s
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Nobody will talk about the failed engineers of a failed moon launch either.
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If you were ignoring politics you would be ignoring this mission. Its sole purpose was political. And because it was a political action by a reprehensible regime, it's completely good and right to celebrate its failure.
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Of course there is a moral scale, it's just in metric
& it isn't absolute as there is a whole bunch of negatives...=][=
I'm not saying one group is more moral than the other in general. But generally those doing the colonisation justify that they are able to do so because they have the greater $Diety and $MoralCode so they are meant to rule. That the colonisation is more a function of guns, germs and steel/steal is more often than not glossed over. We also have to recognise that whilst ideals make up morals, moral choices are not made in ideal situations - so context and limited information have to be taken into account.
But I do think we can agree that genocide is on the negative side of moral codes.
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20 m would be fine for basic command uplink and engineering/housekeeping telemetry downlink, but you're not going to be bringing stuff back at Megabits/sec. I can't tell how big the high gain antenna is - it looks like a horn with maybe 20cm aperture, and the waveguide is hard to see. For X band, that's about 20dBi. They don't have huge solar panels, so I can't see them running 100 Watts (which would be 250 W DC to a TWTA). Free space loss is ~220 dB, so assuming 20 Watt amplifier (+43 dBm) and 20 dBi, their EIRP is +63 dBm - 220, puts them at -157 dBm Prec into an isotrope. 20m is about 61 dB gain, so just over -100 dBm into the receiver. With N0 of maybe -170 dBm/Hz, that might just squeak by for 1 Mbps, but more likely something like 100 kbps.
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Politics kills. Ignoring it is fatal. Politics is the transmission of democracy. Ignore politics, and democracy seizes up.
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Christ, they can't even fail with dignity anymore. It's lies all the way down. It's like that guy who thinks he is the smartest one in the room, lying his ass off and being too dumb to read the social queues - where everyone is nodding politely but in reality hates his guts.
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In the modern vernacular that can be simplified to “You let your ego Trump.” or simply “You Trumped.”
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He says while defending the actions of a genocidal megalomaniac.
And yes, your ARE defending them by insisting the rest of us ignore them.
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Being born is not laying your life on the line. It's not like you had a choice in the matter.
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Statistical
Ars Legatus Legionis
Russia post strike detection of micrometeorites seems to be 100%. Must be the unluckiest bestest nation in the world.
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Unfortunately, too many people take that too far the other way and equate ignorance with virtue.
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I've long reached the conclusion that morality is different from, and inferior to, ethics. Morality is based on cultural norms and expectation, and differs radically between societies. Ethics is based on fundamental humanity, the existence of empathy, the recognition that there is no objective and absolute measure of value that makes us different. You can be as immoral as it takes to enrage the local karens, while still behaving ethically in recognition and respect of your shared humanity with others. The king is not fundamentally different or superior to the peasant, and the king who recognizes that is more ethical than the king who doesn't.
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... or we could just adopt the German proverb: "Wenn man mit den großen Hunden pinkeln will, aber mit den kleinen das Bein nicht heben kann." [*]
[* - "When you want to piss with the big dogs but can't even lift your leg with the little ones."]
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Well, they were here for something over 20,000 years, it would seem. And I'm not sure what you mean by "sitting around." From what I've been able to learn, they did an awful lot of walking.
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Wow. Six minutes between the flounce (above) and the next post. That's past "not sticking the flounce" and into the region of not even landing it before re-entering the conversation.
Look. I empathize: humans are a bunch of bastards who far too often bend our creativity towards tribalism and screwing each other over rather than anything productive or cooperative. It sucks; I get it. It is very hard to have open eyes and not be a raging misanthrope; I certainly haven't managed it.
But yelling at people for doing it wrong doesn't solve anything. Pretty much everyone is doing it wrong. There are countless ways of making things worse and very few of making them better: that's basically entropy, boiled down to ELI5 level.
That can't be the solution: everyone thinks that they're being reasonable and looking at the cold hard facts.
That also can't be the solution: there's an entire religion about a guy who preached that same message about two thousand years ago, and that religion's couple of billion adherents are a large portion of the problem.
Look. If you want to make things better, you need to demonstrate a path forward (something more specific than "be moral and rational" because, again, that's what everybody thinks they are) and lead.
And maybe your way forward won't be the right way forward: as with entropy, there are likely more paths that lead to disorder than to order. One of the lessons we should take from evolution is that a good way to beat entropy is to throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.
But really, if you do think the way forward is just to be kind and rational, and yelling at the people who aren't... maybe the people to yell at are the ones committing war crimes in an unwinnable war against a neighboring country, and not, y'know, the people angry about that.
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Morality is different from ethics, yes. As to whether morality is inferior - that depends on your point of view.
Legal ethics, for example, often results in outcomes that many may consider immoral, such as guilty parties going free.
And similar for medical ethics - for example, if the parents of a sick child are Jehovah's Witness and the child desperately needs blood - medical ethics prevents a doctor from administering it, even if the child will die without it. Is that the moral thing to do?
Ethics is akin to law. Law is often based on "morals" - the prohibition against homicide, for example, but the law is not moral, and its application may result in immoral outcomes.
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