Russia seems to have lost contact with its first lunar probe in half a century
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
Lets put a pin in this post while I get some paperclips.
There is an interesting amount of parallels in both the US and USSR space programs and how having rocket engineering as a background worked as a get out of jail/gaol/gulag card.
Sergei Korolev is a very good example of someone who was in a Gulag, and then went onto being a key engineer for the USSR space program. That he was born in the Russian Empire in what is now Ukraine just adds another layer.
Upvote
12
(12
/
0)
I guess I get your point now, even though I might still not totally agree with it from my PoV.
At the very least this tangent has been indeed interesting, even from the language perspective.
The gist of the very article we comment under was pretty clear, and there's only so much that could have been added on how much Russian space programme sucks big time, especially after the (predicted by page one) litho‑braking manoeuvre.
So I did quite enjoy this philosophy tangent, as much as I enjoyed posting crash memes in the first few pages of the comments. There is only so much you can say about a Luna‑25 litho‑brake after fifteen pages, so ethics was a welcome diversion.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
What an utter load of crap. I rape and kill just as many people every day as I want to (that number just happerns to be zero) and no god, Christian or otherwise, has ever told me one way or the other what to do. God is, IMO, nothing more than a load of garbage invented by people who were too scared to accept that they're grownups who don't need a parent holding their hand any more, invisible sky daddy or otherwise.
Upvote
2
(8
/
-6)
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
"However, due to an unspecified problem…"
Only by learning more about our universe can we survive, and humans learn primarily from our mistakes. The details of every failed effort are at least as crucial to our species than those of our successes. To conceal them is evil, and inasmuch as it leads to secrecy, shame is simply stupid.
That Russia’s government behaves destructively is unsurprisingly. That ours also routinely does this is appalling.
Opacity = Death
Only by learning more about our universe can we survive, and humans learn primarily from our mistakes. The details of every failed effort are at least as crucial to our species than those of our successes. To conceal them is evil, and inasmuch as it leads to secrecy, shame is simply stupid.
That Russia’s government behaves destructively is unsurprisingly. That ours also routinely does this is appalling.
Opacity = Death
Upvote
-2
(2
/
-4)
They weren’t supposed to attempt landing until today. This was an orbital transfer that accidentally became a deorbit burn. It’s not unlikely that this burn was performed on the near side, and then it crashed on the far side outside of view or comms.
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
To be clear, we’re not making fun of them for crashing into the Moon. Landing on another body is incredibly hard, and only a few groups have managed it. We’re making fun of them for being the almighty Russian empire, and this mission is old news to them, and they’re going to show all these new upstarts how someone with 60 years of experience does it… and they crashed into the Moon.
Upvote
20
(20
/
0)
Good luck taking words back from the general popular usage. If it were up to me, "gay" would mean happy and carefree as it once did, and we wouldn't have to see millenials scratching their heads over the meanings of old texts. There are lot of words that have different meanings between their academic usage and the popular meaning, and there are some words (I had a couple on the tip of my tongue but they went the way those thoughts tend to do nowadays) that have different meanings in different technical specialties. We just cant choose to "take back" language, that would look low key emo and you'd be cheugy.
Anyway, the fact is that the word "morality" does indeed often mean strongly right or wrong in general usage, and that's what I've been trying to rebut by pointing out that "moral," as it is generally used, is a cultural, social and religious-based concept that changes constantly over time and place. The religious apologists who bemoan "moral relativity" fail to recognize that their morality, their powerful sense of right and wrong, is quite different than the moral sense of the writers of the book that they claim gives them eternal and unchanging guidance.
I'm not trying to take away anyone's morality, nor their terminology. I say let them keep it, and we can recognize it for what it is. The word and its meaning will eventually change anyway. To the extent that a moral system is also ethical in its application, I'm all in favor of it. To the extent that it's hurtful and hateful, it needs to be opposed and replaced.
The good news is that since cultures naturally change spontaneously and often rapidly, morality is also changeable. Ethics, being centered on humanity rather than a particular cultural time or place, is not so changeable. To the extent that educated and philosophically aware leaders can exert an influence over popular culture, they can work to shape the local morality into something that corresponds more closely to an ethical society. Post-war Europe is evidence that it can be done.
Upvote
0
(2
/
-2)
I was hoping we could bring that side tangent full circle back to the moon failure, but it would have to step through a Russian/Ukranian minefield before it can return.
Upvote
-1
(0
/
-1)
As a serious believer in evolution, I note that almost every society in the last 100,000 years has believed in an "invisible sky daddy". I presume that means it improves chances of survival. Evolution will have a response to humankind being able to choose when or if they have children. Presently, no developed nation comes anywhere near a birth rate maintaining their population. People who are religious, especially couples who share the same religion, produce more than enough offspring than needed to maintain the population.
Upvote
-3
(2
/
-5)
Or perhaps...
Inventing an "invisible deity in the sky", and posing as his "anointed-by-deity", and of course conveniently "infallible" representative has always been the easiest way to gain and maintain control over a quasi-societal group of fellow humans?
"Thou shalt adhere to these here rules <insertdeityname> has delivered to his true followers by means of this talking, burning shrubbery. Thou also must follow them at all times and without question, or risk being ostracized from the group and suffer eternal damnation."
Those groups whose leaders were way incompetent inevitably perished, and those who persevered [or rather: "got lucky"?] survived and lived to tell the tales of their fabulous deity and chosen leader to their offspring. Or a few millennia later, got to write the history books.
Just seemed like an interesting brainfart there for a sec. Carry on, gentlefolk.
Upvote
8
(8
/
0)
That really depends on what you mean by "invisible sky daddy."
Believing in the supernatural, and embracing superstition? Attributing random events, or ones we would currently understand to be natural, to a conscious force? Yes, almost certainly from day one. Even birds are susceptible to superstition; creatures like us who have a sense of narrative didn't stand a chance.
And the evolutionary benefit is obvious: if you correctly identify the reason for an event, you can predict when it will happen, but if you incorrectly predict that a random event has a reason, you're generally no worse off, so it benefits you to be biased towards ruling out false negatives more than false positives.
But "sky-daddy" as a source of morality? That's new. I mean, look at the Greeks (and by extension, the Romans), a bare few millennia ago: their pantheon has very human flaws, which often ended poorly for humans. The Trojan War supposedly happened because Aphrodite couldn't stand to not be declared the prettiest.
Gods have been around basically forever, as explanations for the (at the time) inexplicable. An actual religion, though, like what we would recognize today, has not been a fixture of humanity for very long at all, relatively speaking.
Upvote
6
(7
/
-1)
I tried and failed to use HST to observe Cassini's impact into Saturn's atmosphere. It failed because atmospheric drag on the last few orbits was greater than predicted and the event happened eight minutes before HST could start observing. (Saturn was just rising above the Earth's limb.) But I did get a nice UV image of Saturn and its aurora, which complemented some observations made a day earlier.
Based on that, and without doing the numbers, I'd say the Luna 25 impact could have been seen by a good Earth based telescope. Possibly one at the high end of amateur range. But it wouldn't have been distinguishable from noise. If you know exactly where and when an impact will occur, that very weak signal in exactly the right pixel is a valid detection. But if you don't know where or when the event occurs, there's no way to be sure if it's a real detection or just instrument noise.
Upvote
12
(12
/
0)
Less than it appears.
Morality is a human phenomenon, grounded in human nature, with a lot of cross-cultural near-constants that aren't just arbitrary or random.
The most important of those have to do with not doing harm, more generally behaving in pro-social ways (for some unit of society), being accountable for one's actions, etc.
And most people have understood morality to be essentially truth-based.
For example, even if you believe that there's a God who can infallibly tell you what's right and wrong, despite it going against all your human moral intuitions, you certainly think that that's only important because it's TRUE: that the God does actually exist, that he is actually morally authoritative in some unfathomable way, etc.
So for example, you might kill men who have gay sex because Leviticus tells you to.
But if you figure out that God of the Bible likely doesn't exist, or perhaps that he does but probably never said anything like that---that it was something benighted bronze-age goatherds believed, and nothing more---all the sudden it's not so important to kill gay men. Maybe it's a bad idea. Probably it's morally wrong. No longer the moral thing to do.
Morality isn't just an arbitrary set of rules. It's always grounded in BELIEFS, which can be true or false.
There may be no objective morality, in some technical sense, but there certainly are MORAL MISTAKES, where people think things are right or wrong because they hold false beliefs.
You can be morally mistaken because you are factually mistaken, and IMO that's the usual kind of moral error.
We may never agree on all the details of morality, but pretty much everyone understands some basic principles of morality. (Even psychopaths understand that it's about being pro-social and responsible, not self-serving without limit, although they don't personally care for it.)
Most of the "relativity" of morality is about different beliefs, not different moral principles
One of the big axes of disagreement on morality is about the relative importance of basic pro-social principles vs "purity" and "sacredness" for its own sake.
For example, some people think it's mostly important not to be an asshole. Other people think it's more important to be a virgin, or to not eat pork, than to not be an asshole.
But that too is generally grounded in a difference in belief. If you come to think that your God doesn't prefer beef to pork, because there's actually no spiritual "filth" in the pig flesh that you'll get on your immortal soul, you'll probably stop thinking that not eating pork is a big moral virtue. Likewise if you stop believing various nonsense about virginity and God's feelings about it, you'll probably stop thinking that being a virgin is something to brag about.
But you're likely to be left with something, at least an aversion to people who are assholes. That's something that tends NOT to go away once you get basic clues about facts related to morality, because it's grounded in human nature in a way beliefs about the "uncleanness" of pork are not.
Upvote
0
(2
/
-2)
I meant nonsense in the sense that there were no real world application before electricity was a thing. There are some areas of mathematics that has very little application. Think string theory.
Upvote
0
(1
/
-1)
Of course, that's why there are so many bombed out civilian apartment buildings in Ukraine since the war began, isn't it?......
Fucking brainless russian troll!
Last edited:
Upvote
14
(14
/
0)
Think orbital dynamics or basically any system involving oscillations. Complex numbers are a much more convenient way of dealing with phase and amplitude than trying to work with them as two real numbers. They figured that out in the nineteenth century.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
Evolution does not inherently require a positive result for something to be selected for. It simply has to tend to get replicated rather than not is all.
Upvote
7
(8
/
-1)
If that was true why didn’t they immediately surrender after the first bomb?
Also this is the same Imperial Japan that killed more people in cities that had surrendered than were killed by the atomic bombs. I think those atrocities should always be included to give context of what kind of war was happening.
For instance when Singapore fell the Japanese Command implemented their plan to kill 50,000 Overseas Chinese as retaliation for being perceived to be anti-Japanese.
Upvote
14
(14
/
0)
Also, there is no reason to believe that religion has anything other than a societal advantage (and one that's rapidly disappearing). Nor is there any reason to believe it's been around long enough to have any evolutionary effect in the first place. That's just pop philosophy gibberish.
Upvote
-5
(1
/
-6)
There's evidence that the emperor of Japan wanted to surrender right after the destruction of Hiroshima, but the generals refused to do so. In fact, they may have tried to stop the Emperor from appearing in public to surrender after Nagasaki as well. The short answer to the question is they were paralyzed with shock and unable to move fast enough. It's also possible that the US would have dropped two bombs regardless, to demonstrate it wasn't a one-off.
There was nothing restrained and rational about that point in the war. It was nothing but chaos as the axis fell apart and got steamrollered.
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
In all probability, the Soviet's declaration of war on Japan is what finally forced the situation. They'd been pinning all their hopes on the Soviets serving as an intermediary in a negotiated conditional surrender. Once they declared war that avenue was closed off to them, and their only options were a) surrender to the Americans, b) surrender to the Soviets, or c) utter obliteration caught between American nukes (they didn't know that they only had one or two and could only drop new ones as they came off the production line) and a Soviet zerg rush.
None of them are great options, but it was already clear what would happen if they surrendered to the Soviets, so surrender to the Americans became the least bad option. At least the Americans offered some hope of one day being independent again, and their soldiers were less brutal to civilians than the Soviets were
Upvote
6
(7
/
-1)
The rumor is, that whatever was responsible for sensing acceleration of the spacecraft and then sending the data to the main computer malfunctioned, resulting in inertial navigation thinking that the commanded delta-v was not yet realized and what stopped the burn was a backup timer, which, obviously, was too long. Just a rumor though.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
That seems unlikely. Hadn’t they been paying attention? USSR was an aggressor nation in the war. They helped start the war as a land grab in Eastern Europe, before being betrayed by their fellow Axis power. There should have been every expectation of the Soviets joining in the frenzy as soon as they smelled blood in the water.
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
You might want to try and acquaint yourself with elementary history and the Japanese behavior during WWII instead of posting ludicrous theories about what might have happened that you invent out of thin air.
The Japanese had no interest in surrendering months before when entire cities were being burned to the ground by fire bombing.
Upvote
7
(8
/
-1)
I never said it was a good strategy! It was just the one the military leadership at the time were pinning all their hopes on. At the time they didn't seem to be operating in reality and operating under some major self-delusions regarding how the war's endgame was going to play out.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
I wonder how many people these days remember that “meme” is a term coined by Richard Dawkins to support his (IMO very plausible) evolutionary explanation of the pervasive spread of religious belief in spite of its being often detrimental to the people who hold it.
Last edited:
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
A topic that came up in The Soapbox recently.
According the timeline and contemporary documentation, the Japanese military (who were also tentatively studying the potential of atomic weaponry at the time) were skeptical that the US could build the bombs fast enough to make a difference. Well, they turned out to be right, but the dropping of the second bomb so soon after the first took the wind out of the sails of that faction. If, as it appeared, the US could change from long trains of firebombing groups to small one- or two- bomber groups, each capable of destroying a city, that was a horrifying prospect for the potential rapidity of erasing sections of Japan from the map and making fortifications against invasion futile.
The bluff worked as intended. As always, it wasn't the only factor in play. It might not have even been the largest factor in the moment. But having a second bomb go off quickly after the first definitely ratcheted up the pressure.
At this point their options were A) be crushed under the heel of the USSR for the foreseeable future, B) capitulate to the Potsdam declaration which they interpreted to mean the Emperor himself would be disgraced by a war crimes trial, C) at a high cost to themselves, make the continuation of the war so unappealing to the Allies that a negotiated peace was possible, and Japan was pushing for the most favorable "lose" state they could get (keeping all their concquered territory, for example).
The way they saw it, those were the only possible outcomes.
The bomb and the Soviet assaults on the home islands made the decision for them.
Upvote
12
(12
/
0)
this was after all basically the whole point behind Kamikaze and Bonsai Raids, they weren't supposed to be sustainable, just horrifically deadly, and they were
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
It's well known that the US was deliberately spending more (initially anyway) on the military and space technologies in the full knowledge that the USSR would spend themselves into penury trying to keep up.
And while there was a small peace dividend once the USSR fell, it didn't last long because the military-industrial complex soon found other emergencies in order to maintain their gravy train..
As one military commentator observed - the Ukraine war is cash in the till for the arms manufacturers and they probably don't want it to end any time soon.
Upvote
-14
(0
/
-14)
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
While the observation may be unfortunately true, it's a stretch to imply that the arms manufacturers are the perpetrators of this war. Vultures may depend on the hyenas, but vultures are not responsible for the hyenas' kills.
Upvote
16
(16
/
0)
I don't disagree with any of that for the most part, but just transferring the onus to belief really doesn't change anything. Belief is just as culturally and socially volatile as morality itself, and if a belief in witches leads to it being morally acceptable to burn old women at the stake, or if a belief in the wrath of Tlaloc makes it morally imperative to torture and kill children to appease him, then it's going to be impossible to argue that your moral system is in any way ethical. In fact, in order to meaningfully make a distinction between morals and ethics, it seems almost a necessity to have a scientific perspective of the world, that can be used to examine and test beliefs before those are attached to moral values. Because, as was pointed out earlier, ethics is more of a field of research than it is a rules-based formula. An ignorance-based morality cannot avoid being ethically inferior. The two words are simply not interchangable -- ethics requires a scientific mindset, and one that is focused on the humanity of behavior rather than upon an imaginary external force that must be placated.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
When people say that morality is "subjective," they're often saying (or are perceived to be saying) that you can't make objective moral arguments, and can't persuade people with facts, because it's not about facts; it's about inarguable preferences, like chocolate vs. vanilla vs. strawberry ice cream.
If it IS largely about facts, that's tremendously important. It means there's a chance of coming to moral agreement by starting from common moral intuitions and working them through in light of the facts.
Many people don't understand that. They don't understand how moral arguments work, or how well they can work, except by appeals to scriptural authority or something like that. As you say, an ignorance-based morality cannot avoid being morally inferior. That is largely the point.
If belief in the wrath of Tlaloc is the linchpin of somebody's moral reasoning about why to kill children, that's important. It tells you it's important to question the idea that Tlaloc actually exists, wants you to do that, and will punish you if you don't, because that belief is derailing people's moral reasoning.
That's why (in our world) I think it's really important to cast doubt on things like the scriptural authority of the book of Leviticus. It's important to say that the Bible is clearly NOT inerrant, and that Leviticus is barbaric and immoral.
Many theologically liberal (but not necessarily politically liberal) Christians believe that the Bible has benighted bronze-age stuff in it that's just horribly morally wrong, Levitical prescriptions providing several stellar examples, but they very rarely say so in public. That is not part of our public moral discourse.
That lets a lot of people believe that the Bible IS inerrant, and that most Christians know it is.
When I was a kid, I used to think the Bible was inerrant, and that all of the adults in my family knew it, or surely they'd have said something. Turns out most of them DIDN'T believe that, but they didn't tell ME, so I took the Bible way too seriously for quite some time, and it freaked me out.
Many adults are in the same situation their entire lives. They think it's common knowledge that everything in the Bible is true, modulo some difficulties of interpretation due to ancient language and metaphors, and that the Bible is the ultimate moral authority. They've never heard a smart, informed person tell them otherwise.
They can easily believe that stuff, because less orthodox Christians don't have the guts and honesty to call them out and tell them that Leviticus is stupidly wrong and morally abhorrent, and that anyone taking it seriously is morally impaired. They've never been forced to face the Euthyphro dilemma head-on, even though that argument is a thousands-of-year-old philosophical classic.
Moral progress is possible, and often depends on getting people to stop believing stupid shit and learn a little basic philosophy. That's an important fact.
Upvote
0
(2
/
-2)
Or... those of us there for it, and the utter failure of the 90s rebuild of Russia, knew that Russia never went away and the CCP would still be a threat. You have no idea how long we were berated as "hawks" only to be proven right by this war and the CCP dropping the smiling mask. We. Were. Right. No one is upset about the massive US stockpiles anymore for some odd reason... funny that. They'll complain again when the next crisis is brewing.
We told people to stomp on the 90s, and they said "no... let it live" because they never saw the horrors these monsters unleashed when they were strong. Fooled people into trusting them when they began leeching on the world again. It wasn't mercy, it was weakness. And now innocent people in Ukraine and possibly Taiwan will pay the price.
That spending is why our NATO allies refusing to pay their share are insulting. The reason the US was made the de facto world police. We could push back on Russia and China while no one else could. Given the high rate of begging the US to come back after "kicking them out"... I think the reasons for the MIC are more complex than greed. You want to end the US MIC? Make your own.
Upvote
6
(8
/
-2)
Nah, Russia is just keeping the seat warm until the UN General Assembly officially assigns the successor state, just like they did with China's seat. They were never formally recognized.
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
It's also completely true. Some Japanese officials did have their ambassador in Moscow approach Molotov about helping negotiate a truce with the US and the UK. It isn't clear why they thought that had a chance of working, and they basically did it behind the back of the war cabinet (which was far too dysfunctional to agree on anything.) But they actually did approach the Soviets. Who stalled their ambassador until they declared war and invaded Manchuria.
Upvote
10
(10
/
0)
The Japanese gave up on those bonsai attacks after the first few years of the war. In the later years, they usually dug lots of deep, interconnected tunnels and made the US troops dig them out. The still rarely surrendered, but that approach was much more effective than mass suicide charges.
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
