Put 'em up against the wall.
As a guest, versili can’t search, though it would have been nice to link to Cecil’s original and undated column.
This isn’t exactly breaking news. Yang Liwei’s flight was on October 15, 2003.
Since that times, there have been several threads commenting on his comment.
Great Wall of China – not visible from space…
The Great Wall: China’s best kept secret?
Two of these were also started by guests, oddly.
Even the Imagethief blog: Public relations, communication and interesting times in China had somebody cite the Cecil column, as did the hardcore nerds at TriviaHallOfFame.com.
Nothing ever goes away on the Internet.
Welcome to the SDMB, versili.
We’re hypervigilant about copyright issues here at the SDMB, so I’ve edited your post to reduce the amount of text. In the future, please do not simply cut and paste whole articles from other websites. Limit quotations to a few sentences at most, and provide a link to the rest. The rest of your article can be read at http://spanish.china.org.cn/english/scitech/80887.htm
bibliophage
moderator CCC
According to Snopes it is true that the Great Wall is not visible from up there, but a great many other things are.
My penis, for example.
A link to Snopes is given in two of the threads I linked to above.
Snopes also says that the first mention of the legend was from Richard Halliburton in 1938, but I gave a link to Wiki that mentions a 1932 Ripley’s Believe It or Not cartoon.
Can anyone verify the existence of that cartoon?
A recent news report on that giant palm in Madagascar (or, as a Polish buddy who plays RISK calls it, “Madagaski”) said it was visible from space, not expanding on that to say it was visible in the satellite photos on Google Earth, not with the naked eye. I had to explain to my daughter that it wouldn’t have to be all that big to show up on Google Earth because I could identify our house by the white Tempo parked across the street in early satellite shots. Now that we’ve junked the Tempo it should be real easy to spot our house by the thumb-in-your-eye-yellow Focus my oldest bought to replace it, if she were ever home. On a sunny day I think that car might be visible with the naked eye…from the moon.
When she was looking at it I told her that if she didn’t buy it I would. There are times a guy needs a stupid car and it just needs one of those power chips and a nitrous injector and a blower and a …
bonzer’s away from his home PC at the moment, so has asked me to post this on his behalf:
The Google Maps / Google Earth database isn’t all satellite in the first place; it also includes plain old aerial photography. That’s why some areas are have detailed coverage and others don’t.
Using Google Books, searching 1920-1930 for [“Visible from the moon” Great Wall], you get China Review, 1921, pg. 136, which says, in snippet view
. That’s the earliest I can find.
I should add that I think this popular misconception is a misstatement of what astronomers actually believed, which is that using telescopes equal to the current best on the Earth, the Wall would be visible from the Moon.