Google has already explained this. It involves pigeons.
Radio makes sense, but TV? You expect me to believe they can send moving pictures by radio? Sure, streaming video on the internet, that’s fine, even though it uses radio wifi signal to send the digital file to your goddam phone.
But just send a radio to a box, and it somehow knows how to turn it into a picture, with no computers in there or anything? And like you said, they invented this in the 20s, with stone knives and bearskins?
I can only assume you’re joking, because this is practically impossible. In the English Premier League, a computer selects the fixtures based on data from the police (only one of Manchester City and Manchester United can play a home game on the same day, for example). likewise for other cities with more than one club. Also, TV schedules require teams play a certain number of times for their channel per season, plus the various laws around kick off times, pub licensing laws and keeping certain fixtures for early in the day to reduce the risk of drunken behaviour…
So, unless you’re joking, that simply cannot happen.
I don’t know if you are kidding or not but the only thing wrong with that account is that it is a little out of date. Henry and Holly Stephenson (and yes, they look exactly like you think they do) really did design all the Major League Baseball schedules from their kitchen table until 2004 until they were outbid. Oh, people tried to replace them but even computer science professors could not figure out how to do it for years. They knew how to take everything into account somehow to come up with the most fair schedules that anyone knew how to devise. It was one of the rarest and most esoteric skills in the world.
*For decades, MLB hired outside contractors to draw up its schedule. Henry and Holly Stephenson, a married couple, did it from 1981-2004. SSG was founded in 1996, with coordinating partner Doug Bureman — a former senior vice president of the Pittsburgh Pirates — providing an MLB contact. Still, it took eight years before SSG successfully wrestled the scheduling from the Stephensons.
“They were good,” Trick said. “I thought in the mid-1990s it wouldn’t take long to beat Henry and Holly, but I was wrong. It took a long time before my group was able to compete with them.”*
I’m totally going to have to try that hand-drawn holograms thing.
And as an aside, the guy who discovered the technique is (or at least was) a Doper.
I’ve got your Andromeda right here.
Surely, that video is one of the most amazing things we have ever seen.
And somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy, someone may have created a similar video of the Milky Way… possibly portraying the Earth of 2.5 million years ago, long before homo habilis left Africa.
And when these two huge galaxies eventually collide, there’s an extremely small chance that any stars will collide.
And it happened due to knowledge that was centuries-old and not considered esoteric. The basic knowledge of how to get the spacecraft to the right place at the right time was (and remains) Newtonian physics and its handmaiden, integral and differential calculus of real-valued functions.
The knowledge required to build the craft, to make the fuels, and to make sure the humans in the craft survived trips is more complex, and is more involved, and requires a lot more study, but the flashy stuff, the pirouettes and jetés and tours chaînés déboulés which move the spacecraft around and get set to music in film, that’s all stuff we teach undergrads and high school students, and have for centuries.
In role-playing game terms, humans are munchkins. We’re the kinds of players who discover some mechanic and abuse twelve kinds of Hell out of it, turning the game into something the game master never intended with no respect for the setting. We push the game-ness of the game well past the story-ness of the game, and end up doing absurd things which work because five different rules interact to make this specific course of action the quick path to gold, glory, and god-like power.
Which brings me to my actual example: We’ve pushed the rules to the point we now have a beautiful description of how the Universe works in most normal circumstances. It’s one equation, which Frank Wilczek and Sean Carroll call the Core Theory (more here). It’s simplicity arising from apparent complexity, and while it isn’t the whole story, it’s a big piece of how things work, and it’s solid evidence that our pushing works and our lateral thinking works and that we do know more than we did in past eras.
Actually planning a spacecraft’s plan to arrive, say, at Mars is heinously complex. All sorts of very dynamic stuff goes on. The amount of fuel on the craft changes during a burn so the craft’s mass changes. A tiny change in initial path creates a huge change after a while. Etc.
The real killer is you want to save mass, save fuel, etc. and want to optimize the path. Finding a path, any path is hardish. Finding an optimal (more or less) path is really nasty.
All this requires very complex differential equations that would have floored Newton and such.
To solve these equations requires numeric methods. Something that was basically undoable to any reliable degree until computers came along.
After all, it ain’t rocket science.
This, to me, is one of the few things that seems even more impossible the further we get away from it. When we examine the technology they used to get on the moon, we realize how primitive it seems to us.
Almost nothing reminds me more of how amazingly intelligent people are in all times throughout history. It helps not knowing how advanced future technologies will be.
I imagine 45 years after landing on Mars, it will be the same experience for people. Imagine how the Moon landing will look to people in the year 2200!
My grandfather was born in 1899 and died in 1979. He saw the entire process.
A little closer to home. A strand of programming data composed of only 4 molecules in various combinations is the complete instruction set for assembling a functional human. Or cat. Or horse.
How did they do it before they had computers?
Missed editing nano-window – The mom-and-pop scheduling era ended a decade ago, here’s the story:
The raison-d’etre of this thread is exactly because, as you said, it is impossible. Yet it kept on happening.
For me this wins the thread. I have no difficulty understanding it, but damn!
I wonder what the analogy would be for likelihood of collision- “two oranges floating at random in the Grand Canyon” type of thing.
Ice floats in liquid water … impossible I say …
It is a bit specious to link those two things. Airplane flight has exactly zero relevance to spaceflight. Well, maybe an infinitesimal tad more than zero, but not enough to matter. And solid fuel rockets have been around for centuries, so rocket flight concepts are quite a bit more venerable than fixed-wing flight.
That said, putting 5 rocket flames at the very bottom of a 36 story, 44 ton monolith and using those to push it straight (-ish) up is fucking impossible.
Also impossible was that whole Voyager 2 fiasco. Shortly after launch, the primary dish failed, so they had to communicate with it using a narrow-field secondary antenna. They charted its path past Saturn to send it on to Uranus, and then Neptune, still communicating with it on the dodgy secondary link. For years on end. Sloppy bastards were something like 55 miles off course as it flew over the north pole of Neptune – after billions of miles. And the damn thing is still operating, crossing the heliosheath into the Local Fluff of interstellar space. Four decades, on that jury-rigged secondary antenna. They never should have tried that, because it just could not be done.
My grandmother (who raised me) lived almost exactly during the same era (1899-1978). Her father refused for a long time to believe that planes actually existed.
Maybe, but going from a 100-foot flight to going to the moon in 66 years is a pretty impressive bit of technological advancement, specious or not.
and the kid who invented (most of) it was 21yo!
[EMAIL=“Philo Farnsworth - Wikipedia”]Philo Farnsworth - Wikipedia
There are such things as “out of place artifacts”. They are historical examples of things that should not exist but somehow do. The authenticity of most of them is controversial but two of the most impressive ones are known to be real.
One is the Antikythera mechanism that was engineered well before the birth of Christ in ancient Greece. It is a fully functional analog computer as modern reproductions have proven. The amount of knowledge that went into building it was astounding yet no one can explain how the ancient greeks knew how to build it. The weird thing is that it couldn’t have been a one-off design because of the level of sophistication. They most likely had multiple special purpose analog computers and that is the one that survived through luck.
The other is Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. It is 6,000 years older than Stonehenge and believed to have been built by people living in the literal Stone-Age when the local climate was much different than it is today yet the craftsmanship and stone artwork is outstanding. It depicts large animals that don’t even live in that region anymore. No one knows who built it or why although it is probably a temple of some sort. Complex civilization wasn’t even supposed to have existed that long ago but there it is as plain as day. The impossible part is that they apparently didn’t have any metal tools so they had to figure out how to do complex stonework by other methods and they have survived mostly intact to the present day.